This is a 3D rig I built for Vuzix (formerly Icuiti). It consists essentially of two $280 Canon Zr800 camcorders, mounted on a piece of square aluminum.
The metal mount used was from our optics bench, and is probably $100 on its own, but I've had excellent results with a $10 piece of square aluminum.
All of the bolts are 1/4" #20 machine screws, although there are now a selection of nylon washers, thumbscrews and such to make adjustment easier.
Horizontal adjustment is done by just rotating one or both of the cameras. They're secured pretty tightly, but since they have plastic threadings, they're not perfect, so they can very slightly move.
Vertical adjustment is not possible. The two cameras are close enough for wide shots. Zoomed shots they are about 1/8 of a screen off vertically, which is not good. But for wide shots, they're fine.
I'll put up more pictures soon, but this should whet your appetite.
My feeling was that if you were "close enough" with everything, that you should be able to record decent 3D. I can't say that the results will be good for feature-length films, but they look just fine for short films. I've filmed a few things, which will be released soon.
The cameras are at worst, 1/15th of a second apart, since there is no sync between them.
Syncing is done in Final Cut Pro, and the field-sequential interlacing is done by a plugin soon to be released by us. The plugin allows for you to select which field is left, which is right, and also lets you make fine adjustments (field swap for better timing, horizontal skew for bad camera configurations, etc.)
Alignment can be done in one of two ways;
1. the cameras have a composition guide in them, which looks like two horizontal and two vertical lines. I just would line up the same object on the same vertical line on both cameras. This sets the convergence point there.
2. Using a modified Vuzix/Icuiti AV230 unit, which allows for each eye to be fed from a different video source. (Link to this in this forum as well). For that one, I just look and adjust the cameras to what looks "right".
nice rig.. is there a solution (low quality) to use only one cam`? i mean a rig wich halfs the screen..
