A lot of us have at home 2D video archive. Recordings from holidays, birthday parties etc. Would it be possible to convert them to 3D? The answer is: Yes, it would.
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Easily make your 3D movies This article is based on a suggestion of our reader Radek Skačík. We have discussed it with him and then make a lot of experiments. Then we decided to bring this idea to you.
A little bit of theory
Videorecording usually shows a movement. Let's say it's a ball in the front flying to the right.
It means that when you watch the film, then you can see, that on every field is the ball a little bit more shifted to the right - as you can see on the picture here.
And now imagine this: Take the red component from the first field and blend it with the red/green components from the second one - and use the new picture as first field of a new video. Then do the same for the second and third field, third and fourth ones... What will you get?
When you use anaglyph glasses your right eye can see the red component of the image (now the "older" field where the ball is more to the left) and your left eye green/blue component (the ball more to the right). But this - this is the principle of 3D pictures in anaglyph!
Just do it
We've done a few tests and selected the software, which is free and can do the process described above automatically. It's name is Zwei-Stein and you can download it
from this page. (You can find this link on our
download page as well - on this page we update the link if necessary). Install it and run it.
(Thanks to new version of 3DJournal software you can convert 2D movies to 3D more easily than before - read more about 3D movies in 3DJournal in
this article.)
Now click with the right mouse button to the text Right click here to import media clip. Choose Import media clip and load your recording. Then click to the same place once again and load the recording again.
Click to the first recording and use the button Add Video Effect - select Basic Effects - Mapper. Set Map Green and Map Blue to 0, upper bar of Map Opacity set to 0.5.
Click to the second movie and Add Video Effect - Basic Effects - Mapper. Set Map Red to 0.
Now shift the first video a little bit to the right (one field or more - you can experiment). You can see the final video in the preview window on the right side of the software window. To show different part of the clip just use the bar obove the clips.
Finished video can be saved by File - Export menu.
The best 3D videos
It's not everytime true that there is only one moving object on the movie and that it moves only to the right.
Main object can move to the left, then to the right, down, up... Then it's necessary to set the color filters differently for different parts of the movie - sometimes you will take the red color from earlier fields, sometimes from the later ones (and green/blue from the other ones).
Sometimes it will be even impossible to convert your video to 3D. But often can be usefull when you do a few experimets.
The 3D video here is created using opacity - not by adding colors - and the video can be quite dark. If you want to change it then use a video editing software to change brightness and saturation. You can change source clips or 3D video as well. And you can create 3D movie for Stereoscopic Player as well - similarly as described in
this article about recording of 3D movies .
(3DJournal)
