Converting anaglyph 3D movies to full color 3D!

[Jsmith82]

Stumbling around the interwebs the other day I came across a converted version of House of Wax (1953 version), done by a single guy for his own enjoyment. This got the ol' brain wheels turning and prompted me to start searching just how the heck he did it, or what options someone like myself would have if I ever wanted to attempt something similar, to take and old green / magenta, red / cyan, anaglyph 3d movies and somehow convert them into a full color presentation.

Low and behold, somebody wrote a process and a script to do just that.

My first thought was legalities - I'm not keen on media theft. This was addressed as follows, which also made me think this would be neat to share here on the forum:

Courts have strongly affirmed that we can watch them any way we choose, in private, whether we watch standing on our head, projected on a fishbowl, reflected off the water in our toilet, or even in full color 3D! In other words, if we have a gadget at home that translates anaglyph movies into full color and we use it solely to privately watch the legitimate 3D movies we own, we’re well within our legal rights.

That got me on board

Here is the link to the site and explanation / directions: click here

This works 2 different ways, the lesser not recommended way is to simply have a copy of the anaglyph dvd, or blu-ray. The better way is to have the anaglyph copy as well as the 2d copy - with this method you already have one eyes perspective in full color, the coversion on the other eye will be less apparent and end up looking better.

I'm still reading up but from what I can gather, the script first takes into consideration what you're providing for each eye, whether either is the 2d original. You then have ghost adjustments for the anaglyph colors. The color version of the film is now blended with the anaglyph by shrinking the color version down then restoring it followed by tweaking saturation, contrast, brightness. From there the conversion process begins.

The resulting product is either a top / bottom, or side / side single video format (your choice), IN COLOR AND NOT ANAGLYPH, that a 3DTV can process. Obviously you wont have the extreme quality of BR3D however a couple of posted examples really looked nice when taken from Blu-Ray copies of the films - here is an example snap of Jackass 3D converted via this process:


I'll have to beef up the memory on my home computer but everything needed is freeware so this costs nothing but your time - I'll be trying it very soon - sounds like a fun way to restore some old classics for personal enjoyment and to add a couple exclusive titles to ones own collection.

Just thought I'd share.