What do you do for the holidays when you want to go somewhere (or even just Out) and share the joy, but you really just shouldn’t?
After setting up the Christmas lights, I took my extra time and had some fun with the Samsung Gear 360 (2017) camera, and spent a little learning time* to edit in VR. using Premiere Pro. Yes it can be done!
I am grateful to knightlab.com for an online article that let me cut straight to the cutting in Premiere so I could speedramp some of this video for timelapse effects and step out of ActionDirector’s more limited options. https://studio.knightlab.com/results/storytelling-layers-on-360-video/how-to-edit-360-video-in-premiere/
Namely this line: Click the Settings icon (wrench) on the right side of the monitor or right click the monitor, then select VR Video > Enable
This instantly gave me the immersive view inside my editor so I could decide where to point the viewer. That was a trickier part I won’t go into here. Suffice to say they suggest using the Offset effect to pick the center point, which is where 360 viewers start facing. Because I wanted to pan, and keyframe, it was instantly unwieldly.
Don’t use the motion tool to try to pan, tilt and roam around the view, that moves your whole (equi)rectangle, leaving black voids behind.
For some good details on what the controls are doing, read up at www.immersiveshooter : http://www.immersiveshooter.com/2019/01/11/how-to-edit-360-video-in-premiere-pro/
Having stumbled through other people’s methods and soaking up some understanding, I ended up using my fresh knowledge applied to the VR Rotate Sphere effect in Adobe Premiere, to good effect. If I weren’t trying to turn the viewers’ heads for them Either of the other pages’ ideas would have sufficed.
Filmed with a 360 camera, this 360 Christmas video was Set as VR video in the export from Adobe Premiere. If you edit VR in Premiere you can export as VR video so it’s ready for a player. Or turn it off to make a stretched “equirectangular” video in the familiar widescreen shape but distorted, since the player can wrap it together and all the corners and edges meet seamlessly into a 360 ball.
In this video I experimented with panning the video gently to direct the viewer to some different elements at the beginning and then leave it in their hands a minute or so in.
You don’t want to move or cut too fast between different surroundings because you reallyu grab the viewer by the stomach then, and not in a good way.
This is the final version but I put up both to see what YouTube does to it automatically. It does want the VR option checked to embed the metadata that tells it to publish as VR virtual reality. And the latest version of the ActionDirector software from Cyberlink does correctly write the metadata; this has not always been the case.
Complete VR video: right here!
https://youtu.be/Rlqkytz0CzQ A VR experience of 2020 Holiday lights on the porch in 360 degrees, with stills, 360 and timelapse elements.
Shorter test with VR checked: https://youtu.be/KjtpO-hSJgA . A segment of the video above. Test with VR unchecked https://youtu.be/OVMWHYjuDwI , showing the equirectangular result (this is what stitched images look like without the player and metadata telling the computer to wrap it around you.
Filmed with Samsung Gear 360 (2017 model) Edited in Adobe Premiere 2020 Music: “Change of Season” by David Watson. https://megawatson.bandcamp.com/track/change-of-season
–David.
* You can rebrand “Screwing Around” as “Learning Time” if you pick an experiment that will teach you something along the way. It just needs to provide two final exam results:
1) Never Try That Again! or 2) That was neat; now if only I had taken notes, I could do that again easier and faster!
P.S. Try to take notes when troubleshooting or learning things. It helps you not get lost when troubleshooting, and reinforces memory since you are adding the information into your brain using multiple methods. (In this case, doing and writing)
P.P.S. You can grab someone by the stomach in a good way: Offer them decent free food.
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