The W1 in action!

I was living the dream of taking 3D photos out in the field.  The processing didn’t seem to be too fast but patience was a virtue with the W1 camera.  Holding the camera was awkward because you had to realize that it was easy to get your fingers over the right lens because it was immediately below the main button of the camera.  I had to slide the front down to get ready to shoot then slide it back up and it fit into my pockets when I was moving to another location. If my pockets were smaller like some other pants that I owned it could have been a problem fitting the camera into my pants.  I didn’t always place it into my pockets because I found it more convenient to hold it tightly with the wrist strap when I was in motion.  Getting a good 3D picture wasn’t easy because if things were moving and I didn’t have the flash on the images were usually blurred.  If I used the flash regardless of the situation it helped with the blur.  The camera was not ideal in low light situations because the focus might not be accurate and you can notice on the computer the limitations of the quality that was produced by the camera.  It seemed that three out of ten photos came out good but the more light the better the image was.  Sunny days looked beautiful and late nights were not so good.  A great 3D photo was worth all of the trouble that that camera seemed to have.  I kind of got this feeling from the reviews that I found on the internet but I wanted 3D so bad I could taste it.  I decided to test out the video with this camera and it wasn’t bad.  There was some ghosting but it was 3D standard definition video.  I thought it would be so cool to make a short film with the 3D but I had no idea how to edit the actual 3D video.  Taking the video was a hit or miss with the W1.  If an image was too close it looked like it was split up or out of focus but if it was just right like within around three feet in front of you it looked great.  Viewing the video was neat to see on the camera but not as good as the photos.  You had to be cautious because the way buttons were set up you had to hit the view button then select the video and press down to view it but you don’t want to hit the down button again because it will erase the video when it was playing.  This was a feature that I hated and I was glad that I read about it within the PDF file before using the camera.  I went to my computer and transferred the files to it because I wanted to watch the video with “StereoMovie Maker” to see what it looked like.  The anaglyph video quality was not that great compared to the pictures but was kind of cool.  I noticed that audio quality of the video was excellent compared to my other digital cameras.  The 3D video files were 3D-AVI files which were another format that I never saw prior to using this camera.  I converted the video to anaglyph and it quadrupled the file’s size and was split up if it reached a little more than two gigabytes of file space.  This was annoying to realize another memory managing conundrum.  I could edit the anaglyph video files with decent video editing software but did I really want to shoot a video for anaglyph when ten minutes was going to be more than eight gigabytes to preserve the original quality!  This wasn’t really bad compared to other uncompressed or 1080P video files out there in the world but still needed to be downsized and compressed for DVD unless it was designated for a Blu-Ray burn.  After vigorously viewing these pictures and video I realized that sometimes taking photos or footage of objects or subjects that were red or blue caused problems when seeing them when converted to anaglyph.  This was just another thing to think about when shooting with a 3D camera.