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Basics of 3-D Camera Rigs
Different hardware and software manufacturers have their own terminologies, technologies, and viewpoints; here’s ours.
To make stereo movies, we need two cameras. They get mounted on some sort of a rig, which holds the two cameras in place at some specific relationship to one another. You can then mount that rig on a tripod, a dolly, a crane, whatever, that carries the two cameras around as a unit.
The two cameras must be matched to one another in several ways in order to be usable:
- Same overall image aspect ratio
- Same field of view
- Same frame rate and synchronization
- Same lens distortion (typically none)
- Same overall orientation (geometric alignment)
- Matching color and brightness grading
Most of these should be fairly obvious. Many can be manipulated in post, and SynthEyes is designed to help you achieve the required matching, even from very low- tech rigs.
Even the simplest rig will require matching work in post-production. It is not possible to bolt two cameras together, even with any kind of mechanical alignment feature, and have the cameras be optically aligned. Cameras are not manufactured to be repeatable in this way; the circuit board and chip-in-socket alignment within the camera is not sufficiently accurate or repeatable between cameras to be directly useful.
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