Avatar has made 3D films popular again; and the necessary hardware for stereoscopic filming is now cheap enough for individuals. This is a talk about a small real world development project, covering several different aspects in brief instead of focusing on one technical issue.

The project goal was to help the production of a low budget 3D film by writing a program for realtime display of stereoscopic video on a Linux laptop. The film maker was using a home built rig built around two Elphel cameras (themselves running embedded Linux) and needed to be able to preview and adjust stereo parameters on location.

Development was mostly in Python using wxWidgets and GStreamer. I'll talk about issues with event loops in GUI toolkits and the benefits of the GStreamer modular pipeline architecture.

A key part of the program was using the GPU to de-Bayer raw camera input in realtime. I'll also talk about shader programming, and what would be required in a possible future integration of GPU components within GStreamer.