In this tutorial I will show you how to get a better depth perception with anaglyph stereo.
The whole trick is that your audience will never watch your anaglyph movie without the appropriate glasses.
So the only thing that counts is what your viewers will see through their glasses.
Basically you just have to do a color correction with your glasses on and keep adjusting your image until it looks great in anaglyph.
It isn't important how your movie looks without the glasses! (Actually, it will look really awful.)
But it's still hard to adjust the colors and still keep the stereo effect. So here is the trick:
The red color gives your brain the greatest headache. So the best thing is to convert
red into black/grey – just like it would appear in black and white.
Therefore you simply use the following settings for your left eye:
Red-Red: 0 %
Red-Green: 70 %
Red-Blue: 30 %
One problem is that the right eye (cyan) gets the color information of two channels, making the image clearer and brighter.
That's why you want to add a little gamma correction to your left eye, to equalize the brightness.
By the way: Our eyes are more sensitive to brightness distinctions than to differences in color.
To adjust the brightness you choose the “levels” tool (Tonwertkorrektur in German) and adjust the gamma there.
I was using 1,2. Others (from 3dtv.at, for example) are recommending 1,5. I think it pretty much relies on your material.
Just make sure your image doesn't get a violet or red cast. You should play around with all values to enhance your stereoscopic impression.
For example, I've used the following settings on Broken to get to my final anaglyph version:
Left stream:
Right stream:
To get this:
But, when I made this tutorial I found out that my movie doesn't need a gamma correction on the red eye.
A gamma correction with the same values on both eyes - so the image just gets brighter - works better.
This way I don't get the slight violet cast:
Of course the color representation of these versions doesn't get much better than the standard anaglyph.
But the stereoscopic experience improves, because there is less retinal rivalry. So the audience can concentrate more on your story.
New
My friend and workmate David Shelton, who runs 3dHippie's Blog, has now published a Plug-in for After Effects (and Flash), which uses the optimisation algorithm of Peter Wimmer from 3dtv.at!
The best anaglyph you can get!
Get the Plug-In here, and more information about it here!
Related links:
3dtv.at - A comparison between the different anaglyph methods; e.g. grey, color and half-color anaglyphs. This site is great!
3drevolution.com - Scroll down for some anaglyph color correction examples of Spy Kids 3D!
"Create optimized anaglyph in After Effects" by Stefan D. Voigt is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Comments
Now, a little question: I have some mpeg4 h.263 with anaglyph, but if I use the red-blue glasses I cannot see a good 3D effect. Can I correct the colors of an anaglyphed video?
Thanks a lot!
you can try, but it won't be satisfying.
Have you tried red-cyan glasses instead of red-blue ones?
I have shared on the community forum but it seems that I am the only one experiencing this issue and it's driving me mad
Cheers
what do you mean with feedbacks?
Replies by visitors?
I am using Chrono Comments for this website and I don't have troubles so far.
Except from spasmodic spam :D
Thanks a lot, but very-very-lot!!
Unfortunately, there are no really good color correction tools built-in in After Effects.
You could try using the Channel Mixer and reduce the green-green values.
green + blue = cyan
therefore:
cyan - green = blue
Maybe this could transfer your red-cyan anaglyph into a red-blue one and give you some better results.
Quick question you may be able to help me out with. I am looking for the best way to render anaglyph video footage from AE, but none of the codecs seem to keep the vivid colors I need. Any suggestions?
unfortunately there is no good codec for rendering anaglyph pictures.
I would recommend you to render a side by side or vertical stacked view with After Effects.
After that you'll put the stacked view into the stereoscopic player, which gives you a really nice anaglyph.
Here's the link: http://3dtv.at/Downloads/Index_de.aspx
Thanks!
This example of you looks great a little further away from the screen.
You should consider 'roundness' for your images.
http://nzphoto.tripod.com/3d/315roundness.html
I am currently figuring out how roundness works and how I can implement it into my rig.
The link you posted looks very great! Many thanks for the information! You're awesome! ;D
Maybe I will find a solution there :)
best regards,
Stefan
I thought this would be more and more supported with every update!
And now they kicked it?!
Please write an email to David Shelton about this: shelton.david(at)yahoo.de
Maybe he can adjust his filter, so it works in the Adobe CS6 Suite.
Still, can't believe this!