We don't mean those rather annoying wiggle 3-D images like this:-
The AVI video files produced by the Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3 stereo camera have a proprietary format 3D-AVI which used to be readable by the MyFinePix Studio app, but this is no longer available. These files can now be read by StereoMovie Maker, but only after ffdshow has been installed. StereoMovie Maker can then save a normal side-by-side AVI file which can be read by other apps. This file can be uploaded to the excellent on-line converter cloudconvert to create a GIF. Some other GIF converters can't read AVI files, or can only convert small files. Adobe Express reduces the image width and height during conversion.
The AVI files from the W3 are in 720p 1280 × 720 format but show as 1240 × 720 when loaded into StereoMovie Maker. This is because SMM has performed auto-alignment. The original size can be restored by Adjust→Alignment(Reset).
A GIF downloaded from cloudconvert can be viewed on Windows 10 in the Photos app. The window size can be reduced to allow comfortable parallel viewing. For projection at the Sydney Stereo Camera Club, a GIF needs to be 2 × 1920 × 1080 so that it fills the virtual screen when displayed at full size. This can be achieved by resizing an AVI when saving from SMM, or resizing after loading into cloudconvert. The size and quality of the GIF is comparable whichever method is used. Resizing in cloudconvert is more flexible: it can convert an auto-aligned 2 × 1240 × 720 AVI to 2 × 1920 × 1080 by padding, cropping, or scaling.
To prevent visible jumping when the GIF loops, the first and last frames should be as similar as possible. An AVI can be trimmed in SMM to achieve this by using Frame→Set displayed-frame to start frame and Frame→Set displayed-frame to end frame on selected frames.
It is highly recommended that the camera is mounted on a tripod when recording an AVI file, as was done with the above video. Handheld video is likely to show disconcerting wobble:-
ffmpeg -i DSCF0037SBS_l.AVI -vf deshake output_l.avi
UPDATE
A similar result can be achived with the align_image_stack tool included with Open Source panorama software Hugin. It is run on each series of jpeg images extracted from the left and right videos:-
align_image_stack -a aligned -C --use-given-order *.jpg
Apart from being free (a PTGui license for personal use costs $275), this has the great advantage that the option -C—Auto crop the image to the area covered by all images removes the need to crop the moving borders which was necessary with PTGui. It's not easy to determine the crop area either by eye or automatically by a Python script. Using align_image_stack, steps 2-6 can be performed with a single Python script.
The align_image_stack tool also has options -S—Assume stereo images and -A—Align stereo window but these did not effectively align side-by-side images for stabilisation. Here is the stabilised result from using align_image_stack:-
The first and last frames of a GIF can be made identical by appending a series of frames in reverse order to the original frames. This will only work for subjects without strong directional movement between static first and last original frames, for example:-
Suitable subjects with similar first and last frames are flaming candles, fountains, and waterfalls. Subjects can have matching first and last frames when they are in cyclical motion, like turntables, swings, roundabouts, and treadmills.
There are some amazingly detailed 3D models available on the web, for example: these from Sketchfab. On Windows 10, they can be viewed with Microsoft 3D Viewer, which has its own library of 3D models.
Christopher B. Jones 2022-12-14