360 video capture and render process
Today I want to write out some of my experience around working with 360 videos and photo recordings. It was fantastic to use the GoPro Fusion for a week. We rented it. We went around, and we recorded 360 footage all over Oregon. We went to different high-profile locations for landscapes in Oregon. It was good to shoot some higher-quality 360 footage in those areas.
Not many people go there in the first place. And really, some of those locations were incredibly beautiful. I was thinking about, I think about, sisters rock that we did at the end that evening was just so fantastic. The 360 video virtualizes interesting to look at it; it’s an optical effect. So you get to your head and see the field of view you would see if you were experiencing the place.
The GoPro Fusion is, I think, the newest offering from the GoPro camera company. It’s not 3d. It’s a 360 degree, spherical image. So I was talking about an equirectilinear image that’s stitched together from two cameras that record 180 degrees of your field of vision. And then that’s brought into the computer and stitched with special software, the Fusion Studio software. So it’s fascinating how it works.
https://gopro.com/en/us/news/the-basics-gopro-fusion
https://gopro.com/en/us/news/introducing-fusion-studio
https://gopro.com/en/us/shop/cameras/max/CHDHZ-202-master.html
The GoPro Fusion is probably the most professional 360 camera that’s available for consumer use right now. I think there was the other camera, the ryla, a 360-degree camera with some of the video gimbal stuff that the GoPro has. I think the GoPro is higher end. That’s the only 360 system I’ve used. There’s also the theta camera built by Ricoh that does 4k video. And that’s a little bit less expensive. But, unfortunately, I don’t think it has gimbal image stabilization.
That made a massive difference for videos when you process them through your computer. The complete stabilization is impressive, and it makes it possible to have a walking or moving video in 360. With stabilization, you virtualized in that location. And you’re independent of the movement of the camera, which is what’s fantastic about the way that it’s able to do some of the recording, which gives you a much more immersive feel when you’re watching the video because you can move the camera independent of any jerky motion that the camera recording had in it.
I think otherwise. It would almost not be enjoyable to have a moving video unless it was on another gimbal system. And what’s cool about the GoPro 360 is that it provides you so much opportunity to do moving videos that look good in this 360 immersive environment in 5.2k.
When we’re compressing down to 4k, will it take forever on this laptop? Rendering takes so long. we had it rendering out video overnight. I have a MacBook Pro. This one isn’t the top of the line by any means. But, I’m impressed with what I can do. I upgraded Final Cut 10.4, which is the version that can handle the 360 footage. I also installed the GoPro fusion studio app; it’s the process of stitching the video together. That takes the longest time, and they’re enormous files to start with.
I think over the weekend. We recorded 200 gigabytes of video files. That then has to be stitched together into an even larger file. Then that has to be brought into your editor and then compressed or edited, or rendered together. You need a minimum of eight gigabytes of RAM. And then it helps to have an SSD so you can pull the video through faster. You have to have a ton of horsepower to get through a lot of the 360 video,
Rendering the stitching is what seems to take the most extended amount of time.
So let’s say six minutes of video for about eight hours a rendering, and you can see it going I have this, this program this stat monitor program that shows system components running at, but it’s just painting my graphics system on this laptop.
After it stitches it together, it makes that echo rectilinear image of the to 180s mapped onto a rectangle. It’s fascinating to go through all this stuff. We did many travel stuff to produce videos and photos to make a portfolio for some of our 360 stuff. So it’s a 360 photo or video.
It was an exciting composition experience with 360 videos. The point is that you look in every direction. You have to produce it for that. There has to be something interesting. The viewpoints I set up for, the photograph’s perspective, really don’t seem to work very well for composing 360 images.
You can’t be back up against the trail or back up against the road. Consider a view out toward that waterfall in this case. One hundred eighty degrees of video is just a trail and dirt and trees, which aren’t visually attractive. Only one focal point exists in the landscape, and typically, the photographer’s direction would have selected that. 360 media removes that direction. So it’s interesting trying to mediate all of those different angles that you could look at in a 360-degree view, which is where you have to think about the method in which you’re composing the image.
https://theta360.com/en/about/theta/z1.html
Working with the GoPro Fusion or Max 360 system is interesting. I think they do the best job of image stabilization. The THETA z cameras have many exciting features for photographs in 360, but I think they lack a sufficient stabilization software solution. The rendering process of the files is a chore for most consumer computers. It is real pro work to complete these renders. Nevertheless, 360 videos have been a fun project, and I think the video media created and rendered is excellent.
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360 Video Capture And Render Process
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