So I bought one of the field sequential glasses sets that robcat described in a post a couple weeks ago. And I've noticed that AM has an interlaced feature in its stereo rendering options.

Now I want to know how to use it.

Offhand it seems that my workflow would have to be to test the 3D ina general sense using anaglyph. Then I'd have to render out the movie in interlaced stereo. then I'd have to put it in my NLE with a TV hooked up. THEN I'd get to see if it worked.

I wonder. Do you have to render to fields to get it to work? or will the NLE take care of that?

A:M can render stereo with each eye in a different field. My interlaced stereo glasses have a pass through for the standard pc monitor output that it uses to sync up with the refresh rate of the monitor. This probably won't work with your flatscreen or laptop display. I'm not sure how good it would look going to a tv as you need have a pretty high refresh rate that depends on the monitor and pc settings, and as far as I know is fixed and pretty low for your standard tv. Your effective refresh rate with the shutters is half the refresh rate so thats why that makes a difference.

You have the workflow pretty much figured out

The interlaced stereo is in "fields" already... left eye in one field and right eye in the other. I think the critical part is making sure your NLE does no resizing (say, from 480 vertical pixels to 486) so that you keep an exact 1 to 1 correspondence between the rendered pixels and the NTSC pixels.

It's also important to avoid any compression that might smear imagery from one field into the other field.

Noel:
My glasses are for tv, so they have a passthru with rca cables, not vga. That's where the NLE and the tv come in. If I ever get time to try it, I'll post my results.

Rob:
Good advice on the NLE squish factor. Also on the compression. The movies that came with the set were terrible, like you said they would be. At least they could have gotten the quality of the transfer a little better. The DVD compression made a lot of things kind of smear-y, especially on edges (kind of an imprtant part of the 3D illusion).

Has any tried using AM's interlaced 3D options?

Hey Paul,
I just saw this thread, and was wondering if you've had any results you could post.

Also, what's the quality like of the glasses you have, since they're for TV and not computer, and how much were they (cost)?

Reason I ask is we're playing around with the idea of doing one of our upcoming games for consoles in 3D, and are between anaglyph or interlaced (and in either case, being able to turn that on and off in the game controls).

Thanks,
Greg

many moons ago, i played quake iii? with lcd shutter glasses from elsa.

the images looked very steroscopic and cool... until i passed out from the pain. ' ' )

the problem is that they reduce the refresh rate of your monitor by half, so your cool 72mhz monitor is suddenly a 36hmz seizure machine.

i think getting two monitors and using the cross-eye method would be less painful.

-jon

it MIGHT be possible to wire an adaptor to use those TV glasses with PC monitor, but you'd have to know alot about the signals involved.

Modern video cards and CRT monitors can run up to 150 Hz so the shutter flicker isn't as noticeable as on 60Hz NTSC image.

I don't think current LCD displays lend themselves to interlaced stereoscopic imagery well.

I doubt that the market penetration of LCD shutter glasses is enough to warrant developing a game for it, unless you were planning to include glasses with the game, which is what some games did.

I have not. Between contract work and TWO, my indie exploration of cool CG display options has really taken a hit.

The glasses meant for computers seem to be more expensive than the TV kind. I have an nvidia card in my computer that has a stereo glasses tab in the driver configuration. I think it wouldn't be hard to get it figured out. I think for me, the investment of the glasses chased me off.

Thanks for the update and info. I think we might just be going with the anaglyph route since it is WAY more cost effective.

I purchased one of the 3d shutter glasses for the TV on ebay with movies for my nephews birthday. It came with two sets of glasses and G, PG and R rated horror movies, so I kept a set of glasses and the R rated movies. Messing around yesterday with AM I saw the interlaced setting so I took the jungle queen project from the Extra CD and rendered a camera moving through the scene. I took the .tgas I rendered and created an avi movie and then burned it onto a DVD and it worked great.

I think my next project may be made for these.

Dan

How's it look?

It looks great. I did a test when I created the .avi in Vegas, you can choose when rendering, lower field, upper field or progressive scan. Lower field is the option that gave the best results.

Dan