Fri May 04, 2018 3:25 pm
There is no tool anywhere that does it "easily." Stereo conversion requires tons and tons of rotoscoping, no matter the tool. And in spite of what some vendors would have you believe, there isn't yet a magic roto tool that will appreciably automate the procedure. If Prime Focus, Stereo D or Legend 3D have roto assistant tools that help, none of them are sharing.
Back when I was in that business about five years ago, the lowest I was able to hammer our theoretical operating costs for conversion was about US$40k per minute (not including overhead and management). That was based on paying our roto artists $20/hour and working three shifts to minimize equipment costs. Operating in a lower cost-of-living area might be able to reduce it further (I imagine that's why Legend3D is in San Diego instead of Los Angeles, and it's certainly why Prime Focus only a sales office here). Also, Fusion is a good deal cheaper than the Nuke + Ocula + YUVSoft plug-in we were using—I think that came out to about $25k per workstation per year. I was never told how expensive the plug-in license were—very tight NDA. Even with those considerations, though, I don't think you'd be looking at an appreciably smaller number, particularly if you're not looking at a high-volume pipeline like we were.
With that out of the way, Fusion does have some decent disparity tools, so once you have the depth map, you can do all the typical stereo conversion tasks. It doesn't have much that is great for in-painting (restoring the background behind the edges of objects that have been shifted), but Mocha can pick up the slack there, and if you've got a good TD you might be able to develop tools for Fusion that would be better than the built-in ones. That's quite a heavy investment, though, and something you'd only want to do if you either want to get into the software business or have more than three or four projects you need to convert.
Bryan Ray
http://www.bryanray.name
http://www.sidefx.com
