NVidia has posted a short case study on how Prime Focus used the Quadro hardware to accelerate the 3D Conversion of “Clash of the Titans”. The movie was shot in traditional 2D, and then postprocessed (some would say rather poorly, unfortunateyl) into 3D by various studies. With the amount of footage to convert and the short timeframe, speed was of huge important, and Prime Focus was able to leverage GPGPU on Quadro card to accelerate their View-D process significantly.
Prime Focus set up a pipeline to enable 3D SDI video routing for workstations equipped with Quadro professional graphics solutions. The facility’s 3D playback systems could route streams of 3D content to three different projection rooms in the facility at any given time. The team used IRIDAS Framecycler to playback review files and conform reels. IRIDAS is a company that pioneered the first, real-time color grading solution released based on NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics, and was one of the first systems to provide real-time debayering as well as Stereo 3D support. Having Framecycler accelerated for NVIDIA Quadro, the team at Prime Focus was able to make convergence and parallax adjustments on the fly to reflect director and artist review input.
So, was the effort to convert worth it all?
The designer of the Prime Focus 3D projection pipeline, Sean Konrad, explained, “With the NVIDIA Quadro SDI platform, while clients were reviewing in one room, we could have internal stereographers review shots on another projector in a different room. We could simultaneously set convergence and make adjustments while an editor worked on conforming shots in another screening room. The NVIDIA-based pipeline allowed us to do a lot of multitasking throughout the facility — this was absolutely critical, since we were pushing about 20 minutes of stereo shots through the pipeline every day.”
via NVIDIA Quadro Powers Prime Focus 3D Stereo Projection Pipeline.
But they still failed! their conversion was terrible.