Side-By-Side Top-and-Bottom 3D

Side-By-Side Frame Compatible 3D

In the case of the Side-by-Side, Frame Compatible 3D or what is also called Side-by-Side (Half) 3D, each frame has the same dimension as a regular 2D HD frame but each sub-frame is downsampled to reduce the horizontal resolution by half. As a result, in the case of 720p side-by-side 3D (ESPN uses 720p Side-by-Side 3D at 60fps for their 3D Channel), each sub-frame is downscaled from 1280×720 to 640×720 resolution (downscaled from 1920×1080 to 960×1080 in the case of 1080p content) and then the left and right eye sub-frames are combined to produce a single Frame Compatible Side-by-Side 3D frame.

Each frame of side-by-side 3D consists of a horizonatally scaled combination of the frames for the left and right eye.

Top-and-Bottom Frame Compatible 3D

Top-and-Bottom (or Over-Under) Frame Compatible 3D works in exactly the same way, except that the halving of resolution of each sub-frame is in the vertical dimension. So a 1080p video feed (1920×1080) formatted using Top-and-Bottom Frame Compatible 3D will consist of two vertically stacked sub-frames, each having a resolution of 1920×540 pixels.

The Top and Bottom or Over-Under 3D format consists of a single 1080p (or 720p) frame consisting of vertically stacked sub-frames for the left and right eye, each possessing half the full HD resolution along the vertical axis