[Digital Arts Online]

Following our interview with Pixmondo’s VFX supervisor Ben Grossman – who won an Oscar for Hugo – about how to use stereoscopic 3D to subtly affect viewers emotions, we wanted to find out how other creative techniques are being used with the new medium. We caught up with colourist Dado Valentic of Mytherapy, who worked on many early IMAX 3D projects and mastered StreetDance 3D, the first British stereo 3D film, to find out how grading can be used artfully in 3D.

Dado says that there are a few technical challenges that need to be overcome first when working with 3D footage. The first is that because of the glasses audiences wear, 3D films and TV shows need to be a lot brighter than 2D productions. “You have to take parts of the image that will disappear into the darkness and make them visible again without creating a distortion,” he says.

You also have to adjust 3D footage differently, depending on whether you’re working for cinema or TV, as bigger screens give audiences a much larger sense of depth. 3D TVs are brighter, allowing more scope for adjusting the overall look of a shot, but you can’t use a correction technique called ‘floating windows’, as this only works when the audiences are in darkness.

Dado says that some traditional techniques for increasing the perception of depth in 2D footage also enhance stereo clips. “Warmth of colour doesn’t affect depth perception but …

Below Dado takes us through grading a shot from Jet Set Films using Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve colour grading software. For each step we’ve placed the left eye frame first and the right eye second. …

See the full story here: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/?FeatureID=3360903