3DM | Coldstreams 3D and Drones

The Civil War battle re-enactment video I uploaded last night, was edited in Sony Vegas Movie Studio 12. Vegas MS has decent 3D support except for some issues that make synchronizing dual camera tracks a bit tougher. Once two tracks are paired as a 3D stereoscopic pair, there is no way to shift one of the tracks over by individual frames, which may be necessary if they were not precisely synchronized. However, I have found version 12 of the Vegas Movie Studio to be rock solid for 3D editing (unlike prior versions).

Magix Move Edit version 17 was also very solid for 3D editing. But their 2013 edition, renamed to Magix Movie Edit Pro 2013, was filled with bugs. Even basic 3D features appeared to have not been run by a software tester – they just didn’t work. A later update fixed most of those problems, but, as widely reported online, there continue to be problems exporting video output to MP4 files. It seems this might have to do with trying to use GPU hardware acceleration – or not – or maybe which brand of GPU is installed on the computer.

Based on some experiments, a simpler solution is to just output to Windows Media (WMV) format files. Seems much faster than MP4 encoding and so far, no problems encountered. I will do some experiments before I do this next project in MEP. MEP has a nice feature for 3D editing and that is automatic dual track alignment, based on the sound tracks, plus after pairing, the tracks can be shifted left or right, one frame at a time.