A wide spread adoption of 3D videos and technologies is hindered by the lack of high-quality 3D content. One promising solution to address this problem is to use automated 2D-to-3D conversion. However, current conversion methods, while general, produce low-quality results with artefacts that are not acceptable to many viewers. Creating a database of 3D stereoscopic videos with accurate depth is, however, very difficult. Computer generated content can be used to generate high-quality 3D video reference database for 2D-to-3D conversion. The method transfers depth information from frames in the 3D reference database to the target frame while respecting object boundaries. It computes depth maps from the depth gradients, and outputs a stereoscopic video.