Unfortunately, that was also my assessment when I understood that there is a co-operaton with Hitfilm. Hitfilm is talking about 3D, but not s3D.

Means, that the effects may look like 3D or are named "3D", but have not really depth and there is no calculation of disparities that could generate true s3D. Sorry to say so.

Hitfilm appears to be a 2.5D application the same as After Effects and has a "3D" camera, same as AE.
Seems to me one should therefore be able to do S3D with Hitfilm the same way it was done in the older versions of AE.
Create comp with left eye footage. Once happy with that duplicate comp and replace footage with right eye footage. Offset the camera in the left eye and right eye comps to create interaxial, adjust both for toe in and render out left eye and right eye comps.

CS5.5 and later makes this somewhat simpler, probably via scripting, and can provide S3D output to S3D monitors to ease the pain however if you can tolerate the amount of manual intervention I think you can get it done in Hitfilm. The only caveat is that both Hitfilem and AE have everything as 2D planar objects in a 3D space so depending on the effect it may look acceptable or not.

Bob.

Thanks for that, Bob.

So, if I understand correctly:
1) First, I render the left and right of the original clip separately.
2) In HitFilm, I apply the effect on the left.
3) In HitFilm, I duplicate what I did in step 2 on the right side footage -- this is where I start to get stuck. Is there a way to apply exactly the same effect?
4) Is the "Offset the camera..." part done in Vegas or HitFilm? Sorry, this part just went over my head :-)


Grazie, the video card used to be AMD Radeon HD 6750; I just upgraded yesterday to a NVidia GTX 650 Ti by MSI (driver: 310.90) -- same problem.

3) Sorry I only use AE and with that it's quite easy to duplicate a composition and replace footage. The exact steps to do the same thing in Hitfilm I don't know but I guess it can be done. The trick is don't try to duplicate the effect(s), duplicate / copy the composition. I'm assuming Hitfilm use the "composition" concept and comps can be nested.

4) Do that in Hitfilm.

It all depends, I mean if you only want to chroma key you can just process each eye completely alone. If you want to add an "animation" e.g. particles, you'd want them somewhere in the Z plane, in this case with Hitfilm you'd need to use the faux S3D camera trick I'm talking about.

AE CS 5.5 and later does support S3D monitoring etc but even with that the workflow is much as I described because once you go into S3D mode it creates a duplicate comp, nests the left and right eye comps into a master and then an FX creates the output for a S3D monitor from the master. A null object in the master in conjunction with some expressions would enable somewhat easier control of the S3D camera(s).


TBH given AE's ability to use expressions if you're going to get heavily into adding FXs and doing comps with S3D it's probably a good investment but it is still no trivial matter and the learning curve steep at first. Also, it is still only 2.5D and that means you lose "roundness", you might do better biting the bullet and using a full 3D app however the learning curve then really is huge.

Bob.

Thanks for that info, Bob. Can you recommend a good full 3D app please?

"Can you recommend a good full 3D app please? "

Can you recommend a mistress? :)

All I can recommend is doing a LOT of research because that's a very deep hole to go down. From people I know that have gone down that hole figure on 2 years of hard slog to become moderately competant.

3D Studio Max seems pretty popular for certain fields, Lightwave is another and Blender is free and hence a few use it despite its limitations and then there's the venerable Maya. I've played with Bryce (free) and Poser (sometimes free) and Truespace (now obsolete). Bryce is pretty simple for creating certain things like landscapes, Poser for easy people, Truespace was a more genuine 3D app with context sensitive menuse etc and thoroughly confounded me. At least with Bryce and Poser I did get something sort of usefull done in a couple of days. The 2.5D in Vegas and AE is enough for me to grapple with.

Bob.

I was actually wondering about something closer to HitFilm, but that supports stereoscopic 3D :-)

Does something like that exist?

After Effect CS 6.

Google "S3D after effects"and you'll find some tutorials and people selling scripts to help.

Bob.