The following descriptions should guide you through using the SCS distributed Stereo Workstations to render movies of your scientific data.
Special Note
| Movie Dimensions | For all movies, keep in mind that the maximum resolution of the VizWall? is 2480x1050 pixels. When watching stereo movies, the independent eyes overlap. That means a side-by-side movie, 1280px wide, will fill a standard TV screen (640px). Hardware can upscale the frames to the full 2480px, but at such a low resolution granularity is noticeable. When rendering movies we recommend at least 1024px per eye for quality. |
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Previewing Stereo Movies
| Stereoscopic Player | To preview stereo movies you can use Stereoscopic Player from http://3dtv.at. The application supports a wide variety of stereo input formats and outputs. For the stereo workstations AND the VizWall? refer to the following instructions: |
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| Steps to Watch a Movie | (a) Launch Stereoscopic Player
NOTE Using the "Open with..." option from Windows Explorer to launch a movie file directly does not sit well with the player unless your movie file is side-by-side or interlaced format (most of the movies we generate are independent left-eye, right-eye movies).
(b) Use "File->Open<*>" corresponding to your media type.
If previewing movies from VisIt? or VMD you should use:
"File->Open Left and Right File..."
(c) If opening Left and Right files click the "..." buttons to the right of the white textfields to browse and locate the file.
If opening a generic file or DVD you will be prompted to choose the movie layout (i.e. Side-by-side Left first, over-under, interlaced, etc.). Click "OK" and the movie will start playing or Stereoscopic player will notify you of errors.
(d) Control the stereo effects (separation, parallax, etc.) under "File->Video Properties".
(e) If you are not seeing the movie in stereo you should go to:
"View->Viewing Method->Quad Buffered OpenGL?"
and also make sure your stereo hardware is turned on (i.e. the REAL-D emitter shows a red light or the extra set of projectors and filters on the VizWall? are enabled). |
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Stereo Capable Software
Amira/Avizo
| (Stereo) Movie Rendering Capable? | YES |
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| Steps to Render a Movie | See Jie Wang's guide to rendering stereo movies in Amira on the SCS Twiki. Keep in mind that all steps should be the same for both Amira and Avizo |
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ParaView?
| (Stereo) Movie Rendering Capable? | Mono Movies Only (although viewing data is in stereo) |
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| Additional Note | Stereo movie rendering is not available in ParaView? at this time. We are working with the ParaView? developers to get this functional and will notify you of an update when we have it. For the time being we ask that you setup your data and visualization as desired, then use ParaView?'s "File->Save State" and "File->Save Data" options to export the state and data for viewing on the VizWall?. Keep in mind that a saved state will contain full paths to data on your local machine. When you open the state on the VizWall? you will need to use GVIM or another editor to modify the ".pvsm" (XML) state file for the correct paths. |
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| Steps to Render a Movie | None. Visualize your data in ParaView? as desired (including all animation), then save state and data to an external drive. Bring that drive to SCS and load the state and data in a local copy of ParaView?. |
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PyMOL?
| (Stereo) Movie Rendering Capable? | YES |
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| Additional Note | We have written a patch to enable stereo movie rendering in PyMOL?:
Get the PyMOL Patch Here
Also, the patch provides a routine to render the frames (side-by-side) but does not complete the MPEG or AVI encoding (use the mencodeSBSAVI and mencodeSBSMPEG batch scripts for that). You can get the batch scripts here |
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| Steps to Render a Movie | (a) make sure that the PymolPatch? provided by us has been installed (See INSTALL inside PymolPatch?.zip).
(b) Enable Stereo from PyMOL?'s View menu.
(c) Make sure you change your directory to an empty folder (use "cd" from PyMOL? python prompt)
(d) Setup a standard movie in PyMOL? as if you were going to render in MONO mode, but DO NOT use "File->Save Movie..." to export the MPNG sequence.
(d) Run the command:
save_movie < outputFileName > [, < imgWidth > [, < imgHeight >] ]
(i.e. "save_movie MyOutputMovie?, 640, 480")
If Stereo is enabled (i.e. "Display->Stereo" is checked) this command will render a sequence of side-by-side stereo PNGs. If stereo is not enabled it will render a sequence of MONO PNGs.
(f) Use MEncoder to convert the MPNG sequence into an AVI or MPEG:
mencodeSBSAVI < outputMovieName > < framerate >
or
mencodeSBSMPEG < outputMovieName > < framerate >
NOTE mencodeAVI/MPEG. mencodeSBS(...) are equivalent to mencode(...) (see VisIT? section below), but restricted to "side-by-side" (SBS) frames instead of left/right. Since there is not "left" or "right" in the filenames of the rendered MPNG sequence the mencode(...) scripts will fail to find frames.
(g) The rendered movie will be in rendered directory and you can dispose of the independent frames as you wish. Also, if you need to re-render the movie for any reason, make sure you remove the old movie from the directory or it will be integrated with the rest of the frames into the new movie. |
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Slicer3
| (Stereo) Movie Rendering Capable? | NO |
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| Additional Note | Slicer3 was written (and documented) for stereo (CrystalEyes?) support. However, testing the software, we found stereo did not function as of June, 2008 and submitted a bug report to the Slicer3 development team. Their team is working on a fix and will notify us when it is ready. Since Slicer3 is based on VTK (as is ParaView?) the problems with stereo relate to the design of VTK itself and may require a large number of changes to enable. |
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| Steps to Render a Movie | None |
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VMD
| (Stereo) Movie Rendering Capable? | YES |
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| Additional Note | We have created a patch for VMD 1.8.6 (Win32) which provides a new Stereo Movie Maker plugin:
VMD Stereo Movie Maker (Get the patch here)
This patch is for VMD 1.8.6 (Win32) and requires Imagemagick (6.5.1) and MEncoder (MPlayer-1.0rc2) to render movies directly to MPEG-1 or AVI (MSMPEG-4v2) formats. This plugin DOES NOT require the machine to be capable of stereo viewing (i.e. it works on machines without CrystalEyes? setups). |
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| Steps to Render a Movie | (a) Load your data and configure your representations
(b) Open the menu option:
"Extensions->Visualization->Stereo Movie Maker"
(c) Select your desired output format from the "Format" menu
NOTE VMD was designed to work with Videomach in previous versions. At this point it is unclear whether VMD continues to actively support this software. We have pre-installed the required version of Videomach (3.4.1) to work with VMD although it is a demo license and the demo prompt interrupts auto rendering from VMD. The MEncoder and Imagemagick options provided use software available free of charge and have the same (if not better) quality of output. We recommend using the MEncoder before the Imagemagick becuase Imagemagick sometimes has difficulties maintaining a constant framerate in movies.
(d) Change your working directory to an empty folder you can easily locate. We recommend creating a directory in "My Documents" or "Desktop".
NOTE A clean directory is recommended because the movie renderers will coalesce all files containing the word "left" and all files containing the word "right" into two separate movie files. If you have pre-existing files with these substrings they will appear in the movie.
(e) Configure additional rendering options from the Stereo Movie Maker window as you would for the regular VMD Movie Maker module (see this documentation for additional details on options:
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/plugins/vmdmovie
(f) Click "Make Movie" and VMD will render individual left- and right-view images to the working directory using the TGA format.
NOTE TGA is not readable under Windows by default. We have installed additional software to enable thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer (Select "View->Thumbnails" to enable):
http://greggman.com/pages/thumbplug_tga.htm
Use software like Quicktime (Installed), Gimp (Installed) or Photoshop to edit or view individual frames.
(g) The plugin will notify you of any errors creating the movies. If no errors are reported and the "Stage:" and "Progress:" indicators return to "0 of 0" you will find two movies in addition to the individual frames in your working directory.
(h) Delete the rendered TGA files (individual frames) if you dont need/want them. Also, if there was an error rendering the movie or you want to render with a different frame rate without re-rendering the frames, keep the files and use the command line utilities mencodeAVI and mencodeMPEG. |
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VisIT?
| (Stereo) Movie Rendering Capable? | YES |
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| Additional Note | VisIt? supports stereo frame rendering internally. Unfortunately, after VisIt? renders the individual left-, right-frames it is unable to coalesce them into an MPEG or AVI (you will get an error window). Therefore, as part of the MPlayer-1.0rc2 (pre-installed), we have provided Windows Batch Scripts (mencodeMPEG.bat and mencodeAVI.bat) which will pick up where VisIt? left off.
You can get the batch scripts here |
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| Steps to Render a Movie | (a) Use the "VisIt 1.9.0 in Stereo" shortcut from the Window Start menu to enable stereo viewing and rendering
(b) Load your data and configure an animation
NOTE VisIt? does support rendering movies where the camera rotates about the data. This is done using "Keyframing..." and "View..." controls. See the VisIt? User manual for details on how to do this. If you have time series data and are not concerned with the fly-by or rotating movies VisIt? also supports time steps in movie rendering.
(c) Save your movie using the "File->Save Movie..." wizard.
NOTE Make sure you check the "Stereo Movie" box or you will not get both left and right views. (d) Follow the wizard and click "Finish" to render the movie
NOTE If you export an MPEG stereo movie, VisIt? will warn you that it is unable to save stereo MPEGs and is resorting to PPM images instead. Do not worry. As previously mentioned, we provided two batch scripts to handle converting the image sequence. Also, make sure you render the movie to an empty directory. If you have anything pre-existing inside the MPEG/AVI conversion may integrate the content into the movie.
(e) Open a Windows Console (i.e. Start->Run...->cmd.exe) and change directories to wherever VisIt? saved the snapshots.
(f) On the command prompt run either mencodeAVI or mencodeMPEG to create your movie:
mencodeAVI < outputMovieName > < framerate >
-OR-
mencodeMPEG < outputMovieName > < framerate >
NOTE VisIt? prompts you for the framerate when you are rendering your movie. We recommend you match that framerate when you execute one of the scripts. MPEG has a minimum framerate allowed (~10 fps). If your movie is slower than that you should use AVI which can go as low as 1 but creates files of larger size.
(g) If the scripts execute successfully you will have two movies in the directory:
< outputMovieName > . < left/right > . < mpg/avi >
If you want to run one of the scripts in that directory a second time, you must remove previously generated movies or they will be integrated into the new movies. |
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Recording Stereo Movies to Disc
| Writing DVD/CDs | Use the preinstalled "Roxio DVD/CD Creator" to burn movies to CDs or DVDs. Either medium is acceptable as the movies will need to be played on the VizWall? driving machine (reflectance.scs.fsu.edu) and not in the DVD player (software is required to play the DVD). |
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| Large Movies | If your movie is too large to fit on a DVD, you might consider reducing the length of the movie or the resolution. |
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Playing Movies on the VizWall?
| Playing DVD/CDs | The VizWall? has a copy of Stereoscopic player installed. Follow the same approach as described above in "Previewing Stereo Movies". Keep in mind the VizWall? must be turned on, switched into 3D mode, and users must be wearing the passive polarized glasses for stereo effects to be seen. For more information on how to set this up, see the slides from the SCS Tech Seminar, "Introduction to Scientific Visualization Using the FSU 3D Projection System" available on the SCS/FSU VizWall? FAQ:
http://www.scs.fsu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Computing/VislabPowerWall |
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| Data on External Drive | We realize some software has been written for users to interact with data in stereo but not render movies (i.e. see ParaView?). If you have your data on an external drive, you can connect it directly to the VizWall? driving machine and copy the data to the local harddrive for rendering.
When you are finished with the data we request that you help keep the driving machine's disk clear and delete it. There is roughly 150GB of free space on the machine which all users must share. |
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