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The work is becoming more sophisticated, and increasingly that sophistication is being required for 3D stereoscopic pro- jects. Sometimes artists start a job not knowing that they will be asked to go stereo halfway through. Other times they know it's coming but still have to pre- pare intricate stereo workflows so there are no surprises during the process. All of this keeps a visual effects team on its toes and ready for anything. And these days, being prepared for anything often means more than just knowing the latest compositing tools and techniques, it involves learning other aspects of filmmaking that aren't typically in a compositor's job description... and most importantly, looking at things in an entirely new way. THE MOLECULE The Molecule is a six-year-old New York City-based VFX and motion graphics production company whose primary work has been visual effects for TV series such as Rescue Me, Royal Pains, Damages and Blue Bloods — all deceptively loaded with lots of invisible effects, as well as some traditional big effects — but they have recently been fielding requests for feature film work thanks to their newly minted Hollywood office. Chris Healer, president/CEO of The Molecule (www.themolecule.net), sees that resolutions keep getting bigger and bigger, and that frame rates keep get- ting higher and higher, and he's not certain it's all very necessary. "Personally, I think we exceeded all practical limitations a long time ago. Maybe you want to other eye would kind of come for free. Lately our approach has changed dra- matically. I don't believe that anything is exact. From a purely didactic sense you can do it that way, and yes it's valuable and sometimes you have to go there, but more often I find if it looks right, it's right." Healer acknowledges that when he started working in stereo he was frus- trated."So much of compositing is just smoke and mirrors, and so many of our techniques for doing things just flew out the window with 3D.Then as time went on I realized there is something very pliable about 3D stereo.When you are blink- ing right eye, left eye, right eye your brain is only receiving that information from one eye, but when you look with both eyes and realize your brain is selecting what it wants to look at and throwing out quite a bit of information. I find that is kind of happening in 3D compositing as well. If you direct a viewer to look in the right place using convergence and focus and color, little stereo bugs can be forgiven." Healer is a former Shake artist."I loved it, even though at its core it had some limitations." Now a Nuke user, he says this tool addresses many of the issues he had with Shake, like time remapping, scripting, and even undo commands."I love that Nuke can do compositing of single-view material and stereo material, but they take that idea even farther to call it multi-view.To me, that shows they have a very forward-thinking perspective, not just that stereo is coming but so is multi-view… maybe 10 years from now. Chris Healer and The Molecule helped Mother Nature for some episodes of , adding greenery to scenes shot before trees bloomed this spring. see 4K in a theatrical screening, but from then on out HD is fine for all practi- cal purposes — Blu-ray discs, downloading on the Internet, even viewing HD in a theater is fine." At this year's NAB he saw 8K recorders and 120fps playback in stereo. "It's like, come on guys, do we really need stereo, do we need multi-view, do we need more pixels, more frames per second?" It remains to be seen what of this is going to stick. The Molecule is currently providing VFX on the indie film Hellbenders. "It's 5K in stereo, which is like 120MB per frame," he explains."It's cool that we can do it, but it begs the question:why do we always have to be at the absolute maximum limit of what our machines can do? At this point, when an HD job comes in, I am thrilled. Everything is so fast and so fluid.When a standard def job comes in it's hilarious; it's virtually realtime compositing." Healer and crew have done a good amount of stereo, including work for The History Channel, a short film and bits for the featureThe Mortician. Hellbenders is the studio's first full-length stereo feature. "It's the first real stress test of our pipeline. It's one thing for one person to do a shot in stereo or a couple of peo- ple to do four shots, but it's an entirely different thing when you have 15 people trying to push hundreds of shots through a pipeline. And some of them are thinking in stereo, some are thinking purely operationally and some are figuring out how to make the software work better. Everybody is at a different place and that's an entirely different strain to put on a pipeline." Thinking about stereo in a different way creatively is a must, reports Healer. "When I first started doing stereo I thought that even a static frame — a non- moving camera — would need some kind of a 3D track on it in order to ex- trapolate 3D information.That was difficult to do. I spent a lot of time trying to work out the process of extracting 3D information from a stereo pair to flow it into our software so the 3D guys could add things in true depth and make that mathematically accurate. In an ideal world you would be doing one thing to one eye and parameterizing the space in such a way that having done one eye, the TIP: "There are a few stereo books out there and I think they should be read, but also taken with a grain of salt.Again, if it looks right, it's right. I constantly close my left eye and look, close my right eye, and start thinking in stereo. I want two images that look right when I look at them in separate eyes.Which is a dif- ferent mindset than 'let's build this accurate 3D world and view it through a stereo camera.'That is almost the wrong way to think of it." NITROUS VISUAL EFFECTS Veteran VFX artist Geoff Leavitt and partner Jonathan Bourgoine started Cal- abasas, CA's Nitrous Visual Effects just over three years ago. Supplying VFX ser- vices for television and film, the studio has three full-time employees and ramps up as needed.This helps them keep quality up and overhead down. Leavitt, whose extensive VFX credits include Zookeeper, Grown-Ups and X- Men:The Last Stand, reports that today's compositing landscape increasingly fea- tures stereoscopic work."A lot of projects are going stereo, but there is 2D to 3D conversion too, and that is a lot of heavy handed compositing," he says. Nitrous (www.nitrousvfx.com) recently completed over 80 shots for the in- dependent feature Julia X, a true stereo production with a budget between $2-4 million.The film was shot with two Reds using a beam splitter to get left and right eye."We got double the footage than a 2D film, but were prepared," explains Leavitt."We spent about six months researching stereo compositing pipelines as well as stereo 3D pipelines because we didn't want to get the footage and then be at a standstill trying to figure it out as we go."The process went so smoothly that instead of needing the allotted six weeks, they deliv- ered in four and a half. One effects sequence they worked on was adding feathers to a fight scene www.postmagazine.com August 2011 • Post 31 Ro yal Pains