hulger.org

Read on to see how we made the 3D movies on HULGER.TV

We shot the 3D footage using these identical Sanyo Xacti HD (VPC-HD2) video cameras. It is important to use exactly the same model so that the image quality is an accurate mirror as possible so there’s nothing to tell the brain that what you’re seeing with each eye is not ‘real’.

When filming each sequence a click of the fingers in front of both cameras then made it easy to sync the two sequences together in the edit. Each clip needs to run in precise parallel as again the brain needs to ‘believe’.

We used After Effects to composite the two clips together. I’m not sure what other software would allow this but I’m sure there are many examples (please comment if you can suggest one). The size of the videos could have been bigger but after some tests it seemed that putting the clips side by side in a 640 X 360 frame worked best (half resolution of the 1080 X 720 res of the camera). It took a bit of playing around to work out what each eye should see for the optimum effect. The frame you see is a crop of the original frame and this allowed some scope to find the optimum balance between what the left eye and right eye should see.

Vimeo accepts different resolutions, although you need to edit the embed code if you want it to play back at the right size. It’s obvious enough where you need to make those changes in the code.

The card stops each eye seeing the other frame so after a while the eyes start to think they’re seeing true 3D.

You have to focus beyond the screen to get the effect. The eyes start to wander and usually fall onto references in each of the frames which start to tell the brain it’s seeing a real scene, despite it being presented on flat screen.

The effect would be stronger with a medium format lupe but it’s a bit of a hassle and cost for a one off 3D hit.

We’ve also considered recording the 3D audio environment for full sensory immersion. All we’d need then is a scratch & sniff card to evoke the olfactory ambiance of the scene.

The short demo video and the 3D videos can be seen at their optimum size at HULGER.TV

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 4:56 am and is filed under HULGER*STUFF, ON*SHOW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.