Lately there is a lot of talk about 3D televisions that will allow you to watch movies like Avatar even at home. Obviously these televisions are already very expensive in the face of a zero content offer so before I can talk about it I think it will still take a few years.
In the meantime, the most curious could try to make a 3D video to be seen with red / blue glasses on normal television, using any film or movie.
Clearly you shouldn't expect an Avatar-style effect and you have to take this more as a pastime than a real video editing job.
The results vary greatly depending on the 2D video used and the conversion, almost automatic, gives the idea of 3D but can never be comparable to that of a cinema.
Searching Wikipedia for three-dimensional cinema you can read the technical detail of how it works.
In summary, the techniques for creating 3D films are different, what interests us is the anaglyph .
This cinematographic technique is the oldest and simplest, the only one possible for ordinary mortals, to create a 3D video on a home PC with intuitive programs, to be seen also on normal TVs with simple paper glasses with red / cyan lenses. It is a matter of creating a stereoscopic film by filtering two parallel images, one colored red, the other blue.
The effect is poor from the point of view of the colors which will be very opaque and not very defined.
Perhaps some will remember the Spy Kids 3D or Nightmare 5 movie that had the latest 3D piece and used anaglyph.
The other two modern techniques with which today's three-dimensional films are made are those with polarized light that use more solid glasses.
The English Wikipedia page also refers to a 3D video technique without glasses.
Returning to our home and amateur environment instead we see how to create a 3D video by converting a 2d video with the basic anaglyph technique, to be seen on normal TV screens or monitors, using those blue and red lens glasses that are easily found or can be found. build at home.
The easiest to use program is called 3DCombine which unfortunately can only be used for free for 15 days.
This program does not integrate the necessary Divx codecs; see also where to download the codecs useful for viewing each video and film on the computer.
First of all, you have to prepare the video using AviDemux, a free program already reported about video editing.
The 2D video to be converted must be of Xvid format, with MP3 Lame audio, with Stereo Filter.
Once 3DCombine is open, go to the menu on the bottom left and press the button to open the 2D video by choosing the file from your computer just edited with AvideMux.
At the top, from the Video menu, choose the 2D to 3D (Auto) option.
Then press on Open Output File and give a name to the new video converted to 3D choosing where to save it, on Depth effec t, leave at 2.50, as 3D format choose Anaglyph, save also the audio, finally on Post Processing leave 1.
After pressing the Convert button, select the external codecs as Audio compression and choose the MP3 (MPEG Layer-3) from the list and the Divx 6.8.5 codec as the video.
In the next window you must choose the bitrate at a value of 3000 .
After these small configurations, the normal video conversion will start and the same video will be saved with the 3D display .
The creation time varies according to the length of the video, the quality instead is what it is, you have to be satisfied.
Combine3D also works to convert images and photos with 3D effect .
To see it as if you were in the cinema, you have to remedy the glasses with blue and red plasticized lenses .
On YouTube, looking for videos with the key " yt3d: enable = true " you will find some 3D videos that represent tests of the future YouTube player.
Other more complex programs (not free of charge) to create the 3D movie even using the holiday movie taken with the video camera or mobile phone, are Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas and Powerlink Power Director.
If you have better and more satisfying methods for this to create three-dimensional videos, let us know.
