3D Vision Blog

TriDef 3D Media Player is the multimedia photo and video player that you get with Acer Aspre 3D laptops and some other 3D displays, but you can as well buy the TriDef 3D experience software separately. Besides the movie and photo player you also get the TriDef 3D Ignition software that is intended to be used to play games in Stereoscopic 3D mode, but I’ll talk about the gaming part with TriDef software in another post and now lets get back to the Media Player…

The TriDef 3D Media Player is intended to be used to play back stereoscopic 3D movies and pictures, along with normal 2D images and 2D movies that can be converted in real time to 3D. The player practically supports all popular movie and photo containers and formats, including support for the proprietary formats used by the developers of the player DDD – .TriDefMovie, .TriDefPhoto and .TriDefPOPvert. The good thing is that you just need to have the proper DirectShow splitter filter and codec in order to be able to play the video in the player and possibly convert it from 2D to 3D in real time. However prior to the just released today TriDef 3D Media Player version 6.5.5 I had some issues with playing back some video files in MOV, TS and MP4 file containers although the system had the needed support installed, but the good news is that the new version has this fixed. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that the player does not support side by side stereoscopic 3D video and I also had some trouble with above/below, although these should be working and with field sequential video too.

What is quite interesting in this player is the feature to convert in real time 2D videos into stereoscopic 3D, even DVD Video and HD clips. However you should know that the resulting 3D effect depends on a lot of factors and sometimes it can be better and sometimes it can be worse, but there are some things that you should be aware in order to get better results. Using higher resolution and better quality videos does help a lot to provide better conversion results, also using videos with steadier and not too fast paced action usually results in better depth perception. A usual problem for 2D to 3D conversions are the fast paced trailers that do have a lot of action and switch between too much different scenes very quickly, so you might want to avoid these, but it won’t hurt to try them just in case. 3D CG animation movies are usually Ok when converted in stereoscopic 3D, but working with 2D drawn or cell shaded Anime the effect of depth is not that good, but there are still exceptions.

And since there are not a lot of stereoscopic 3D movies and even trailers available having an Ok feature that allows you to convert 2D to 3D videos, however being far from true stereoscopic 3D shot or rendered content is still nice to have. You can also do something else with the help of additional software like Fraps for instance (the video recording framerate should be set to match the source framerate and don’t forget to record audio!) – I mean that you can capture the real time video conversion into an Interlaced video format and then share it with other people that do not have TriDef compatible hardware/software to do this themselves, but still have some sort of Stereoscopic 3D setup. After grabbing the converted video stream with Fraps you should reconvert it to something smaller in size, but have in mind that you should maintain high quality of the video compression in order not to get something with bad quality 3D. An example of what you can achieve with the automatic 2D to 3D conversion with the media player is available here Avatar HD Movie Trailer in Stereoscopic 3D Format. Some videos can convert better, other can convert worse… the results depend on a lot of factors, but I’ll say again that this is still not as good as a true stereoscopic 3D content, so don’t get your hopes too high.

The player does not offer a lot of options and the conversion to 3D is almost completely automatic, however you still have control on two things that can roughly be considered to be equivalent of depth and convergence level (the two controls in the right). This allows you to tweak a bit the results in order to minimize the ghosting in the final video or to improve a bit the stereoscopic 3D effect, but still the rest is done by predefined algorithms. And no matter how good are these algorithms for conversion they are still not perfect and can do mistakes like adding depth where they are not supposed to for instance, although considering they do not require any serious setting up they still manage to do their job quite well and don’t forget that everything is being done in real time.

- For more information about the TriDef 3D Media Player software…

If you remember I’ve written when FRAPS version 3.0 was first introduced that among one of the exciting new features was the ability to record in-game stereoscopic 3D movies. This news was a very exciting one, with me hoping to see a lot of Stereoscopic 3D movies recorded and shared between the users of 3D Vision and possibly other stereoscopic 3D setups. Unfortunately this did not seem to happen as already a month has passed since and still the stereoscopic 3D in-game videos are kind of lacking or maybe nobody is sharing them…

One of the possible reasons that these videos are not appearing anywhere could be that they need some additional processing afterwards and then they need to be uploaded somewhere for everyone to have access to them. But more of an issue seems to be the fact that recording movies using FRAPS has always been a heavy task for the PC, especially if you don’t have a top-end system with a fast multicore CPU and a high-end video card. And with the increase of the resolution and the need to record video with double width the things are even harder for the computers, because you still need to be able to play the game while you are recording it. But when we add to the equation all the latest games that are quite demanding, especially if you want to play them with a lot of detail, then things become even more of a problem than before, so I’ve prepared some tips that might be useful for you should you decide to record such movie.

When you start FRAPS and go to the Movies tab you need to setup the program at first in order to get the best possible performance and quality, while still retaining playable framerate. First off you should use a second hard drive for saving the movies and not your system one where you probably also have the game you are playing installed. The video codec that FRAPS uses does not compress the video data a lot in order not to take up too much of the system’s resources and this is resulting in a larger file size, thus needing more free space and faster transfer speed. This is why you better use a second hard drive to avoid possible degradation of game performance if the game needs to read some data off the hard drive or the operating system needs some data accessed in the background.

AS for the Video Capture Settings you should select to record in 25 frames per second. This framerate is enough to have a smooth movement in most games while at the same time not requiring that much of resources as you get the in-game framerate synced to the chosen recording FPS when you activate it by pressing F9 (the default key). You should also record in the Full-size resolution instead of Half-size as the second needs to resample each frame to half the resolution in real time while you are recording and sometimes the resulting quality might not be what you expect. So instead of plying at a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels and recording the video in Half-size resolution you better lower the resolution to 1280×720 pixels and record in Full-size. This way what you see while playing the game will be recorded in the video an you won’t have to rely on the resampling to bring good enough results. Also playing in lower resolution lessens the burden on the video card and the CPU, though that when recording the video at Half-size resolution there is also less load on the system resources too. Another issue for when using Half-size is that you cannot achieve 720p output as the half resolution of 1680×1050 is actually 840×525 pixels, but you should also have in mind that recording at 25 frames per second on 720p resolution is still not an easy task for every PC, so you might even have to go to lower resolutions.

Sound capture is an option that you might not activate if you won’t be needing it, but that is ore like a personal preference and it does not bring a serious issue in terms of performance drop. Still it is recommended to use a Stereo mode for recording and not Multichanel one as the second choice might result in not being able to reach at least 25 fps. Not to mention that if you do some editing afterwards and not just recompress the video you migh have some trouble with the multichanel audio and most likely a lot of the people you share the video after that will be able to hear the audio in all its glory.

Regarding the CPU versus GPU requirements when playing games in stereoscopic 3D mode and want to record the game play in a movie things are quite interesting. The thing is that FRAPS need a lot of CPU power in order to compress the video in real time with the requested framerate, but at the same time the game also needs CPU power when you play it. This is why the faster the processor the better and having more cores is a good thing too especially if you share some of the cores exclusively for usage by the game and others by FRAPS using the Task Manager’s Affinity settings for the respective processes. The game on the other hand requires a lot of GPU power especially if being played in higher resolution and with maximum details and even more if you activate Anti-Aliasing mode. Also don’t forget that playing games in stereoscopic 3D introduces some additional load on the GPU and the resulting framerate is usually about 30-40% lower than what you can achieve normally without stereoscopic 3D mode active. You probably will notice that if you have lets say 60 frames while playing the game normally in Stereoscopic 3D when you activate the recording the framerate might drop to lets say 20 frames per second. This is not a problem for the video card, but is happening because of the big CPU load. And when you are playing in stereoscopic 3D at a resolution of 1280×720 pixels and recording the video your CPU will have to compress and record frames with the size of 2560×720 pixels as you actually get a side by side recording of a frame for the left and for the right eye. This can bring down to their knees even the top model processors, so yet again I’m reminding you that laying in lower resolution is better than using the Half-size video recording option. But because of this there is something you can do when playing the game at 1280×720 instead of 1680×1050… you can easily put the detail level to the maximum and even enable some AA filtering without noticing any framerate drop when recording the video as this usually increases significantly the load only on the GPU, but not on the CPU.

Feel free to share some tips that you might have, but I’ve missed mentioning above and of course you can post links to some of the stereoscopic 3D videos you’ve made with the help of FRAPS in the comments below…

You should be aware of the program FRAPS if you ever benchmarked a game, needed an FPS counter in real time regardless of the 3D application, wanted to record an in-game video footage of you playing or just taking some screenshots. Just have in mind that FRAPS is a commercial application that will cost you $37, but there is a free trial version that you can try for free first to see if it will do what you need.
Nevertheless FRAPS is a very useful application and it just got an update to version 3.0.0 getting some new and very nice features, even for the Stereoscopic 3D community, so we should thank its author for that. I’m talking about the new ability to record stereoscopic 3D content right while you are playing your game with Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision (officially) and it seems that it also works with iZ3D’s drivers. It seems that so far you can only record games using DirectX9 (D3D9), but you’ll be getting a video recording with side by side frames for the left and right eye that can be later on played with a stereoscopic 3D player. But besides the new and interesting ability to record S3D videos, FRAPS 3.0.0 also comes with some nice new features, so here is what is new…

3.0.0 – 5th Nov 2009
- DirectX 11 support
- Compatible with Windows 7 final (RTM) and RC1 versions
- Stereoscopic 3D Vision video capture up to 1920×1200 for D3D9 games
- Force lossless RGB option to always capture video in pure form
- Ability to mix both game sound and external input such as microphone (Vista/Win7 only)

P.S. The only drawback, especially if you want to record S3D video in full resolution is the additional drop in framerate you’ll get, so be prepared to push your PC to its limits (and probably do an upgrade) in order to produce HD videos in stereoscopic 3D side by side format. ;)

- To download and try the new FRAPS version 3.0.0…