OCULA | Taking the headache out of stereo post-production
OCULA is a unique collection of plug-in tools for NUKE that solve common problems with stereoscopic imagery, boost productivity in post production and ultimately help deliver a more rewarding stereoscopic viewing experience.
Problems addressed include:
- Colour matching - fixing differences introduced by polarisation and mirror rigs
- Vertical alignment - correcting vertical offsets introduced by mismatched camera rigs and keystoning
- Focus matching - fixing focus differences between cameras by deblurring and view reconstruction
- Interaxial shifting - altering the interaxial distance baked into a stereo pair by rebuilding views
- Retiming - stereo motion vectors for retimes with correct stereo alignment
- Disparity generation - for automating and speeding up day to day compositing tasks including automated roto view generation, convergence manipulation, depth channel generation, material QC and more.
OCULA Overview
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DOLPHINS: Footage shot and supplied by Boomtown Productions Dubai
The plug-ins are designed to automatically replicate key processes on left and right channels and help artists polish and refine stereoscopic material, literally removing headaches from the final viewing experience. OCULA, created by The Foundry's SCI-TECH Award®-winning R&D team, uses algorithms to work out the geometrical relationship between left and right cameras and generate disparity maps.
Disparity maps track and correlate the differences in positional space and movement between corresponding pixels in the left and right cameras, delivering pixel-level control over images. Knowing where disparities occur, OCULA tools apply corrections by warping, stretching and squeezing only the areas of an image that require treatment. Image manipulation using disparity maps is different to the X, Y or Z-axis shifting of images, where only whole image planes are being shifted.
These building blocks enable OCULA to assist in correcting issues such as vertical alignment and localised colour density differences, and focus mismatches, saving artists a huge amount of pain in performing day to day tasks such as keying and tracking which can become very cumbersome on uncorrected footage.
The OCULA plug-in set contains additional tools that facilitate the copying of rotos and paint strokes from one eye to the other, reduce interaxial separation, performing stereo retimes, create new views from a stereo pair and generate per-view depth maps. All corrections can be made to the left and right eye channels either together or separately, minimising or eliminating discomfort from the stereo viewing experience.
OCULA is available for NUKEX and NUKE.
What's New in OCULA 3.0?
The Foundry's Jon Starck highlights OCULA 3.0's new features.
TRON: LEGACY © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
DOLPHINS: Footage shot and supplied by Boomtown Productions Dubai
Try OCULA
Download a Free 15 Day OCULA evaluation.
OCULA Vimeo Channel
Check out OCULA in action on our Vimeo channel:
fxguide Article
"OCULA is at the very heart of the new post-production tools that have emerged to deal with stereo. NUKE and OCULA were used extensively on Avatar, and we explore the lessons learned with Simon Robinson, Chief Scientist of the Foundry. OCULA, in particular, is a real partnership between filmmakers on the cutting edge and the UK software developer." Read the full fxguide article.
OCULA Demo
Simon Robinson, The Foundry's Chief Scientist, demonstrated OCULA to FX Guide's John Montgomery at IBC 2008. Download the video.