3840*1080

[Istvan Toth]

Hi Tim
I started to use the tool and indeed it is very exciting and worth the value!

Using side-by-side in unsqueezed mode I tried to render a sequenze and got the following error-msg. "The effect Stereo3DToolbox failed to render: Your HW cannot render at the requested size and depth.

Why? Is there a workaround? I have the 8800GT in the computer and as there are 2 outputs the board is able to deal with a total of 3840 horizontal resolution.
Thanks
Istvan

[Tim Dashwood]

It may come down to available RAM as well as graphics card capabilities. I also have difficulties at this resolution from within FCP. This may all change within Snow Leopard (testing underway) or a future 64-bit version of FCP but I have no real data on what graphics cards work and which don't. I have the stock GT-120 and 6GB or RAM.

What I do is use Motion. It doesn't seem to have the same hardware limitations or 2 minute slug/still limit as with FCP and it is super fast at rendering. You can send your edited 1920x1080 left/right sequence to Motion and then change the horizontal resolution in project settings.

I've attached a jpg of 3840x1080 "slug" that I use in Motion to apply the plugin. Just set your project to 3840x1080. If you didn't use the "send to" feature from FCP then throw your left and right clips into the Motion timeline on their own layers or groups (below the slug layer.)
Drag the slug to the top layer/group and apply the plugin to the slug, select "left and right image wells" and then uncheck "output 2:1 squeezed." You should see the full resolution L and R template.

Now just drag your left and right layers into the image wells and render.

Direct download http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attachme...-side-side.jpg

[Istvan Toth]

Thanks, I will take a look to the proposed solution.
Anyway, strange this limits because the 8800 has a dual-output so should be able to deal with the 3840 resolution.
Istvan

[Istvan Toth]

Hi Tim
there must be some other problems here too. I tried an existing 3840x1080 file where I had already muxed the left and right together. I created a sequence with the 3840x1080 resolution and imported the clip into the sequence. It rendered fine. I tried some other filters like color-correction and again it rendered fine. Only when I started to use the Stereo3DToolbox it failed to render, giving me HW reasons why it cannot render. Hmm..

2 other sugestments for the near future:

1) could you include some key-commands for the use of the horizontal and vertical parallax controlls?
2) when I use the Canvas on a second screen, then I cannot zoom in to have a fullscreen view of the picture. It becomes red with the Stereo3Dtoolbox written in it. Maybe this happens only when I use unsqeesed formats, but it is boring because I cannot finetune the geometrie
Thanks
Istvan

[Tim Dashwood]

FxFactory utilizes the graphics memory to speed up renders. You may get different results if you adjust the FxFactory preferences to force the use of FCP's RAM instead. I'm on the road so I can't test this on my Mac Pro for a few days but I will see if the FxFactory developers have any other suggestions.

[Istvan Toth]

Ok, I changed it and it works now...very slow, but works. It took 30 minutes to render a 50 second clip. I hope there will be some maximisations in the use of the graphic card. BTW, my system is a 8core, 3GHz, 4G RAM, and a 8800GT, so its not the slowest one:))

Before I forget, the "red stereo3Dtoolbox box" went away after the rendering.

Thanks
Istvan

[Istvan Toth]

Sorry again, but it is indeed strange. Almost every filter I use, it took me about 50 minutes to render a 27 minutes sequence in the given resolution. With the stereotoolbox it tooks 12 hours. I know you are out-of-office, but please let me know asap if your programmers can improve something or not. You created a very nice tool I would love to use in smaller projects, but ....
Thanks
Istvan

[Tim Dashwood]

This draws attention to why rendering with the graphics card is so much faster than using the Mac's processors and RAM alone. This is also why Apple implemented OpenCL into Snow Leopard... to take advantage of the power available in graphics cards.

Unfortunately I still have no data on which graphics cards can or can't handle rendering these types of resolutions independently. I also don't know why Motion can breeze through rendering the exact same sequence with the graphics card but FCP returns a hardware error.

I am planning to start serious testing in Snow Leopard next week. There may be significant improvements in this particular situation.

[Istvan Toth]

Thanks Tim
should I find some solution then I will keep you updated.
Istvan

[Istvan Toth]

as promised, I installed FCP 7 and now even forcing the plug-in to use the graphic-card doesn't give me anymore the hardware msg. Its still about 5 hours rendering for a 27 minutes clip, but not 12 anymore.
The problem is that with this resolution apparentley I cannot use the unlimited RT but have to render all the time. As far as I have installed the FCP7 only since 10 minutes I still have to look around for options
Thanks
Istvan

[Tim Dashwood]

Originally Posted by Istvan Toth

Is there a workaround?

Istvan

I think I may have an elegant solution for your desire to present 3840 x 1080 across two screens.

I've written a couple of applescripts that may solve your issue and simply let you render out left and right movies at 1920x1080 from FCP & Stereo3D Toolbox and then combine them with Quicktime.

The first script simply opens the left and right movie files and starts playing them to display 1(left) and display 2 (right) in sync (as well as Quicktime can maintain sync.)

The second script will open left and right movies and combine them into a 3840x1080 quicktime reference movie and resave it. This will take no rendering time. This script is set up to repeat itself so you can keep pairing a bunch of movie files. Just click cancel to cancel this script.

I also made a variant of that script that will 2:1 squeeze the left and right into 1920x1080.

I've attached all 3 scripts for you to test out. They all are working in Leopard with Quicktime 7.6. They have not been tested in Snow Leopard with Quicktime X (and they probably won't work in SL unless QT 7.6 is installed.)