3D Stereoscopic & DCI Mastering with CLIPSTER^®

State-of-the-art DCI Mastering

CLIPSTER^® enables the generation of DCI masters with stereoscopic content. Following the DCI specification, CLIPSTER^® provides the ability to create fast and secure stereoscopic Digital Cinema Packages (DCP). CLIPSTER’s DCI Mastering Wizard lets you conveniently perform all steps of the stereoscopic DCI Mastering process including interleaving, encoding, encryption and wrapping into MXF files. With CLIPSTER’s unique hardware accelerator, this process can be accomplished faster than real-time.

Quality comes first

When creating the ideal 3D experience, control over the available depth parameters is critical and instant visual feedback is essential. With these requirements in mind, CLIPSTER^® was designed to support all available output formats to connect to single or dual projection units and screens. If you find yourself in a situation where only a 2D screen is available, the anaglyph-mode offers a safe fallback.

Camera misalignments while recording must be detected in order to prevent vertical and rotational offsets from showing in the theaters. The highly sophisticated STAN software (Stereoscopic Analyzer) is tightly integrated into every CLIPSTER^® offering the most superior 3D error detection available in the market. For manual correction, all necessary parameters can also be edited and animated. Use the overlay’s difference and anaglyph modes to control the result, or consult the 3D depth histogram to quickly reference depth allocation – including configurable thresholds for maximum disparities.

For color-differences, the automatic color matching tool enables you to align the look between both eyes. With CLIPSTER's D-Cinema player emulation, you can easily control the quality of the final DCP and view its integrated subtitles.

The Stereoscopic DCI Mastering Process

Two separate video streams – one for each eye – are merged together when mastering a 3D stereoscopic DCP. 3D subtitles, depth-editable with manual control or sophisticated automatic depth detection, can be positioned and reviewed in real time to prevent depth collisions.

Following the DCI specification, the final DCP is comprised of left and right images interleaved at 48 frames per second and encoded into JPEG2000 file sequences in X'Y'Z' color space. And of course, CLIPSTER^® offers even higher frame rates of 2x 48 fps.

3D Handling

Whether you ingest 3D content using HD-SDI up to 30 frames per second or use any file based input format – CLIPSTER^® simplifies the handling of 3D content. Connect two independent streams in the timeline, right away in the BIN or automatically on import and both streams will be used in perfect synchronization.

Stereo tracks can be edited as regular video tracks - eliminating the need to edit the left and right eyes separately. Play out and control both streams simultaneously over HD-SDI or DVI. A routing feature helps you to define the left and right eye outputs. Control depth in real time up to 48 frames per second per eye with a special 3D panel – preparing you for the high frame rate tasks to come.

Conforming 3D content is also painless with CLIPSTER’s sophisticated conforming tool; just drag and drop the EDL into the timeline and the stereoscopic images are created.