Here's an option that's easy and cheap. Very exciting, I'll explain it.
Step #1: Go to the TriDef website.
http://www.tridef.com/
Step #2: Buy the TriDef 3d experience.
It'll cost you $50.00.
Step #3: Find or buy some red-blue anaglyph 3d glasses.
Step #4: Take your video, any video, and play it in anaglyph format with Tridef.
Ta-da! Your video is now in 3d!
TriDef is one of those conversion systems that analyzes the areas of your video and determines what is in front of what, then uses that data to create two tracks and then convert them into one anaglyph video. All in real time. Which is pretty damn impressive, although it's not as good quality as if the video had actually been shot in 3d.
Plus anaglyph format sucks. So here's a procedure for going from TriDef's 2d -> 3d conversion to a nicer format, ColorCode.
ColorCode, incidentally, is the format used in the 2009 Superbowl. It's a good format in that it looks almost like normal video without glasses, but with the ColorCode glasses, it looks 3d - and with no loss of the color spectrum!
So here's phase 2 of my 3d conversion method:
Step #1: Download the ColorCode 3d software if you want ColorCode 3d instead of crummy red-blue anaglyph.
http://web.mac.com/csvendb/APO/Software.html
Step #2: Get some free ColorCode glasses if you didn't do so at your local grocery store before the aforementioned Superbowl. The ColorCode website will send you a few free by mail if you fill out a form.
Step #3: Take your video and display it in TriDef in the parallel screen mode or whatever it's called, the one where you get two video tracks out of the one you started with, side by side.
Step #4: Use FRAPS or some other screen video recorder app (pick your fave) to record your screen as the video is playing. Make sure you capture both the left and right video streams.
Step #5: Go into a video editor and crop the two tracks carefully down to the right size.
Step #6: Run them through the ColorCode software or any app that converts two tracks into one 3d track (in any format you prefer)
And then you can enjoy your awesome video in ColorCode 3d or any other 3d format you choose.
Alternatively, you can do all of this in one step, by handing your 2d video to me, and paying me a few dollars, and asking me to convert it to ColorCode for you. Just a thought. ;)
For better quality 3d than Tridef can generate artificially, you can use some kind of camcorder addon for video that is live-action:
http://www.stereo3d.com/vidrec.htm
And render two separate passes in your 3d app of choice for CG effects shots, from two slightly offset virtual cameras.
For compositing shots, you can either composite each shot twice, one for each eye, or run it through the Tridef method. The latter is not ideal, but it'll seem pretty tempting when the alternative is hours of extra rotoscoping and motion tracking.
Anyway, just thought you might like to know.
Alternate Method
The 2D to 3D Realtime Video Conversion Script for Avisynth v0.3 was designed to be used for realtime conversion, but it can as well be used to get a permanent video converted from 2D to 3D. Sometimes you might just want to have a separate video already converted or your PC might for example not being able to handle 1080p content in real time. An example for converted video is the 1080p Avatar Trailer that you can download from the links below, the video file was just converted with the script so you can see what it is capable of. Just don’t forget that here I’m talking about automated 2D to 3D conversion which can usually provide good results, but they are not as good as what you’ll get from a video shot in Stereoscopic 3D mode. In order to convert videos to 3D with a file output, besides the AivSynth script you’ll also need to download the free video editor VirtualDub along with some codecs that are needed to handle the video and audio output. A good example for that would be Xvid for video and LAME MP3 for audio, but others might as well do… just have in mind that I’m talking about encoding here and not just about being able to decode these formats.
You need to open VirtualDub and then Open as a video file the 2D to 3D AVS script instead of directly opening the video file you’ll be converting, don’t worry, the AviSynt script will do what is needed and will just pass video that VirtualDub can interpret. Then Open the Video meny, make sure that Full Processing mode is selected (on by default) and Open up the Compression menu, where you’ll see a list of compatible codecs installed on your PC. You can choose Xvid MPEG4 Codec and Configure it to use Single pass quality based encoding with a Quantizer of 4 in order to have a good ratio between compression size and image quality.
Recompressing the audio is optional, but you’d need to do it as otherwise the file has PCM audio that just makes the size of the file too big. In this case you need to open the Audio menu, select the Full Processing Mode (here it is not on by default) and choose the Compression option. Again you’ll see a list of installed and supported audio codecs, here MP3 is just fine for Stereo output and you can choose 128Kbps for good enough quality and small file size.
What you need to do now is just save the output file as Avi and the recompression of the video will begin, the time it can take varies depending on a lot of factors for example if you are using a single or multi-core CPU, what it the size and length of the video etc. Here you just need to wait a bit for the processing to finish and after that you’ll be ready to play your converted video file directly in the stereoscopic player without the need to go trough the AviSynth script for realtime conversion. So now back to the Full HD 1080p teaser as an example that I’ve converted using my conversion script and VirtualDub, the file is about 170MB…
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