Nebula, I'm confused. In your first sentence you say 'I am looking for a setup to capture 'accurate' 3d animations ', then in your last sentence you say the opposite: ' am not going to capture 3d animation'. Let's assume you do:
What I ment was that I am not going to try this any time soon. Atm, I find it more fun to make 2d animations out of captured video.
When you say '3d animations', are you talking about steroscopic animations (requiring special glasses to view) or are you talking about motion capture data obtained from live actors?
capturing motion, yes.
When it is really such a problem to rum 2 cams in the same time on one Computer, then it might be the simplest solution to use 2 Computers with one Camera each and a Connection over a Port, the parallel Port for instance, to send Syncing Signals. You know, use that old 266 something MHz Machine. Might be even cheaper than a Mirror.
Recording with 2 cams should already be possible when running windows media encoder twice. But atm I have no money for another webcam or a usb hub to test this.
And ofcourse I can always use a other pc.
btw - I find that the syncing process is unimportant when filming. You can sync it later with vdub. Currently I can use one webcam for getting the 3d movement, but it requires identical movement and takes more time.