http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_upgrade_your_2d_movies_3d
saved here:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you know
that 3D is this year’s entertainment buzzword. With 3D blockbusters like
Avatar scoring megabucks in the theaters, 3D cinema’s jump to the
living room is all but a foregone conclusion. But where does that leave
all your old 2D files and DVDs?
Thanks to a couple of very cool programs and some clever scripting,
there’s hope for them yet. In this article, we’re going to show you how
to use AviSynth and VirtualDub, along with a script from the
3D Vision Blog to give any 2D film the 3D treatment.
Convert to 3D with AviSynth
To convert our movies to 3D, we’re going to start with a program
called AviSynth, so point your browser at bit.ly/2EO5A2 and download the
newest version, then run the installer. You’re probably used to running
most new programs after you install them, but don’t bother trying with
AviSynth—it doesn’t have a user interface. Instead, it functions as a
codec, allowing media viewers such as Windows Media Player to understand
AviSynth scripts, in the form of AVS files.
As you may have guessed, we’re going to use one such AVS script to
upconvert our 2D file to 3D. It’s not magic—the script simply exploits
some common visual cues to take a decent stab at applying a 3D effect to
a 2D movie, but it’s certainly better than nothing. The script was
written by the author at the 3D Vision Blog, and is available
here. Go to the site, copy the script (it’s the first big chunk of code) and paste it into notepad.
Before we can use the script it needs a little customization. First,
change the filename at the beginning of the script from
“Avatar_Trailer_HD.avi” to the filename of the video you want to
upconvert.
Save the script with a .AVS filename extension to the same directory as the video file.
At this point, you’re all set to view your movie in 3D. To do so,
simply open a media player that works with AVS scripts (such as Windows
Media Player) and tell it to open your freshly created .AVS file.
Assuming you’ve done everything right so far, you should see an
extra-wide version of your video, with two slightly different frames
playing side by side. This is the 3D file, formatted to play with
Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology. If you would prefer anaglyph (red/cyan)
3D, for use with a pair of filter glasses, you need to make a quick
modification to your script. Comment out (by adding a # to the beginning
of the line) the line that says
StackHorizontal(f2, f1). Then, uncomment (by removing the #) the line that says
# MergeRGB(f2.ShowRed, f1.ShowGreen, f1.ShowBlue).
Save Your 3D Video with VirtualDub
So, we’re looking at our video in 3D. Now we’re done, right? Not
quite. AviSynth works in real-time, synthesizing an AVI (get it?) from a
source file and a script, frame by frame, as the media player requests
those frames. This is hard on your CPU, and means that if you want to
view the file on any other computer, you’ll need to install AviSynth
first. Instead, we’ll now show you how to permanently save the 3D video
to your hard drive.
To save the movie, you’ll need a program called VirtualDub.
VirtualDub is a lightweight, open source video editor which is
especially good at quickly reencoding videos. Go to the
VirtualDub site and download and extract the program.
The next step of the process is to make sure that VirtualDub has the
tools it needs to make a high quality copy of the 3D movie. More
specifically, it needs codecs—one for video and one for audio. The Xvid
MP4 and LAME MP3 codecs are excellent, open source examples of each. If
you don’t already have these codecs installed for use with some other
media program, you’ll need to get them now. The Xvid codec can be found
here, and the LAME codec can be downloaded
here. Once you’ve downloaded both, run the installers to registers the Codecs in Windows.
Set VirtualDub to use Xvid by clicking Video -> Compression… and
then selecting Xvid MPEG-4 Codec. Set it up for audio by first clicking
Audio -> Full processing mode and then clicking Audio ->
Compression… and selecting MPEG Layer 3.
Finally, open the .AVS file for your 3D video, and click File -> Save as AVI. Give your file a name, and you’re done.