I need a computer for a special application.

[Frank Jr.]

I have an old HP M8300f with Windows Vista 64 that kicked the bucket three times over the years. I have repaired bulging caps on the mobo twice. This last failure had to with the power supply. I could repair or replace the PS easily and cheap enough, but the machine is simply outdated and not worth my time anymore. I just purchased an HP Envy Phoenix 860-121 which should arrive tomorrow or the next. Hopefully I won't be plagued with bad capacitors on this one. One thing I don't like about this new one is it comes with Windows 10. Oh what fun that will be.

 

[harshness]

But you are wrong about 3D. While it remains to be a niche market, it is still quite popular in asia based on the availability of 3D TV's from, 24" on up.

Niche doesn't begin to cover it and it certainly doesn't rise to suggesting that 3D is proof that if you build it, it will be commercially successful. If there were interest, there would be a supply.

If the content you can buy ends up with asian soundtracks does it really matter elsewhere?

Sony, JVC, Panasonic, Epson, and many others continue to make 3D projectors and are sold in the US. I love my Sony VPL VW665ES.

Offering New Old Stock (NOS, like 2015's VPL-VW665ES) isn't the same thing as a wide selection going forward. The 3D projector market is still there because there are small commercial theaters that justify keeping the underlying engines around (well that and some people's willingness to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a TV like the VPL-VW5000ES).

 

[harshness]

One thing I don't like about this new one is it comes with Windows 10. Oh what fun that will be.

I'm not sure I appreciate your idea of "fun".

At least your computer with its 6th generation CPU can run Windows 7. Gen 7 (Kaby Lake) processors are not supported in Windows 7 (by Microsoft decree, you can't get downgrade rights on a late-model Intel CPU).

 

[jayn_j]

I just have this feeling that if a physics debate were being held here, Harshness would keep arguing until both Neil Degrassi-Tyson and Stephen Hawking were beaten into silence. And somehow at the end, the debate wouldn't be about physics at all.

 

[waylew]

both Neil Degrassi-Tyson and Stephen Hawking were beaten into silence

I'd be on team Harshness for that

 

[harshness]

And somehow at the end, the debate wouldn't be about physics at all.

Physics isn't much involved in predicting what humans are emotionally attracted to or repelled by. It only plays a part in how insanely expensive it will be to acquire/avoid these things.

 

[jayn_j]

Physics isn't much involved in predicting what humans are emotionally attracted to or repelled by. It only plays a part in how insanely expensive it will be to acquire/avoid these things.

So? I am currently finishing up on a bearing distance heading indicator for the Boeing 777. Taking your words at face value, it is unimportant that the indicator gives accurate bearing and distance information to the VOR or TACAN station (the physics) as long as the colors are pleasing and that I replace the certified electronics with a Raspberry Pi.

I believe humans are most concerned that their airplanes don't crash and cost is at best a secondary driver.

 

[harshness]

I believe humans are most concerned that their airplanes don't crash and cost is at best a secondary driver.

If we were talking about airplanes with their $75,000 passenger doors and complex anti-wagging vertical stabilizer systems, your argument might be possible. Here we're talking about whether or not a video format with decidedly limited utility is likely to make a go of it.

You're comparing apples and quadcopters.

 

[TheForce]

Offering New Old Stock (NOS, like 2015's VPL-VW665ES) isn't the same thing as a wide selection going forward. The 3D projector market is still there because there are small commercial theaters that justify keeping the underlying engines around (well that and some people's willingness to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a TV like the VPL-VW5000ES).

The 665ES has been replaced last year with the 675ES. It mostly upgraded the input1 to handle 4K and HDCP2.2 signals. My 665ES only does that on input #2 which is good enough for my needs.

The 5000ES is laser engine, I believe there is a subsequent model lower cost on that as well. They still do 3D. As much as the 3D FUD people wish to believe, 3D is not going away. It has just settled into it's own niche market. I love 3D as do my family, but I never considered it would ever be the choice for everything, even if glasses were eliminated. Its latest genre is entering the VR content market for 3D 360 VR with goggles. Another 665ES owner and I have commiserated on our upgrade path from the 665ES to laser when it comes down to under $10,000 and weighs less than 25 pounds. I don't want to have to add steel rafters and bring in a crane to ceiling mount my projector. The 5000 is a beast.

 

[TheForce]

You're comparing apples and quadcopters.

Did you mean pears and quadcopters?



Yes it flies too:

 

[harshness]

As much as the 3D FUD people wish to believe, 3D is not going away.

Saying it doesn't make it so. As the affordable hardware side quickly vanishes, the content side is drying up as well. If you have to spend four large plus to get a 3D TV, it isn't really at the consumer level anymore. The likelihood of a replacement TV being 3D is getting thinner by the month as is the list of compelling theatrical releases. I see five movies in the hopper and four of them are substantially CGI or outright animation (Boss Baby).

On the other side of the lens, we find that Best Buy no longer advertises any 3D camcorders (they advertise one that will do 3D, but you have to outfit it with an accessory lens). Maybe not a bellwether for technology but certainly a sign of the times.

To be sure, there may always be a handful of people that find considerable value but their selection will be severely limited going forward and they'll pay dearly for the privilege (like trying to find a high quality and affordable turntable cartridge). Look how much it costs to get something that will play SACDs.

It is also important that we agree that VR and 3D aren't the same thing.

I don't think there's much fear, uncertainty or doubt about where 3D is going.

 

[TheForce]

VR +3D is going to be the next big thing. News from Vidcom this past week, Adobe just bought Mettle Skybox. Last year Adobe added VR360 to their Premiere Pro and After Affects. In April they added 3D stereoscopic projection to VR360. But it was lacking in text and PIP spherical projection. The small company Mettle made an expensive plugin that added that feature to Premiere and After Effects. But it was expensive at $499 for the suite of Plugins to deal with the 3D in VR360. I decided to wait until after my trip to get it. Finances? But on Tuesday, Adobe bought the exclusive rights to their 3D VR plugins. Yesterday, Adobe announced that the next update to it's VR capable editing packages, Mettle plugins will be included as a standard effects option for editors.

Google and Facebook recently added VR360 stereoscopic projection for VR goggles such as Google Cardboard. Both Apple and Samsung phones have 3D display formats now for the goggles viewing.

There is no stopping the clock for creative development of 3D stereoscopic viewing, only stopping the clock for people who decided they do not want to keep up with the changing technology and new innovations. And it's not just useful for entertainment film and games. Industry and the military is very interested in making use of this for design and strategy. New to the industry, Real Estate sales people are beginning to set up 3D in their offices for giving clients more realistic tours of high end homes before traveling to the location. I shot my first VR360 of a million $ ocean front property, my daughter listed last month. She sent the 3D video to a client in California and he was impressed and is close to closing the sale for cash.

I do agree that none of this will be mainstream for watching the 6PM news on TV or your favorite sitcom in prime time, but for a niche market, it will continue. When 3D enthusiasts like me were all saying 3D stereo would be offered on every production, I disagreed. I've always said it would be a niche market. You know even Blu Ray HD is still not mainstream. DVD SD is still the main popular format for most people. Look at Red Box statistics where BR disks are only 50 cents more. I believe the VR360 in 3D will be the norm, not VR360 2D for games, documentaries, and industry. But has no real purpose for standard TV production.

 

[harshness]

That a technology exists and there are standards and tools surrounding it is no assurance that it will be practical, desirable and affordable; some non-negligible elements of adoption.

That Blu-ray HD isn't absolutely dominant bolsters my position. For many DVD is sufficient in a world where you can get a serviceable Blu-ray player for under $60. The media cost differential is much closer than it used to be yet the buying public's response still seems to be a solid "meh".

People will always be tickled by the extraordinary but often not nearly excited enough to bother going there themselves. I'm intrigued by 3D largely because it seems that I can no longer have it.

 

[TheForce]

I'm intrigued by 3D largely because it seems that I can no longer have it.

Who told you you aren't allowed to have it? I'm not stopping you. Maybe because the salesman at Best Buy won't sell it to you, should not stop you, unless you refuse to buy from anyone else. Like I said, I needed a monitor that was a passive 3D 27" for my edit bay and it was not available anywhere in the US, so I just ordered it from Alibaba, an LG.

What did bother me is that the industry standards capped the 3D at 1920x1080 for flat screens and projectors. But, now we are seeing the 360VR cameras coming out with 4K per eye technology and goggles with 4K screens that can display 3D in split optical format.

Here is a screen capture from my iphone6+ as displaying a 4K 3D 360VR window of view in Goggles format. Since the equirectangular image is 4K pixels wide by 4K pixels tall for stereo3D but you are only viewing a window of those 4K pixels at a time in goggles view. The true equirectangular flat image is 4Kx2K per eye and it looks more like a squished and curved panorama image.

The image processing of a 3D 360VR 4K equirectangular video at 30p is why the computer to deal with all that data has to be quite powerful. But when viewing a portion of those pixels at any one time, is why the image in view will lack the detail of a true 4K and actually, not even HD quality. The limiting factor is at both ends. The camera needs to shoot at some multiple of 4K and the goggles need to display at the same multible or the flat version image when viewed in VR window will look more like an old VHS tape than even HD. The best 360 cameras today will have like 16 4K cameras in a sphere shooting in all directions. But that image while it may be at 50K pixels in equirectangular, the goggles to display it will still limit the viewing resolution. In otherwords, 360VR is a long way off to becoming equal quality to HD. It's more like VHS quality when using goggles with a 2K iphone 6+ screen as seen in this image.

But, just because the image quality is not there, yet, that doesn't stop me from having fun with the format. Like when I pioneered underwater cave video, I was one of 4 people in the world to do that in the early 80's. I shot with a VHSC camcorder.

 

[TheForce]

BTW- are you aware of the cross-eyed method of converging a split screen optical? If you stare at the image above for a few seconds with your eyes crossed, soon your brain will show a third image in the center in 3D stereo and it will have depth. All the goggles do is correct the curvature of the image and converge the two eyes so you don't have to start cross-eyed which is rather painful.

 

[harshness]

Who told you you aren't allowed to have it?

My wallet told me that I couldn't have it. You have to pay a pretty penny (or get NOS) for the currently available stuff. Ordering direct through China or Korea often cheats you out of a warranty and availability of authorized service in a marketplace that it flooding with products of questionable build quality.

What did bother me is that the industry standards capped the 3D at 1920x1080 for flat screens and projectors.

The same limit is built into ATSC 3.0

But, now we are seeing the 360VR cameras coming out with 4K per eye technology and goggles with 4K screens that can display 3D in split optical format.

Again, lots of potential, but in no way guaranteed that anyone will make practical use of of it or that it will have a lasting impact on world culture.

There was a pretty long interval between the kinetograph and kinetoscope and the first movie houses (Electric Theater, 1903)and it was kind of touch and go for a long time.

 

[Pepper]

Just glad that I was able to get a 65 inch LG 4K 3D set from HHgregg before they shut down.

 

[TheForce]

I finally ran into a problem working with my new 360VR camera. The custom stitching software to stitch together the 8 cameras into one 4K equirectangular video file won't run on windows 7. So, I got it working on my Surface Pro that has a enough power to slowly render the camera files into the required output. It is running windows 10 Pro 64bit so it works. But the GPU in the Surface Pro causes some image artifacts that is quite visible and annoying if you know what to look for. All my 360ER work to date on YT channel has this defect. It shows up as a wrinkle in the image if I make stitch corrections to the seams. If I leave the stitch errors alone and not try to make alignments to the seams, the wrinkle is gone but then I have seam alignment errors. It became a pick your poison editing decision. I was blaming the software was buggy, but as it turns out it was the Surface Pro's GPU. Yes, before you ask, I did make sure all latest drivers were installed.

Anyway, working with the engineers, I was asked to upgrade my edit computer that has a very high end GPU to windows 10 pro 64bit and do the test. Yesterday, I installed a new SSD C drive with windows 10 I downloaded for free and bought a license key for dirt cheap online. So I do the test of the stitching software and like magic the rendering is perfect! Plus the rendering time on my edit computer is about 100 times faster than the surface Pro.

So now I have my edit computer set up with two C drives I can hardware swap before power up.

I love it when a problem that has been giving me trouble for 2 months is now resolved.


I see intel has a new CPU I have my eyes on for next year. the i9 with 18 cores and 36 Threads. It is designed for 4K video editing and 360VR. A little pricey but it should last me for a few years. According to Nvidea here will come a day when 360VR will be using 36K video to achieve UHD in the window. This CPU is said to be ready for that kind of editing.

Here is an interesting presentation by nvidia:
NVIDIA SIGGRAPH 2017

 

[TheForce]

I'm getting closer to needing that big computer. This month Adobe upgraded it's Premier Pro that made many operations perfect that were just full of artifacts using 3rd party plugins. But first I had to resolve a computer issue to see that perfection. I could add the 2D image file to a timeline and convert it to 3D 360 VR projection but when I went to display it in the output monitor the monitor went blank and I got an error message. So I turned on the system resources and it seems the default memory for Adobe PP is 5GB + the 3 windows reserves = 8GB. no problem since I have 12. But the additional conversions require 7GB. So I adjusted it and bingo, the program monitor showed up.
So I complete the editing and ger ready to render the project to an MP4 4K equirectangular file to You Tube specifications and it crashed every time that converted file was rendered. System resources says 10.5GB ram while rendering but when that file came up, the monitor graph shot straight up. I'm guessing maybe 15-16GB of ram required. So I'm upgrading to 24GB the maximum the cpu/MB will support. Let's all this a bandaid until I have the money to buy the bigger computer next year. I see the 16Core/32 Logical processors is now out and prices at $2K for CPU+MB Maybe next year it will be cheaper. (I9-7980)

 

[TheForce]

I did upgrade to 24GB or ram and the render completed but took a really long time. I'm at the end of the road for this computer. Time for faster CPU and faster GPU, maybe two graphics cards for faster GPU assisted rendering.

VR and AR is extremely taxing on editing.

Do you know, the public is already asking for live streaming of 360VR.

The recent experiment by Verizon of the Macy's Day Parade in 360 VR live streaming was amazing but that is not ready for low budget clients.