My Gopro 3+ Black 180 degree stereo rig

After some research I found a company that makes replacement lens mounts for the gopro that can take rear mounted filters. It also has longer threads that will properly engage the theia lens.

http://peauproductions.com/store/index. ... th=192_193

Will see in a week if this is a solution.

So I tried the Theia TY180IR lenses.

They don't seem to be very widely produced, as I have #73, #74. They are not consistant, with clearly different glue quality looking into the front of the lenses. The body is totally plastic, and the finish scuffs easily. They also are not M12 but CS mount, and their threads barely reach the gopro's normal threads.

Worst of all, though not Theia's fault. Gopro doesn't have an IR filter over the sensor, and these lenses are not IR CUT, so they are totally unusable.

Right now I am ordering two back-bone kits with include IR filters and CS mounts, so hopefully these lenses will work that way. Still very frustrating that gopro cuts costs by putting the IR inside the optics.

"TomCHall" wrote:
So I tried the Theia TY180IR lenses.

They don't seem to be very widely produced, as I have #73, #74. They are not consistant, with clearly different glue quality looking into the front of the lenses. The body is totally plastic, and the finish scuffs easily. They also are not M12 but CS mount, and their threads barely reach the gopro's normal threads.

Worst of all, though not Theia's fault. Gopro doesn't have an IR filter over the sensor, and these lenses are not IR CUT, so they are totally unusable.

Right now I am ordering two back-bone kits with include IR filters and CS mounts, so hopefully these lenses will work that way. Still very frustrating that gopro cuts costs by putting the IR inside the optics.

That is really strange. On their site they definitely say they are M12 and "IR corrected". "day/night" corrected
http://www.theiatech.com/ty180ir/
and Bhvideo list them as IR corrected too. Maybe they mean focus corrected for IR illumination or something.

But here they say -- http://www.iscwest.com/en/Exhibitors/50 ... sheye-Lens ... "A mount with IR cut switcher is also available." Beats me. However I would look forward to seeing some of your results with the IR filter if possible.

Things dont look very promising for hardware sync for regular Gopro 4s or its successor.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/360.vid ... 721448374/

Someone asks for sync help with multiple Gopro 4s

Jim Geduldick, Photo Marketing Manager at Gopro implies that 3d sync will be for their (expensive) mulitcamera arrays only -- ie. their Gopro Odyssey array for Google Jump processing platform to start with and then their 360 2D array:

Your looking for sync which is not capable outside our internal technology. Our forthcoming rigs will have sync but not for splitting arrays up. Arrays are very tricky and require both hardware and firmware to work correctly.

Then there are more exchanges like this about Gopro actively discouraging hacking efforts:

"Tom C. Hall autoexec.ash was disabled in the latest firmware. Refusal to provide pinout information when asked. Lack of exposure lock, No sdk to control the cameras configuration over USB.

It easy to understand why. Gopro doesn't want to deal with some dentist complaining about how they set their camera in a weird way in the menus while hunting lions in zimbabwe.

Gopros are consumer/prosumer products. Anything outside of that the company actively tries to squash"

Has anyone shot 180 degree 3D at 60fps? Without perfect synchronization, I'd assume, the higher the framerate, the less noticeable any temporal offset between the two cameras would be.

The worst it could be for two cams both shooting 60fps is if they were exactly 1/120th off, right? Is this something that's perceivable with typical video? How fast would things need to be moving before a framerate like 60 is jarring or causes headaches?

With GoPro thw faster the frame rate the more noticable the rolling shutter.
No free lunches

Hi all,
Thanks for the great information. I'm designing and specifying a 3D 360 rig, which I'll use to make a short film.

My plan is to:

1. Construct it out of laser cut acrylic (whatever I end up making I'll upload the plans).
2. Use six GoPro 3+ and the MewPro Genlock solution
3. Use fish eye lenses

...This is the sort of level I can handle with my budget.

I have a ton of questions (I'm currently laying out an arrangement of gopros in 3d, and yep, I'm seeing the issues faced), but firstly fundamentally:

q1. I was planning on making something similar to the iZugar 3D 360 rig, i.e. an equilateral triangle with three stereo pairs. But then I've just seen that crazy Omnipolar style rig, like the iximage ones. Two of these back-to-back could cover 360 in 3D. I'll be shooting a mixture of people and buildings. Does anyone have a view on equilateral stereo vs omnipolar stereo?

Alternatively, maybe the shed load of the Xiaomi + j1vvy's rig (/Samsung Beyond) route would be better for the budget, but it just seems like so much stitching and file wrangling would be involved! (And of course no genlock)

I'd really appreciate any thoughts/comments on this!

I think 6 Gopro 3+ Black + Mewpro + 220 lenses has good potential for 3d 360 capture. The Mewpro dongle for the slave cameras is pretty large though so maybe this is a problem for a compact rig. The omnipolar up/down idea has issues -- a lot of parallax between the up/down cameras. Also Mewpro will sync them all exposure wise -- so up will be overexposed with normal exposure for down often.

I want to test a 6 camera rig, currently only have 4 GoPro with 185° lenses. But I think that 8 or 10 cameras will give a better stereo because of the change in IP when shifting from the center of a pair of lenses to their edges.

6 cameras mean each is capturing 60° for each eye.
If the lenses are 65mm apart at the center then the 30° to each side of the lenses will look like 56mm apart.
Using more lenses will smooth this out this better.

Hi, everyone.

I've been following all of your posts here for the past few months. Super helpful! I've been toying around with a pair of Sony HDR-AS15 ActionCams to try out a 170° 3D video with a pretty hacked together tripod and mount rig. I want to start really small to practice and understand the basics all the way from recording videos up to post production.

The biggest problem I have is in post production. I'm not exactly sure how the videos should be vertically and horizontally aligned?

I'm using After Affects/Premiere Pro. The first thing I do is put the first video on top of the second video, put the first video's opacity to 50%, then I try to manually align the first video to the second video. Should all corners of objects in the video be perfectly-aligned vertically with each other? Or are there the corners of the objects are a little higher/lower than each other naturally?

For example, in this stereoscopic analglyph photo from this thread: http://i.imgur.com/C7CGaNU.jpg
But you can clearly see here that the objects are not vertically aligned: http://i.imgur.com/sYrzJAP.jpg

Do I mainly focus on vertically aligning the objects in the center of my video, and let everything else fall into place?

And horizontal aligning, if I perfectly align an object horizontally, that means both eyes are looking perfectly straight, correct? So would I perfectly align the furthest objects (trees, hills, etc.), or do I perfectly align the closest objects (the people I'm filming about 5-10 feet in front of the camera)? If I perfectly align something in between furthest and closest, that means the closer objects would "pop out" of the screen, right? Which is bad if that object goes off screen?

Right now, the videos I'm outputting are REALLY uncomfortable to watch, like my eyes are not naturally focusing on stuff. I could make the 3D work, but I have to strain myself to get it working and that can't be any good for the eyes. :lol:

Here is one of my example uncomfortable videos (for this particular video, I used HitFilm 3 Express for editing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAqv6sbdXDk