Sony NX3D1 L/R extraction solved

[Bruce Schultz]

I'm cross posting this from a thread on the 3D Stereo Delivery forum to here to help out people who have the new Sony NX3D1 and want to extract discreet separate Left and Right eye data streams to edit in FCP, After Effects or Premiere Pro CS5 with Tim's Stereo 3D Toolbox or Cineform Neo3D software.

If you are anything like me, you eschew plopping disks that come with cameras, BluRay burners, bare hard drives, etc. into your computer, but this time I could have saved many hours of trial and error frustration had I just popped the Sony Content Management Utility disk and installed it.

It turns out that the Content Management Utility supplied by Sony with the NX3D1 camera (and available online for free) actually has a utility that extracts Left & Right data streams from MVC footage, and does it as a batch utility. I've only tried this on Sony MVC footage, I don't know if it works on other manufacturers MVC codecs.

You just need to load in the MTS or MT2S files, control click them all and then click on Tools/Create Separate 2D Movies For Left & Right.

The auto file re-naming is pretty arcane, but it can be deciphered and files re-named to what you want as MTS or M2TS files which are clearly labeled by CMU as Left & Right then put into L & R folders for muxing.

Cineform Firstlight (for Windows) or Re-Master (for Mac) will then mux those L/R files into either AVI or MOV and away you go with After Effects, PPro CS5, FCP, or even Sony Vegas (but I've not tried that yet) with Neo 3D. If you are using Stereo3D Toolbox, then you can transcode those MTS/M2TS files with Log & Transfer into ProRes to use with that plug in.

I could never get MVC>AVI to work with 23.98 footage using any of the Cineform output choices and the MOV uncompressed worked but was ungodly large. The Sony CMU program seems to do the data stream extraction as quickly as MVC>AVI and is much faster and easier than doing it in Vegas 10E where multiple settings have to be just right to do a clean L/R extraction.

Unfortunately, this solution requires a Windows machine for the extraction, but hopefully Sony will release a Mac version of CMU at some point to eliminate this requirement.

[Matt Faw]

Good post, Bruce! It's worthwhile adding that the CMU program also imports footage from the Sony TD10 (and 20?). I think it makes sense to include the following useful info, provided by Paul Newman (and which I've tested), about how to use CMU to split footage that was originally imported via Sony's PMB software, which comes packaged with the TD10 (and 20?):

Originally Posted by Paul Newman

How to Split Stereo MVC files that have been imported by Sony PMB software to seperate left and right channels using Sony CMU.

If you use Sony PMB soft to import files from say a TD10 to your edit system, and then find you want to split the files into separate L&R streams, you will find that PMB imported files will appear as "unsupported" in CMU and will be skipped.

I prefer to use Edius to split files, however, CMU is free, so..

1) Open your source file folder, locate each xml file for each clip, they will be named: file number.m2ts.modd - one for each clip.
2)Rename the extension for each xml file with the extension: file number.cmuprops
3)Now set the default programme to open the xml file as Notepad.
4)Now open each xml file and edit the last string in the file to read:

<key>XMLFileType</key><string>ModdXML CMU 2.0</string></dict></plist>

It looked like this before:

<key>XMLFileType</key><string>ModdXML</string></dict></plist>

All we are adding is "CMU 2.0" to the last but one string, note the "space"

Save and exit notepad, open CMU after modifying all your related xml files, and export your Land R seperate files.

If you are nervous, keep copies of your .m2ts.modd files..you can also edit, add camera data to the xml's as well if you need to.
Paul :-)