3D Vision Blog

Here is a new German amateur 3D short film called “Der Schatten der Gerechtigkeit” (The Shadow of Justice), probably the first German amateur short film shot in stereoscopic 3D. The movie is in German, but the version below is with embedded English subtitles in 3D, so that you’ll understand the dialogues (other versions are also available). The production was done with a custom side-by-side camera rig using Canon HV30 and HV20 HD cameras, because these cameras were already available, along with the rest of the equipment, so it was basically a no-budget production. For the post production a Zalman 3D Monitor was used and Acer H5360 3D projector for previewing the material in stereoscopic 3D, all the editing was done in Adobe Premiere Pro and the compositing in Adobe After Effects.

The length of the movie is 13:31 minutes and it is available in HD quality (1280×720) in Over/Under format with the left frame first best viewed with 3D Vision Video Player or Stereoscopic Player, but any other 3D setup should do. The movie is also available in anaglyph format, on Youtube 3D and in 2D version, but only the Over/Under version linked below has English subtitles, the rest are all available only in German for the moment. The end result is great, especially considering we are talking about an amateur short movie and not a professional production, but then again it also took over 8 months to prepare everything you’ll see in the video.

- Download The Shadow of Justice in Over/Under format with English subtitles
- Links to the other versions and more interesting materials are available here…

The guys from RadiantStar – the company that is making the 3Dfier DirectShow filter for realtime 2D to 3D video conversion have just released two new versions of the filter to compliment the already available one that was designed for 3D Vision owners. One is for Passive Polarized Displays like the ones found on Zalman Trimon 3D monitors and Acer Aspire 3D notebooks and the other one is for Anaglyph red-cyan glasses. These two are currently available only as demo versions for personal testing and still are not being sold like the 3D Vision version. Also for these two you don’t need to use a stereoscopic player, you can just use them with a normal video player that can load the required DirectShow filters like Media Player Classic for example. And with the Anaglyph red-cyan glasses demo version there is no time limitation on how long it will play so you can watch whole movies with it.

- To download the latest 3Dfier DS filter demo versions for personal evaluation…

The usage of Anaglyph method for viewing stereoscopic 3D is still by far the easiest way to get a glimpse of what is possible in the world of S3D and what you can expect from a better solution. Of course there are some issues associated with the anaglyph method like problems with color reproduction or you getting tired even after a little use of the red-cyan or other color filters. But still having in mind that you can try it without the need for special display, glasses or even software that you have to pay is just enough for a lot of people to want to try that first and then go with solutions like 3D Vision, iZ3D Monitors, Zalman Trimon and others that require a serious investment in hardware and not only for the 3D setup itself, but also for the PC that will be able to handle the 3D content good enough. So lets get to the point how you can test anaglyph stereo 3D gaming on your mobile computer in particular, but the same solutions will also work on a desktop PC…

If your laptop has an Nvidia-based GPU inside (GeForce 8xxx or later mobile graphics) you can go for the 3D Vision drivers and use their free anaglyph mode called 3D Vision Discover with any pair of plain red-cyan anaglyph glasses paper or plastic. Or it was working without problems for the 3D Vision Drivers up to version 190.38, as with the later 191.xx (if I remember correctly) up to the latest ones you will get the error above when trying to enable the Stereoscopic 3D mode from the control panel. It seems that when you run any newer 3D Vision drivers they try to find a compatible 120Hz LCD panel in your laptop and if they don’t you are out of luck and cannot even enable the 3D Vision Discover mode to try out the anaglyph mode. It is still weird why Nvidia did not do anything about his issue since it has been around for some time already, or maybe they are simply ignoring all the owners of gaming laptops since there is still no official 3D Vision support for mobile systems with external monitor (with shutter glasses and 120Hz LCD). If you are a lucky owner of Asus G51J 3D laptop – the only one so far with a 120Hz panel you are Ok and you probably should not have any problems running the 3D Vision Discover anaglyph mode too, but why would you do it on this laptop anyway? Still with a modified drivers and and external 120Hz LCD monitor you can run both anaglyph and shutter glasses mode with the 3D vision driver. At least running the anaglyph mode on your desktop PC does not bring any issues, but still if you don’t yet have the shutter glasses you cannot even try the anaglyph mode on your laptop, why?

Anyway, the good news is that there are alternatives for laptop owners that still want to try the free anaglyph mode and that is to use the iZ3D Driver that does support Anaglyph and a few other stereo 3d viewing methods apart for the specific mode used for their own stereoscopic 3D displays. Another good thing about the use of this driver is that it will work not only on Nvidia-based hardware (including pre-stream processors architecture GPUs), but also on ATI-based video cards. The only drawback here is that the iZ3D Driver still does not support DirectX 10 games, unlike the Nvidia solution, although the company seems to be working on adding it for some time now. So if you have a laptop and you want to try out stereoscopic 3D gaming on it with anaglyph mode you should definitely download and try the iZ3D Driver.

- To download the iZ3D Driver with free Stereoscopic 3D anaglyph mode…