(At the Movies) 3D in AE

[Kevin Camp]

ideally you’d have a two cameras shooting the shot, but offset by horizontally by about the distance between two eyes (i’m sure there is a magic number for this).

the two shots then get combined and then there is some form of glasses that separate the combined image so that the left eye will see the footage from the left camera and the right eye sees the footage from the right camera.

however there are some ways to fake it (to a certain degree), check out the three part ae tutorial here:

https://vimeo.com/10893465

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Clint Milner]

Hi Kevin,

Yeah, I was kind of thinking about that… In particular I was thinking of Andrew Kramer’s SureTarget plugin, but instead of having one camera, having two, side-by-side.

Then you could render out the comp using each camera and then blend the resulting files together… but I’m sure there’s more science behind it.

Also, how do they do the 3-D (like at the movie theater) that isn’t the old-school blue and red?

Thanks,
Clint

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[Kevin Camp]

i think a lot of the current movies are using polarized glasses to separate the left and right images. there are other technologies out there but most of them have the same concept of two image combined into one, then separated by glasses.

your idea with two 3d cameras will work. it’s a matter of getting the distance between them set up correctly. possibly a little tweaking of the point of interests, but i’m not sure.

for testing purposes in ae, i think i’d go with the red/blue cardboard glasses. they are cheap and easy to find, and you can easily work with ae’s 3d glasses effect for test.

if you needed to deliver another format, then you could still use the renders from each camera, they would just need to be combined in a different way.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW