http://groups.yahoo.com/group/3dtv/join

Excellent group, with some very knowledgeable folk including a few industry veterans. Feel free to post your question there and I’m sure that someone on the group should be able to give you a much better answer than anything I could come up with =)

I am looking for info on how to create 3D animation for the Panasonic screens (or other brands)
I already make 3D for autostereoscopic screens and really would like to try to make images for those new screens!
Is there a special codec to use ?
It seems that it have to be 60fps for a frame sequencial, am I right?

thanks for your help

Chris

While you are indeed correct in that there is no specific reason that television sets needed to be 60Hz or 120Hz back in the day, the truth is that 60Hz at 30fps for 3D wouldn’t work as well. While the video itself would display correctly, due to the nature of the active shutter glasses, a 1/30 second shuttering per eye (for a 60Hz 3D Display) would be too jarring and noticable, leading to flickering and a poor viewing experience.

Of course, that is independent of the actual ability of the TV to display the content, but is more a limitation imposed by active shutter technology. Historically, the different framerates chosen by different media/countries has made the whole framerate system a bit messy. It certainly would be ideal if everyone could agree on a single FPS so that we wouldn’t have to worry about uneven pulldown and judder associated with incompatible display refresh rates.

As mentioned in our Panasonic Plasma 3D TV reviews, the new panasonics had to also be modified to handle 120Hz. This was purely for the sake of active shutter to work, as Plasma TVs don’t inherently need the bump to 120Hz refresh rates for ghosting, etc due to the ultra-fast response time of plasma panels.

This is because Hollywood still uses 24fps for shooting movies, and that works perfectly fine for the most part. Blu-Ray 3D will mostly utilize frame sequential 1080p at 24fps, that is 24 frames for each eye, or 48 total frames at 1080p. This should provide excellent quality.

When it comes to 3D broadcasts, depending on how you are getting your video, you might be bandwidth or cablebox limited. There are techniques such as “Side by Side” 3D, where the left and right eye image is squeezed into a single 1080 or 720 frame, and then processes and separated out by the TV. It does halve the horizontal resolution of the image but initial tests by ESPN with 720p side-by-side content at 60fps has gotten very positive feedback.

We’ll have to wait and watch a bit to see what framerate and specifications 3D content providers go with, but for the most part, you don’t have to worry too much about it as all the 3D TVs should be able to process these different specifications and display it correctly on the TV screen.

I will be including a couple of articles on the different frame packing and display methods that are going to be incorporated in 3D displays. So stay tuned!