Anaglyph disappointment

We got back initial tests from Color Code and Trioscopics, to of the major anaglyph encoding companies with their own color schemes. Unfortunately, all of them still sowed the ghosting that I was seeing with my rough red-cyan anaglyph tests. We are asking them if there is anything they can do on their end to minimize the ghosting, but at this point it seems like it is just a part of anaglyph.

I am not sure if it is due to the quality of the gels or that the lighter color gels just can't get 100% saturation so the cannot block all of the other colors, practical vs theory. What I am seeing is part of the red image through the cyan gel, or with Trioscopics, part of the magenta through the green or blue through the yellow with color code. It is mostly around bright objects, or objects that are fairly desaturated, such as bright white and grays. I tried going into Fusion and adjusting the color filters for each eye, but I was unable to get a combination that would completely remove the ghosting, although I was able to minimize it in certain cases.

As far as color goes, both Trioscopics and Color Code did a good job of replicating the colors, Penguins I wasn't worried about too much, other than the black and whites, however Fanboy and Chum Chum held up pretty well. I think the hardest part for Fanboy was that all of the backgrounds where cyan and there was a lot of red as well, which caused many problems, however since neither Color Code nor Trioscopics used red-cyan, it wasn't as tough.

The biggest issue with Color Code I think was that with the Blue-Amber colors, there was such a vast difference in the brightness between the eyes, it was hard to visualize the stereo image as it was with Trioscopics, which is a much more even density. With Color Code, it a probably a stop or two difference between the left and right eyes, however with Trioscopics green-magenta, it feels pretty even.

In the end, I'd prefer to only do an anaglyph conversion with a black and white show or something with muted colors, but for broadcast, until there are enough 3D televisions purchased, it has to be anaglyph.

Anaglyph Output Issues

After I finished compositing both eyes to send out for the various encodes that we wanted to test, TrioScopics and Color Code along with traditional anaglyph encode, to see which version works best with our shows, we were having a hard time being able to get it done in the timeframe we were looking for, especially with such a short amount of footage. Unfortunately we were unable to find a place to encode the anaglyph version and we were unable to get a color code version either, so I played around with doing my own Red-Cyan anaglyph encode in Digital Fusion. The process was fairly simple and straight forward, all that is needed is to filter the right eye with cyan and the left eye with red and combine them.

To do this I simply created a cyan background and multiplied it with the right eye image, created a red background and multiplied it with the left eye image and then screened the cyan left eye over the right. This gives the anaglyph image, which worked for the most part. There was a slight problem where I was getting a ghosting outline of the opposite eye. What this gave was an offset halo on either side of the 3D object.
At this point I have been unable to remove it completely, the cyan is not completely cutting out the red pass, which is causing the ghosting. It is most prominent with white objects or objects with a strong bias in the red. Maybe the other encodes will be able to reduce it.