[Chimera-users] Rendering into 3d

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Rebecca,

 I didn’t even know Chimera wrote out two image files when you save an image in stereo mode.  The way I have made stereo movies is by recording a left-eye movie (there is a Chimera "stereo left eye” camera mode) and then recording a right eye movie.  Then I hand the two movie files to a stereo player, I use Bino, and it does the job.  I have not made single file stereo movies.  The typical formats for that use a single large frame with the left (or right) image stacked above the right (or left) image, called top/bottom stereo, and there is a blank band between the two images.  Another stereo format uses side-by-side images in a single frame.  Both these formats require meta-data in the movie file to say that it is a stereo format, and at least a few months ago ffmpeg discussions suggestions said that ffmpeg could not do that.  I have not heard of a player that uses a left image then a right image sequentially, although I would not be surprised if some player can do that.  Which player are you using?  There is a serious problem with that format in that movie formats do compression based on each image differing little from the previous image.  By alternating left and right eye images you are going to make the compression work horribly — it will need a very high bit rate or the artifacts will be ugly.

  If you still want to renumber the Chimera movie images I think the easiest way is to write some script to rename your files.  Chimera is putting the frame number in the image file names and the frame number is the same for left and right eye images.  It would be as complicated in Chimera to renumber these images as it is in a separate script.  Since I don’t think it serves most Chimera users I suggest you use a script.

	Tom



On Apr 17, 2014, at 11:19 AM, Rebecca Swett wrote:

> Hey All,
> I'm looking at rendering some movies output from chimera as a 3d movie for viewing with nvidia 3d vision pro glasses. From everything I've read as long as the left/right eye frames are sequential, making the movie with ffmpeg should work fine. The problem I'm having is that ffmpeg has no way to alternate between 0-left.ppm 0-right.ppm 1-left.ppm 1-right.ppm, which is how chimera saves images when recording movies in stereo mode. If those same images were named 1.ppm 2.ppm 3.ppm 4.ppm, there would be no problem. Is there a quick fix that can be inserted to change the naming of the recorded frames? Any other suggestions? 
> 
> Rebecca Swett
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