Wondering where you’re going to find some 3D content to run on your new 3D TV and 3D capable Blu-ray drive? Shoot your own! Panasonic’s new AG-3DA1 camcorder is hitting the market in October, and our eyes-on experience on Tuesday shows home videos could become 3D’s ‘killer app’.
The AG-3DA1 takes a new approach to shooting 3D compared with many other high-end options in the market. A lot of focus has been on pushing the converged images together in-camera. Panasonic has taken a split recording approach, with the two lenses sending signals to separate CMOS chips and recording to two separate SD cards. The two videos are then converged quite easily in post, like with Tim Dashwood’s Stereo3D Toolbox for Final Cut Pro.
The camera was also pushing out a live feed of 3D content to a Panasonic TV, so our demo was of ourselves, standing there with 3D glasses, looking at the screen. What impressed most was that this live footage was some of the best 3D I’ve seen. Instead of heavily engineered and artificially generated 3D landscapes in a Hollywood movie, this was plain and simple real life, and it truly made the TV look like a window.
Of course, this is a high-end camera, shooting 1080p with a host of pro features like HD-SDI, XLR audio, and loads more. But it’s another milestone in bringing 3D video tech to the masses, so we won’t just be reliant on packaged entertainment to get a 3D experience.
Could the opportunity to start capturing family memories in 3D be the thing that gets you over the line?