Making 3D movies shouldn’t cost you 3G’s, so I wanted to write up an article so that you can do it on the cheap. How cheap? Less than $75.00 is a good place to start considering that a normal video camera is going to start around $300.00.

You will need a few pieces of hardware and a lot of software. Don’t worry: I have a lot of links to help you out. You will need two CVS one-use disposable cameras; go ahead and mod them like we did a few weeks back. If you don’t remember how, here's the step-by-step article and here's the video as well:

Hacking the CVS Video Camera


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Kevin Pereira and G4 engineer David Randolph show how to reuse those "one-use-only" video cameras.

Just don’t close up the cameras yet because we still need to solder on some wire and run them to one switch so that we can start recording on both cameras at the same time. If you look at the circuit board assembly around the record button, you will notice four very small solder points around the button. We want to solder wire leads from the top left point and the bottom right point. The other two are not used. I recommend that you use solid-core wire since it is easier to work with. In fact, Cat5 is one of my favorite cables to strip down for small projects like this. (Big projects, too. The entire giant NES controller was wired with Cat5.)

Now, drill a hole on the side of the camera and run your wire out and put it all back together -- but remember to note which wire went to which point on the switch. When we solder the wires later, we need to make sure that the top left contacts on both cameras are on the same side and the bottom right contacts are on the other side. If you get it backwards, then one camera will start recording while the other camera stops recording.

Once you have the finished cameras, you will still need to put a bolt through the bottom to make a mount for each of the cameras. Remove the batteries, and there'll be just enough room to drill a hole through the bottom and place a small bolt. (For my camera, I found that a metric 0.7 bolt worked just fine.) Then glue the bolt in place so that it doesn’t spin freely. This will make a stable mount for your camera.

I found a plaster trowel with a wooden handle that made the perfect mount. So if you go down to the local hardware store and get one and remove the handle, you will have the prefect camera control arm. While you're at the hardware store, you should also pick up a 1” wide piece of aluminum flat-bar. Now take the flat bar and cut it 6” long. Drill three holes in it at 1 ½” apart so that you have a hole in the middle of the bar and a hole on either side 1 ½” away. This will make the lens of your camera exactly 3” apart. In the professional world 2 ½” would be ideal but we can cheat a little and go with 3” since the camera bodies are 3” wide its pretty hard to get them any closer together. The center hole is for the handle.

Note that I have mounted a normally opened switch in the handle and glued it into place after I ran the wires to it.

If you want to get fancy you can take the left over flat-bar and bend it to make a shoulder mount to help stabilize the camera.

So lets review our parts and cost so far:

2  CVS cameras  $30.00 on eBay
1 1” Wide Flat-Bar $3.00
1 Plaster Trowel  $3.00
1 Nuts and Bolts  $4.00
1 N/O switch  $1.50 RadioShack
1 1’ Cat5 cable  $free if you steal it from work
   Total: $71.50