Mars may be 300 million miles away, but you don’t have to go there to, um, go there. At the Science Museum of Minnesota, you can take in Mars and its eerie red beauty in the world’s first high-definition, digital 3D theater that carries you right onto the planet’s surface.

The solar system premiere of “Mars 3D,” produced by the Science Museum of Minnesota and Twist, a film company based in New York with a satellite office in Minneapolis, provides a stunningly realistic journey to Earth’s closest neighbor because it is based on 3D images captured by NASA’s two roving robotic geologists — Spirit and Opportunity — in one of humanity’s most dramatic interplanetary expeditions.

“Anybody can look at these images on NASA’s website,” says producer Melissa Butts. “Our show marks the first time that NASA’s 3D footage has been adapted for public viewing in a motion picture format.”

“With the Mac and software, I can do the stuff I did on my Flame probably five times faster. And I can still afford to buy a house and not have to pre-donate my body to science.”

Beam Me Up

Directed by Barry Kimm from Twist, produced on Power Mac G5s and projected by Panasonic’s new 3D Digital Cinema digital projection system, “Mars 3D” immerses viewers in the launch of the rovers — in 2D — and then in a 3D landing and exploration of Mars, where no man — or woman — has gone before.

“We started working in an Avid on a G5 to cut the 2D portion of the film for the documentary on the launch,” Melissa says. “But we ended up going into Final Cut Pro which had HD rendering and all those tools.”

Producing a digital film in 3D proved easier than Melissa had anticipated “because we’d just make one cut and timeline for the left eye, then duplicate the content for the right eye,” she says.

“We’d walk in with a CD or DVD that had left and right eye cuts and give it to the projectionist at the museum. He would load it into a server linked to the Panasonic projection system, and there we’d go.”

Launching Two Missions

Twist’s production team captured 2D footage of the documentary both in Panasonic and Sony HD formats, then edited the content in Final Cut Pro. NASA supplied the 3D images from its $800 million Mars mission.

“The Final Cut Pro system ran on Pinnacle CinéWave hardware on a G5,” she says. “Pinnacle allowed us to digitize footage from the original HD tapes at an uncompressed 1080i HD resolution. We were amazed at the color correction and compositing tools we had at our disposal with Final Cut Pro.”

What Color the Skies of Mars?

When images from a robotic rover come back to NASA in black-and-white 3D, how do you convert them to the actual landscape and color of Mars and its skies?

First you work with a director — Kimm — who’s a stickler for accuracy and who works closely with NASA scientists to stay true to the color of Mars’ dirt and the characteristics of the planet’s sky.

Then you find a talented graphic designer and animator — Joe Whiteis — who can convert the strings of numbers that come in from the Mars rovers to scenes of craters, rocks and landscapes — and then animate them with basic 3D camera moves.

Craters from Raw Data

Once Whiteis created a camera setup in Cinema 4D on his Power Mac G5, he’d work with the raw data that came in from the rovers. He’d light and colorize it in Photoshop and use Cinema 42 to build interesting camera moves that fit the time needed to fill for the voice over.

“If we needed a slow pan on something, we were able to build the cuts and have it rendered unbelievably fast,” he says. “I remember setting up my renders and going for coffee. When I returned 20 minutes later, I expected to have a good guestimate of how long the renders were going to take. But they were all done. That blew me away. The combination of the software and hardware made it really flexible for us to consider a lot of variations, change a move or tweak something four or five times instead of just once.

“With the Mac and software, I can do the stuff I did on my Flame probably five times faster. And I can still afford to buy a house and not have to pre-donate my body to science.”

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