[Below the Line News]

… As a result, we’re seeing a rise in stereo conversion. Converting standard 2D images into stereo 3D has come a long way since 2010’s Clash of the Titans, with the final installment of the Harry Potter saga providing a great example of tasteful and effective stereoscopy.

Stereo conversion involves a lot of manual rotoscoping to pull the foreground images off of the background and then a lot of complex tracking to artificially create the second eye, or camera. I saw demos of stereo conversion capabilities in Nuke and Flare – the younger brother of Autodesk’s powerful Flame compositing and finishing system. Both of these technologies provide impressive toolsets for taking apart images and re-assembling them as stereo 3D sequences.

Perhaps the most powerful tool for the grunt work of stereo conversion is Imagineer‘s Mocha Pro, a dedicated tracking tool which greatly reduces the amount of manual keyframing which might otherwise be required. It does this with a sophisticated planar tracking capability – tracking surface rather than just points – which allows the application to handle blurred edges, changing light conditions and even obstructions. With Mocha Pro ($1,495 as a standalone application), users can do “clean plating” to assemble background plates, including infilling, so that compositors can then focus (more bad puns) on the shaping and positing foreground elements.  …

Imagineer tells me that they have been selling well lately to facilities such as Digital Domain, Pixel Magic, ICO VFX and Legend3D. …

Read the full story here: http://www.btlnews.com/crafts/post-production/ibc-report-2d-3d-stereo-conversion-growing-in-leaps-and-bounds/