Editor's Note: This month we have two more contributions from Elliott Swanson: Pictures of his DigiSnap Stereo Slave setup and a stereo pair of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry made from two frames from the DVD version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

April 2004 Edition

By Elliott Swanson

Arrangements of the DigiSnap Stereo slave for Nikon cameras, and the Harbortronics/Bogen camera bar. Nikon 990 cameras used, with Raynox .7 wide angle adapters. Harbortronics may be contacted at www.harbortronics.com (Located in Gig Harbor.)

I took the two frame captures from the supplemental disc of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as it was playing on my computer. It begins with the same scene used in the actual film where the camera does an aerial sweep to the left around Hogwarts at night, and then goes in through the window at the left (back) of the dining room. There was a lot of horizontal movement, but unfortunately, the camera was zooming in and rotating its angle of view constantly. So I had to undo all that. Then I had to reconstruct the background to repair the angle flaws introduced by the rotational error. The image had to be resized to undo the zoom, as well as being un-rotated overall, and free transform distorted to correct the vertical structure angles. Then I had to fix individual areas where there were problems such as lights on in one frame and off in the second, and fix mismatched objects through moving areas from one image to the other and running Gaussian blurs where I needed to obscure detail. Lastly, I had to do a lot of work with brightening and contrast to make the castle visible. It's actually a night time scene. The high resolution version is really beautiful.

Copyright 2003 Warner Brothers