If you’ve been following my Production Blog for awhile, you remember me building the 3D Camera Rig for “Blood of Ohma” that was more or less hand built. It was based on a pair of 2 little Sony Handycam’s.
To shoot True 3D, you have to capture a separate image for both the ‘Left Eye’, and the ‘Right Eye’. This process is different than “Converted 3D” which makes up about half the 3D movies Hollywood puts out. To do a “Conversion” essentially, in post production the 2D film is cut apart and digitally enhanced to create the illusion of depth that was not originally captured during photography.
To capture depth in photography, you have to simulate how the human brain processes images, with two eyes.
The rig we built for ‘Ohma’ used two separate camera’s, which created a video file for each eye. During filming, I was only able to monitor the ‘Left Eye’ camera so the final result in 3D for each scene was an educated guess based on all the camera tests I did prior to the start of shooting.
Both video files then had to be synched in post and then converged into 3D using the 3D Toolset inside the Sony Vegas software I used to edit the film. The entire process was very time intensive and took a lot of tweaking.
To my surprise, this whole experience caught the eye of Sony Creative who contacted me during pre-production to offer their support and followed the film all the way thru our theatrical screenings for which Sony provided all the 3D glasses for.
About 6 months after I finished “Blood of Ohma” the Sony TD-10 camera arrived, which replaced every aspect of my hand built 3D rig into one camera set up.
The TD-10 has dual lenses which each capture full HD video at 32 mbs to it’s own imaging chip. Double the resolution I shot ‘Ohma’ with.
In addition, the camera has manual zoom, focus and convergence controls. The biggest trade off from my hand built rig, was I had ZERO control over zoom or focus. The camera’s were set zoomed full out, with ‘auto focus’ enabled. Zoom and Focus are the basic tools for a film maker, and I didn’t have any of them.
So seeing these features built into the camera felt like a gift. And lastly, the LCD screen displays the converged 3D image – without glasses – so I can now set set up the 3D shots on set, rather than guessing and fixing it in post.
I’ve only shot a few web series with this camera and have done a ton of tests, but “WISP” will be the big field test for Sony. I’ll be able to put the camera thru a full spectrum of situations and we’ll see how it does in the ‘real world’.
The TD-10 is the first in this series of Camera’s so if this one is any indication of where Sony is going to go with it, I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
- Paul
