On Thursday night Stephen Colbert was showing videos on his show from fans who had taken a John McCain video and edited the footage of McCain into out-of-context comedic situations. One such entry was from fan Greg Elmensdorp, who took the time to turn the footage of Senator McCain into an anaglyph 3D image.

It’s everywhere!

There are small steps and there are giant leaps; and then there are mid-sized hops that fall somewhere in between. In the world of online 3D imagery, one such mid-sized hop has been achieved by Paul Neave at his Neave Anaglyph site.

This catchy little Flash app converts simple line drawings into left and right anaglyph images and then gets fancy by enabling the user (that’s you!) to fly through the 3D space of their drawing by using the scroll wheel on their mouse. Plus, as DotLot’s 3D friend Sean Gleeson pointed out in his 3-D doodling made easy post, the app is open source.

Neave Anaglyph highlights the possibility that 3D could have online uses beyond just stills and video. 3D could very easily be adapted to become part of games and website navigation. It could even become part of a tool set for drawing applications.

Go play with Neave for a while and then leave us a comment with your thoughts on the tool. Can you think of any uses for it that we’ve overlooked?

A major step in any film/video project is sound design. For rich media, often times, sound design is not an overly complicated process. There may be a few lines of dialogue, some music, and sound effects and thats it. Since the piece is short, it can all be handled fairly easy by exporting .wavs and finalizing sound in Pro-Tools. However, as projects get more complicated, so does the process.

In order to work with the sound properly and efficiently, one needs to export an AAF. Depending on what form of media and your capture method, this can require different steps. For media such as DV, HDV, MOVs, AVIs, etc . the process is fairly straight-forward. Once the edit is complete and finalized, navigate to project and scroll down to “Export Project as AAF”. This will consolidate the project and export the necessary sound components into an AAF, which can easily be imported into Pro-Tools.

If you happen to shoot with tapeless media such as P2 or XDCAM, the process gets more complicated. In the future, I am sure there will be a patch to address this issue, but that is yet to be officially announced, so in the meantime workarounds are required. If you follow the above process you will get a long list of error messages upon export because Premiere is unable to unlink the audio and video portions of the MXF file structure. Therefore, it can’t consolidate the project properly. There is a solution though, but takes a little bit of work and foresight.

Step 1 -SAVE AS!

Create a new project, otherwise you will be in a world of hurt in a matter of days, if not minutes.

Step 2 – Clean House

In order to allow Premiere to export properly, you need to isolate the audio portions of the MXF files first. The only way to do this is to unlink each video and audio clip and then delete the video (hence why you want a new project. I’d also recommend duplicating your sequence to be safe). This may take some time depending on the length of your project. It’s a daunting task, but not very complicated.

Step 3 – Add Handles

In the end we’re going to convert our audio tracks to individual wav files. However, when we do that, our audio will not be able to be lengthened. Therefore, if you need handles (which you probably do), you need to manually add them. You might have to add audio blank tracks in order to do this, so that you can move clips around efficiently. Another daunting task, but not difficult. Be meticulous about this, because going back is not easy because of Step 4.

Step 4 – Reduce and Render

If you haven’t saved as a new project yet, do so now because what is about to be done, can’t be undone. Select all of your audio and then navigate to clip/audio options/render and replace. This process may take a few minutes based on the length and complexity of your project. You are replacing all of your linked MXF media with new rendered .wavs. Once this step is complete, you will be able to find all your rendered wav files in your project window. I recommend reducing the project to nothing but your sequence and the rendered audio. It will guarantee that the export to an AAF goes smoothly. However, at that point, there is no going back.

Step 5 – Export

At this point, all you have to do is export you project as an AAF and it is ready to be worked on. Project/Export Project as AAF.

At some point in the future, I am certain that Adobe will release a patch to address this issue, but until then, this is the best workaround I have found. If you have any input into this process, please let us know.

- Brad Strickman

DotLot™ was honored with eight awards at the 29^th annual Telly awards last month. We won a silver statuette – the highest award – for our work on the LA Phil Virtual Tour as well as seven bronze statuettes for work we did on several other client projects. Here are the winning entries, with links to the work where available.

• Awarded Silver for the following
  • LA Phil Virtual Tour – Public Relations category
• Awarded Bronze for the following
  • OCPAC Virtual Tour - Public Relations category
  • DotLot Video Walkthrough - Production Company/Ad Agency category
  • LA Phil Virtual Tour - Copywriting category
  • Johnny Money Game Demo - Education category
  • Digital Insight won in 2 categories - Corporate Image as well as Use of Graphics
  • WhyHighlander – Automotive category
    

For a recent project, we were charged with producing a video that was going to be displayed on a plasma screen at a tradeshow booth and later in the company’s lobby. We knew we needed to produce the video presentation for 16:9, but we had many rounds of debate over which pixel aspect ratio to use and what our final delivery format needed to be. In order to find the answer we needed to take a step back and discuss what the difference is between a square and rectangular pixel in the first place.

Aspect ratio specifies the ratio of the width of a picture or pixel to its height. Photographic pixels are square with a pixel ratio of 1:1 which means that the width and height are equal, or square. NTSC TV uses a pixel aspect ratio of 0.9:1, which means that the height of each pixel is greater than the width, or rectangular. Widescreen TV (16:9) uses a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2:1, indicating the width is greater than its height, also rectangular. Luckily, HDTV at vertical resolutions of 720 and 1080 has an aspect ratio of 16:9 and uses square pixels, as standardized by the ATSC, so we chose a square pixel format for our project. Unfortunately, the challenges of delivering to an unknown monitor didn’t end there.

Plasma screens are made to display 16:9 formatted presentations but can also display 4:3. If you do decide to go with a 4:3 format you need to be aware that the viewer may not see a true 4:3 image. While there is usually a 4:3 pillarbox format option available on plasma displays, several manufacturer’s engineers have figured out their own unique ways to display a 4:3 on a 16:9 screen. In some cases, they do this by preserving the image in the center and stretching the edges towards the sides of the screen. In our case we created our presentation at 16:9 to allow the presentation to fill the screen. But the quest for the best display of a production didn’t end there, either.

Take a closer look at Plasma display resolutions and you’ll see that all screens are not created equal. Examining 7 plasma manufactures and their screens, we discovered that very few have a display of 1920 x 1080. In fact, of the 16 models we reviewed, only 4 had a native 1920×1080 display. This means that you really need to find out which model and manufacturer your client is using before you start production. If you don’t know, you might want to create your video to allow for the best presentation on the majority of plasma displays. We try to follow the rule of always working in the best quality (1080) and scaling down when necessary to meet the demands of the presentation, of course it’s always better if you can avoid resizing.

One last thought to consider is how to actually get your well produced production to the plasma display. One way would be to have the plasma connected to a hard drive where you can call up your presentation – in native HD, if possible. Another option would be to author a Blu-Ray disk, but this only works if your client has or plans to rent a Blu-Ray player. Finally, you could always author to DVD ,which is the path we had to take for this project since the client was on the east coast and they weren’t able to provide us enough details about their display setup. We exported our final comp as 16:9 with square pixels and brought it into our DVD authoring tool. From there we exported using DVD standards for a widescreen output. Did we get the greatest quality output? Maybe not the best possible, but by using the right settings throughout our post production workflow we produced the best possible DVD and it was certainly the most appropriate output for this project.

What’s your experience in working with Plasma screens? Leave a comment here with some of your thoughts and experiences on the subject.