Anaglyph Movies
As hard as Anaglyph stills are to capture and produce, Anaglyph movies offer the same difficulties as well as a host of additional challenges.
First, acquiring two movie cameras is usually more expensive than
purchasing
two still
cameras. Though it is possible to capture an anaglyph using one
video camera and a beam-splitter, the resolution of camcorders is generally low enough
to require separate devices for capturing the two views. Secondly,
intermediate video products produced at each stage can be quite large.
Still images are on the order of a few megabytes. Videos are often sized
closer to the gigabyte range and beyond even with compression. This is compounded when
you consider the number of steps that the source videos need to undergo before
arriving as the final product you see.
Consider the following. Two separate video sources must be captured and transferred to a computer. Each source must first be deinterlaced. The results must be combined into one Anaglyph video. Sound from one or both video sources must be added to the movie. The final video is then scaled down and converted to a web friendly format before uploading to an Internet site. Compression can be used, but only at the highest quality settings, or the anaglyph will not be convincing. Remember, this technique relies on precise coloring and displacement of two blended frames.