Stereo Alignment Script

This tutorial shows how to use a SynthEyes script to quickly and accurately align the two halves of a stereo shot. The script automates the process described in the prior manual alignment tutorial, so you should watch that tutorial first.

The script can be run repeatedly to create animated follow-convergence in post. That may create animated zooms ---- if you need to avoid that, you should remove the keying on the image preprocessor Delta Zoom channels, replacing the animation with a constant value that is the maximum of the keys. Then re-run the script on each keyed frame.

Note: the "Stereo 2-D Alignment" script is contained in, and requires, SynthEyes 2008.1.1027 or later (2008.1.0027 for demo).

Notes:

  1. The tutorial is 5:00/11 MB. You can download the mp4 by right-clicking this link: AlignScript.mp4.
  2. How are we able to estimate the lens field of view? We've tracked some (monocular) footage already!
  3. Note that the tutorial does not consider lens distortion. If you run the camera well away from the widest zoom setting, that should be OK. Otherwise, you will need to calibrate each camera separately and feed those values in as well (on the Image Preprocessor's Lens tab).
  4. The alignment process sacrifices some image quality (ie via the zoom factor). To minimize the quality loss, do a better alignment job on set!
  5. All tutorials and images (c)2009 Andersson Technologies LLC, not for re-distribution or usage other than with SynthEyes.
  6. Everything is done and shown real-time on an 8-core (16-thread) 2009 Mac Pro running 64-bit Windows Vista. The process is the same in OSX.