Manual Stereo Alignment

Even if the cameras are mechanically aligned on set, additional alignment will be required in post-production unless you use a very high quality rig. This tutorial shows a simple way to set up SynthEyes to do this manually; not only does it get the job done, but it is rather informative as well.

Once you understand what this process does, you can proceed to see how to use an alignment script to do it quickly and accurately.

Notes:

  1. The tutorial is 8:08/20.5 MB. You can download the mp4 by right-clicking this link: ManuStAlign.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 here 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! For this footage, there was an alignment mask only on one viewfinder, the other was "eyeballed."
  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.