It was back in late February when we shot an entire short film in hi-speed 3D, using the wonderful Weisscam HS-2 cameras to capture the most stunning imagery we’ve created thus far. In the meantime the film is finished, excerpts were shown at NAB 2011 at the booths of our technology partners and today we are excited to give you an extensive look behind the scenes of RISE. We’ve put together a making of video, where we talk about a lot of the artistic and some technical challenges when producing in  hi-speed stereo 3D. Read on after the video for some additional tech talk… Enjoy!

There you go. We are getting ready to distribute the finished film and a stereoscopic trailer will be ready in a bit – we’ll feature it here shortly. While we already talked a little bit about some technical aspects of the production here, we’d like to repeat and expand on this so our international friends can take part in our experience (seeing our blog was all German until now).

The “basic” setup were two Weisscam HS-2 MkII mounted on our beloved P+S Standard Rig. We recorded RAWs out of the camera’s ring buffer onto Weisscam DigiMags. As Nicolas, the director of RISE stated in the BTS video, the action in front of the camera(s) is done and recorded in realtime at some 2000fps (or less of course). After each take the footage is played out at regular 24/25 fps from the ring buffer and recorded onto the DigiMags. So the few seconds captured end up running for a few minutes now, giving the director a chance to review the result as it is recorded at the same time. (We used AJA frame syncs to synchronize the signals for on set playback in 3D on a 46-inch JVC Display). Nicolas instantly dismissed the recordings the moment he noticed, that a take didn’t yield the desired result to save time on set. (And to save drive space… we ended up recording some 4TB in two days!) But again, as Nicolas pointed out in the video, the challenge as a director on a hi-speed 3D production  is to see that desired moment during realtime capture, otherwise there’s nothing useful to record during 25p-playback.

Since the Weisscam RAW codec is not 3D muxed (meaning left and right streams are recorded into one file as is the case with our SI-2K 3D setup) but recorded individually into separate files, we anticipated that syncing the 3D footage in post could turn out to be very little fun. (Imagine to visually identify a sync problem between left and right image when the difference is 1/1000 of a second! As it turns out this looks more like a geometric offset at first). A traditional head slate was not an option with a maximum recording time of less than 10 seconds at the frame rates we were shooting with. By the time the slate is moved out of the frame and the action has taken place, the slate would have been eaten up in the ring buffer with no decent sync mark in place anymore. Same problem when using a tail slate. The clapper would have to move at the speed of light to position the slate and clap it, before the valuable footage is recorded over. Speed of light, you say? That was exactly our solution. We used professional photo strobes with a flash duration of about 1/1500s. These were positioned to illuminate some darker area of the frame and fired wirelessly by an assistant as soon as Nicolas called “cut”. The perfect lightning fast hi-speed 3D sync marker! At the end of the day the genlock did the major lifting and sync was consistently off by only one frame anyway. (But it would have taken a while to assert that fact without the strobe!) As a nice side effect this method also gave the DIT dept. a heads up when the realtime transfer from the cams to the DigiMags could be stopped, saving additional time because we didn’t wait to record useless minutes of footage at the end of a take.

The stereography was done utilizing the P+S standard rig. Christian, our stereographer was able to set convergence and IO with little effort thanks to a syncronized output on a Transvideo monitor. The stereo depth was calculated with hi-speed 3D in mind, where the audience really has time to evaluate an image. This means that even with a small IO base there is a large amount of perceived depth. We did not want RISE to be about effects and stuff flying at the audience but rather a good experience for the viewer showcasing the possibilities of hi-speed 3D. However, some of the particles we had up in the air, actually do violate the stereo window and calculated depth budget. On one hand this is due to the somewhat uncontrollable nature of flying substances, on the other hand our tests showed that this tends to be much less disturbing than in regular 3D footage. From our experience hi-speed 3D material in general is much more like stereoscopic still photography with it’s own set of rules. This also holds true for the lighting.

As such it is not coincidental that Stefan, Kamerawerk’s very own S3D photographer was responsible for the lighting in RISE. His approach to lighting, derived from his work as a still photographer in advertising, was perfectly suited for hi-speed 3D. The audience has a long time to notice misplaced or distracting shadows or other weird lighting mishaps. While these pass quickly and usually unnoticed in realtime footage, a hi-speed image works like a still image in that respect and a photographer will work in great detail to make that one frame perfect. With 3D added to the mix, which tends to draw even more attention to undesired artifacts, Stefan’s lighting really helped things along. (And of course it goes without saying that high speed ballasts are your friend!)

Claudio, our senior editor was on set during the entire production handling the DIT department. Of course this would prove to be advantageous on any production but with a highly technical project like shooting an entire film in hi-speed 3D it was a blessing. He and the director constantly discussed how things would come together and what was still missing to make a cohesive edit. On a technical level his presence on set made for a no-questions-asked post production process.

The RAW-dailies were decoded in realtime using Iridas SpeedGrade. We made a few small adjustments (such as the 1 frame sync shift and a minor 3 pixel vertical shift) and rendered out to 8-Bit SbS files for an offline edit in Final Cut Pro. As Claudio indicated in the video, editing 3D is different but editing hi-speed 3D is THAT much more different. Maintaining a visual flow in slow motion, taking 3D into account when making an edit as well as keeping a pace so audiences remain engaged calls for a truly multidimensional mind, where technical aspects have to be settled in advance so they don’t get in the way. After the picture lock, the offline edit was re-conformed via a simple, old fashioned EDL to SpeedGrade where the grading and depth balancing was done in only 2 days.

So much for now. We’ll be talking more about RISE when we release the 3D Trailer in the near future, getting into some more detail about the artistic side of things, including the musical score.

Hit us in the comments with any questions you may have!