Sahalie Falls 360 Video
“Sahalie Falls 360 Video” | Billy Newman Photo Podcast
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link Sahalie Falls 360 Video
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Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
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Hey, what’s going on? Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. My name is Billy. And I’m ready to answer. And we’re recording. In the studio today, we just got finished with a cool weekend ship over Memorial Day weekend where we had a little bit of extra time with the day off. And we did like a bunch of traveling and we recorded a bunch of stuff, which was pretty cool. It was kind of a special project. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Marina, what kind of special work were we doing?
It was super cool. We were doing some 360 video and photo recording.
And it was really cool. Yeah, it was really interesting doing that. I did like a little bit of a podcast talking about the idea 360 video and some of the GoPro fusion stuff. But yeah, it was really interesting. Having the GoPro fusion for for a week, we rented it. And we went around and we shot like a bunch of footage all over Oregon, and a whole lot of different spots of similar like the natural areas that we’ve been where we’ve had like the, the just, it’s probably like the more high profile locations for landscapes and a lot of the areas in Oregon, so it was really cool getting to run around, and maybe be some of the first people to shoot some high end or higher quality 360 footage in those areas.
Yeah, I think so definitely. I think there’s some of the spots, we got to the thing I really see many regular photos from
Yeah, not many people really go there in the first place. Yeah, and really, some of those locations were incredibly beautiful, like I was thinking about, I think about like, sisters rock that we did at the end that that evening was just so cool. But just the the way that the 360 video virtualizes is really interesting to look at it, it’s kind of a neat kind of optical effect, when you know, you get to look out and you get to kind of turn your head and see just sort of the the field of view that you would see if you were experiencing the place if you’re traveling there. But it’s really fun to get to see especially in certain locations, you know, where you really get to turn your head and see different aspects to the environment that are going on. Yeah, something going on.
Yeah, it was. It’s really cool. What a great job we the GoPro camera does, yeah, just with the quality of it looks so real and so beautiful.
Yeah, I was really interested in that and how it was going to do but but yeah, the GoPro fusion is I think, the the newest offering from the GoPro camera company. And, and you know, they have they have the the regular, you know, two dimensional system still too but but the three 3d six system is really interesting. It’s not through sight. It’s not 3d, but it’s a 360 degree, spherical image, it’s bill, I was talking about an eco rectilinear 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 a special software, the fusion Studio software. And it’s really interesting how it works. But I think this is really pretty new. If I understood right from from like the, the invoice and what I understand about GoPros these cameras really have just come out I think it was it was marked as the like the innovative product of the year at CES this year. So that back in January is kind of pre announced. And I went you know, once some more now, it’s interesting, but but I think it is really just come out for release in April now. And then so we’re probably some of the first people to even rent it from this company that has it available. So it’s cool. Yeah, last couple weeks of May. And yeah, trying some of the new technology out but the GoPro fusion is probably the most adept 360 camera that’s available for consumer use right now. I think there was the other camera, the ryla, which is a 360 degree camera that also has some of the video gimbal stuff that the GoPro has. But really, I think the GoPro is higher end. And there’s, it seems like, every time I’ve not used the GoPro system, I’ve had a little bit more trouble, but I was really impressed with that works. That’s really the only 360 system I’ve used. There’s also the theta camera built by Rico, that does 4k video. And that’s a little bit less expensive. I think that’s been out for a couple years. But um, but I don’t think that’s the gimbal system. You missed the stepping kind of image stabilization.
Man that made a huge difference for videos. We were able to watch them I guess you can preview them on your phone with an app. Yeah, just from directly from the camera. And it looks awesome. But you can see the motion for the stepping and stuff a little bit. And it’s cool when you process it through your computer. And and see the the effects of everything. The full
stabilization is really impressive and it really makes it possible to have like a walking or moving video in 360. And I think I think otherwise given given like the change in access that would happen. You know, like, as the camera moves through the 3d field and Z axis changes there, you kind of spin the camera a little bit, then it kind of throws the rest of the axis off, is how it would be without stabilization. But with stabilization, you really virtualized in that location. And you’re kind of independent from the movement of the camera, which is what’s really amazing about the way that it’s able to do some of the recording, which really gives you a much more immersive feel when you’re watching the video, because you can move the camera independent of any kind of jerky motion that the camera recording had in it, which really makes possible for for videos that are moving, I think otherwise, it would almost be nauseating to have video that was moving unless it was on some other kind of gimbal system. Yeah, that’s why probably you’ve really seen only only like kind of standstill videos up into this point that are related to 360 video. And what’s really cool about the GoPro 360 is that it really provides you so much opportunity to do moving videos that look really good in this 360 immersive environment in 5.2k. So like when we’re compressing down to 4k, it’s cool. But oh my goodness, does it take forever on this laptop?
Yeah, does rendering takes so long.
Yeah, so we had to go in overnight. So it’s not a bad I have a MacBook Pro. It’s
like a it’s a couple years old now. But there’s really not. I mean, there’s a few improvements in the MacBook Pro line, but not that many in that would have had other problems if I had upgraded anyway. But this one isn’t like the top of the line by any means it’s capable. But the graphics card I guess in a laptop really crushes through fine in HD video and anything else that I’ve thrown at it to do editing and Final Cut, it’s amazingly fast compared to the video editing system I would have had like in high school or college or something like that. So I’m impressed with what I can do. But I upgraded the final upgraded Final Cut 10.4, which is the version that can handle some of the 360 footage. I also installed the GoPro fusion studio app. And really, it’s the process of stitching the video together, that takes the longest time so they’re enormous files to start with. I think just over the weekend, we recorded like 200 gigabytes of files that we put into the onto the drive. Yeah, huge amount. Yeah. And then so those have, that’s just before anything’s done with it. So I guess it’s you know, it’s a higher quality video, but that then has to be stitched together into an even larger file. And then that has to be brought into your editor and then compressed or edited or rendered together. So all that takes a ton of time. And so but rendering the stitching is what seems to take the longest amount of time. And I guess we had to go on all night, I think we got in minutes, let’s say maybe six minutes of video for about eight hours a rendering, something like that. But it’s a lot of rendering time just for this little computer. And you can see it going I have this, this program this like I stat monitor program that shows you like what some of your system components are running at, but it’s just kind of painting my my graphics system on this laptop. And so I hear that you really have to have a ton of horsepower motor power to get through a lot of the 360 video, maybe that’s some of this stuff, you would win here too. But I have to you have to really that’s really where having like a higher capability computers is where you see an advantage of doing this level of rendering.
Yeah, my laptop can’t even handle what we’re trying to do.
You need minimum eight gigabytes of RAM. And then it helps to have an SSD so you can pull the video through faster, something like that. And then you have to have a dedicated graphics card. I believe in the system and it any gotcha even with the a pretty modern system. It is extremely slow, versus You know, a lot of other kind of editing rendering system that exists right now. But I think it’s like one frame a second. So if you think of like, videos, 30 frames a second. I think it’s rendering one frame out a second when I guess 360 degree spherical frame, or you know, Echo rectilinear that were that we were learning a little bit about. So after it stitches it together, it makes that echo rectilinear image of the to 180s sort of mapped onto a rectangle. Really interesting. I was doing it. It’s fascinating to go through all this stuff. It’s really fun to working with the GoPro camera stuff. But so yeah, this weekend, we did like a bunch of travel stuff to try and produce some videos and photos and kind of make like a portfolio for some of our 360 stuff. So we traveled. Where was the first place we went? We went to like say Haley falls. Yeah.
It’s cool. It’s beautiful. It was our second time being there. But our first time was just a few days before that. So it was a nice spot to us, which is cool. Yeah. It’s long the Mackenzie River, and it’s a really beautiful place. It’s waterfall just right off the trail. And it’s cool because you can climb down from the trail. There’s a kind of self made trail from I think people Yeah, fourth down there. Yeah. But it’s really cool just a big waterfall and it kind of goes into a river that drops off and to another little tiny waterfall. I don’t know, if you count as waterfall. It’s a waterfall.
It’s, it’s really cool. I like I like the way that that looked. And it was interesting kind of learning from that, that’s kind of a composition experience with 360 video, or for making a 360 image is sort of being in the bowl of the action, right seems to be kind of an interesting way to produce it, where you have something to look at, let’s say, if you’re mapping it onto the face of a clock, you have something to look at at your 12 o’clock, but also something to look at at your six o’clock so that there’s a reason to sort of, to sort of pan and move the camera in the frame of the field around.
Yeah, it’s a 360 photo or video. So the point is that you look in every direction. Yeah. And you really have to produce it for that. Yeah, there has to be something interesting. Yeah,
that was interesting about looking at a lot of the, let’s say, the viewpoints that I set up for, let’s say the, you know, the perspective that would be taken for a photograph, let’s say that, and those really don’t seem to work very well for composing these 360 images. So I guess that’s kind of the tip of the thing that I learned pretty quickly is we’re trying to put it together, like you can’t be back up against the trail or back up against the road or something like that, that kind of view out toward whatever the subject is, let’s say that waterfall in this case, because really, what you experienced most of is 180 degrees of just a trail and dirt and trees, and things that aren’t really that that interesting visually to look at. So it’s interesting trying to try to mediate all of those different angles that you could look at in a 360 degree view, which is where you really have to think about the method in which you’re composing the image a lot. To put yourself in a position where there’s something pretty at all angles of view that you have, isn’t it difficult to think, you know, like photography, you just have to try to worry about getting, getting just that little bit to look good in composition. But in 360, you have to think about every every field of every part of the field of view.
Yeah, is a fun and interesting additional thing to think about with composing something that’s like visual media,
it is really fun. But it’s a challenge, or it’s I don’t know, as it’s just a different type of perspective of trying to think of something that looks good. You know, something that while I was like looking at 360 video, a lot of people don’t seem to notice that part of it yet.
Right, though, they’ll be like a background, that’s just a driveway or parking lot. Yeah.
Yeah, something like that, where we’re so that’s what I’m seeing, like some of the successful, the successful arms a 360 video are bringing you into an immersion of it. And of course, you know, of course, that’s what you do. But so it was interesting going through and trying to produce some of that in this way. But even with, like some of the company videos that I did, like trying to walk through and do like a tour of a retail location, that was kind of interesting to do, where you know, instead of maybe skirting the side of the building or something, but you just kind of walk right through. But it’s interesting where you can, you can have the view 360 degrees around you. So you’re really trying to like, build an environment where you get to see that perspective is cool. So we went to Haley falls, we walked the trail around there, which is a place also where I learned the same lesson about composition where the trail is beautiful, out toward the river, or out toward a lot of angles. But then the trail is also not that it’s also kind of just a lot of work, a lot of broken pieces, a lot of a lot of wood and branches and things that aren’t really the forest and its beauty. So it’s interesting to see that.
Yeah, when you’re using it, you really do notice pretty quickly, what is not visually interesting, you’re attractive,
where you just you see all the places around you you would not take a picture of Yeah, well, I wouldn’t take a picture of that, or that or that or that. That’s all in the picture now. So. So it’s interesting to kind of consider that sort of stuff. But that’s really the the challenge I guess I’m trying to do storytelling, or composition in photography for 360. But it’s but it’s also possible to like write, like, what we were saying we found is getting to that center position, like an area with a creek and a waterfall is really kind of naturally conducive to being compositionally interesting. For some type of 360 VR content, we have semi static but comprehensible landscape that you’re surrounded by. And then a waterfall, it’s sort of a natural position where you’re going to have a geographical bowl, where you’re sort of set in with it, it’s also going to be green around all of your angles, you know, it’s blowing water up, and it’s sort of making everything green. And then you have like the creek that flows out from that. That’s another piece of motion that you get to look at. So all of this kind of pieces sort of work together where you can look up and see like the forest and stuff around you. So that was a really pretty way to shoot that and it’s a really interesting way to kind of look at and visualize what was there and it’s fun to see, you know, after we do like, well, this is like this is like what it was when I was so it’s really fun. But yeah, I like doing the hike stuff along the river there too. I also like the photos that we got from it. They’re talking about Got some of the images just still images that we took? Yeah, of course. Yeah. There’s beautiful areas. So just you know, obviously like still liking to take pictures. It was really fun to take photos. Yeah. Well, you know, spring snow melt is so crystal clear right now that the water just looks blue. Light aluminum blue to school.
Yeah, it was really beautiful. Water was really blue. And it was so clear. You could see all of the rocks. And a lot of the rocks had like moss on them. I guess it was green underneath the blue water. And it was really pretty.
Yeah. Yeah, that was a beautiful spot. So I’ve heard that McKenzie has always been really interesting. And I think they’re on the McKenzie on. And then I think it’s, well, actually, what is it the maybe the calapooia? The citm. I don’t know when that goes out from like, like Corvallis, Albany. That one’s really nice too. Or it’s like really mossy and like, I just looks foresty that sort of thing. looks kind of like a rain forest almost in some of the spots. But But yeah, it’s beautiful about getting up there. So we traveled there, we went up, kind of in the cascade area, route to a bunch of spots. We did like the trip over to Eastern Oregon. I know. We can probably get into a few of those. If you want to we want to talk about that. Sure. We could see him for another podcast. I don’t know. Let’s talk about I guess. Let’s go to proxy fall. So we did say Haley flows. Let’s see proxy falls and then we’ll say the Eastern Oregon ship for our next podcast. Sure. But yeah, so we did another trip. We did one ship to so Haley falls, then we went back the other day and we went up to proxy falls, it’s cool that they have the gate open. Now in Oregon, there’s like there’s a road it’s like 126, it goes up out of Eugene out toward, I guess what would be bend or the Cascades or something like that. But there’s this old highway that breaks off from that. And that’s the maybe old 126 maybe it’s not even that it’s just the old past that used to go over the mountains there. And for whatever reason, it goes up a much higher and it seems like steeper section of mountains than the one I would want to travel up. Maybe it was easier to build a road through for whatever reason, less canyons or something. But that one, it kind of sneaks up into the mountains for a while and it passes proxy falls, which is a beautiful spot. It’s been photographed a ton of times I’ve got a one of my favorite photographs, taken in kind of my landscape portfolios from an area by proxy falls, but it was really fun to get up to and to try and do some 360 visualizations of but we worked we parked up there. It was kind of like a gray part of the day. The weather has been sort of strange where it’s been clear out right? been clear, probably most of the state of Oregon. But then there’s these clouds these like thunderheads seem to be building up over the Cascades. And then in the afternoon, they end up kind of blowing out out toward the west and making really a lot of the area cloudy. And then I have a morning time like we get we get a layer of clouds over Eugene too. So it was a nice sunny day, we drive up into the mountains, and then we drive up into the clouds, where they’re being produced up in the foothills of the Cascades. So it was kind of fun to get up there going from a sunny day into a cloudy day. But getting out to proxy files really still a very pretty spot and we were kind of in there in the evening. So it would have been you know, shady afternoon shot anyway. But it’s beautiful to get up there. The way that the water kind of flows off the hill. I think it’s one of the taller waterfalls in Oregon. Right? Doesn’t seem like it. I Yeah, it definitely seemed like it. Watson falls I think the other one that we’ve gone to, is, I think the tallest waterfall in Oregon. But I really believe that proxy Falls is right there. I mean, it’s just like stunningly tall. When you when you see it that that that drop of it just looks like a huge amount. But that was really cool to see. I guess there’s the stuff in the Columbia that’s you know, intensely tall too. But it was really cool to see the the waterfall that we kind of hiked up to it. And we were the only people there, which is fun. And yeah, we shot like a whole handful of different 360 videos and photographs of the water and the the ways that the falls are there. Those cool I really liked the ways that some of those rendered out to
me to that spot was beautiful as my first time there and it’s a really incredible looking place because there’s the whole gigantic and impressive looking waterfall. And then it’s cool because that flows into a creek but the creek kind of just goes through the forest that’s below it. So it’s running around all these really tall trees. Yeah, we brought on. Yeah, we were walking around in our big boots. Thank goodness we had him.
Yeah, yeah, it was a biomart special one week and I picked up picked up some rain boots. Some ankle high waders,
if you’re an outdoor photographer get rain boots, it’ll change your life. Yeah, it was a cool thing. That was great. kind of run through the creek there.
Yeah, it was a ton of fun. Yeah, really beautiful. And like it’s important for 360 especially It was really very interesting in all directions. Yeah. Really cool spot to shoot that stuff. And it was like you were mentioning it was it was cloudy and gray but it was sort of misty, up at the top was missing and that really just made it even prettier. I thought Yes, it was a great a great day to be Day,
I thought it was really cool to be up there. Yeah, I thought that was a lot of fun. Getting to check out the proxy files area and then just kind of driving back that afternoon was kind of cool coming back home and uploaded all the media into the computer. But kind of figuring out that, yeah, taking the GoPro we have it, we kind of build out like, you know, 10 or 15 videos or something from a location we go to, we come back home, we plugged the computer in, and then I’m trying to draw all the footage off. It’s sort of it’s sort of lists how to do it online. But it’s really interesting the process of trying to get the footage imported onto the computer, I’m sure exciting for this podcast. But this is kind of the minutiae of detail we get into for some of the photo import stuff. But for the GoPro, since we’re recording on to a 180 degree image on one side, and then 180 degree image on the other, you have to merge those images together, I got into that a little bit about through the GoPro fusion software, but importing it from the camera. And then on the computer, you have to keep all of the files for the video intact, you can just take pieces of the video and bring them over kind of one by one maybe like you would think about other types of video files that you have. And the reason for that is because it has these other kind of data files that are surrounding it, this will give you the information for the gimbal, the digital gimbal system and sort of the pitch and yaw of the position of the camera. But all that kind of sensory data has to be connected to the file. So you have to import it in a certain way to bring everything over, and then bring that up into the GoPro fusion software and then spend all the time having it proprietarily stitch those files together. But it was cool kind of going up to the proxy files coming back home, plugging the cards into the computer, or taking the little micro SD cards out, put them into the computer trying to transfer like the files over and you’d be amazed. Like I was so surprised. Like, it was like, we could fill up a 64 I think what 64 gigabytes of total space in like, a couple of hours. It seemed like organo just like going out to even like two or three spots. It seemed like you can fill up a card. Yeah, it really does. It fills up quickly. Yeah. So fast. Yeah, so see you I guess I guess how we shot 200 gigabytes of video. That’s more video than I’ve ever shot before. Oh, yeah. All other video combined. equal. Yeah. And it’s before it’s render too. So yeah, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be pretty interesting trying to process through this. So that’s the good, that’s the interesting part. So we’ve gone through, we’ve shot all this stuff. And then I guess for the next month or next like four weeks, we’re gonna have like, render out all these videos, and trying to like work them a little bit to see if their portfolio ready. So you can put together some kind of 360 presentation piece. The cool. I’m really excited to do is it’s one of the more fun kind of technology media photo things I’ve done in the last few months.
Yeah, it’s been so cool. And it’s an awesome camera. It really does a beautiful job. Yeah, it was really cool. I’m really happy with. I mean, we went to gorgeous places, but it does a really nice job of picking up all of the contrast. Yeah, this looks very clear.
representing it. Yeah, I was really yeah, the 5k or the you know, like the 4k render that we did have one of those videos. It just looks like really crisp. I’m really impressed. Yeah, me too. I want to get goggles. I know. I do too. I want to. I want to walk through everybody. Yeah, good. Well, that’s pretty cozy. Yeah, it was really fun to go and shoot a bunch of that stuff. But But really, we just rented the camera. So. So it was really fun having kind of the inspiration to go run and try and produce as many places as we could, in just a few days while we had that kind of media captured tool. So we just turned it in today. And then we’re gonna process a ton of these videos and see what we get out of it. And I guess sort of do an estimation of what it’s worth. But we definitely will probably run it again, if not, if not get one some time. And again, I’m trying to think now of all these different sort of options or opportunities you can do with 360 video. Like who would want 360 video? Like what kind of tour? Are you going to get paid? Or what can you make? That’s cool, what kind of content like landscapes that like you can make? That would be cool. Yeah, I’m excited to do it. So it’ll be a lot of fun. But, but yeah, well, let’s, let’s come back our podcast for this next time. And we’ll talk about a bunch of the other parts that we did about going after like for rock and go into Smith rock and doing some of the Eastern Oregon stuff going over to Crater Lake on us. That was pretty fun. So, so yeah, we’ll probably come back on another billing human photo podcast and talk about that sometime. He this week. But thanks for joining me for this podcast. Thanks, man. Thanks for doing so many 360 videos this weekend. It was so cool. I loved it. Yeah, we got to do more of that stuff. And I like I kind of get in specialized gear. Like producing something with it. Yeah, is a it’s a really cool project. There’s a pretty good time to it. So on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy and thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.