A couple of months ago, we got everyone over at Phenomblue one of the new Flip Mino HD cameras. After spending a fair amount of time watching Avatar along with all the behind the scenes interviews I got the idea to build my own 3d camera using a couple Flip Mino HDs. This is nothing new in that people have been mounting two cameras to some sort of custom rig to create the 3d effect for a while now. What I thought was interesting about the flips was that for a few hundred dollars, your average video enthusiast with a little disposable income could create their own 3d cameras.

The Flip rig definitely has some limitations in that you don't have any kind of varying focal length to give you a depth of field effect and for the most part, what you see is what you get with the flip cameras. The camera can be a little shaky since there is no stabilizer in the cameras however, going out and shooting everyday things like a sporting event, walking around downtown or even cooking dinner, as you can see in the video bellow, has enough of an interesting feel to make it worthwhile. The Flip Mino HD also shoots at 1280 X 720 (as you can see in both videos shown here). This gives you a nice advantage when you want to create a standard def video in that you can play with what part of the videos are in focus and what parts of the video stick out or sink into the screen. We'll look at this in a later post.

As far as building your own 3d camera there are many different ways to go about it. In my case I was able to have a metal handheld mount fabricated so I could easily walk around with the rig but something as simple as a piece of wood or metal attached to a tripod with a couple holes four mounting bolts to go through would work just fine as you can see in this example of from Weber State University with the rig they built using Kodak Zx1 Digital Camcorders. If you are feeling really techy, you can head over to Evan Johnston's site and see how he created a 3d camera using Silverlight and 2 web cameras and a kleenex box.

Once you have created your own 3d rig, processing the video you shoot is surprisingly simple. In an upcoming post I'll be showing just how easy it is.