Are you going to look into creating VR/360° content?


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TechNoboOrig

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Hello all, this is just a small list of things that you need to remember while creating and editing VR or 360° video. I normally use Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects to edit my videos. They are paid programs, but there are many free alternatives with similar plugins and things that you can do to make your VR video POP and look good.
Even though VR is a relatively new thing and a lot of people can't afford good enough cameras or GPU's to edit and record in 360°. But there are many add-ons and mods for games already like Minecraft, such as the "Replay Mod." And there are more and more cell phones surfacing every day that has the ability to watch YouTube using something like Google Cardboard and the built-in gyroscope to let you look around a 360° world.

1. How to properly record gameplay for a 360° video:
So when you're recording a game using something like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, you have to remember that using basic screen capture software will not allow people to look around much like you are in the game in their own time, they can only see what you saw. If you want them to be able to see a different perspective from you, make a note that you have to record using a mod like the "Replay Mod" for Minecraft. There are many of these mods that exist and many that are in development already. Even NVIDIA are jumping into the VR craze with their new technology: "NVIDIA Ansel", where with a click of a button, you can take a 360° screenshot of your environment allowing others to look through it themselves in your VR YouTube videos. NVIDIA Ansel is available for games like Mirrors Edge Catalyst and is planned to be released for other games like Tom Clancy's The Division, The Witcher, Paragon and No Man's Sky.


(Source)


2. How to properly edit 360° video:
So let's assume that you got your hands on some 360° footage by recording it yourself or downloading it from a YouTube video (Please don't reupload other's videos, use it just for learning). Once you have the footage, you need to keep a few things in mind: •The video file size will be large, don't compress too much. •What you see in the editor, is not necessarily what others will see when using a VR headset or watching on YouTube. •Rendering will take a long time so make small changes and be sure to watch your video through before rendering the video!

Let's say that you use something like the Gear 360 and recorded a 360° video and used the software they provide to make the video rectangular and easy to edit. You will need to focus on more than just the video size when importing into your favourite editing software, see (3) below.
So once you have your video, Adobe After Effects or whatever you edit in don't know that it is 360° video and unless there aren't some updates, they won't know for a short while. So you're going to have to work with the stretched out version of your 360° video in the editor for now. For example, you would use a plugin like SkyBox from Mettle, which suppots only After Effects at this time, but more will be created or found soon. It does cost $99, but if you're serious about 360° video, they you have likely already invested some money in a beefy PC or camera. As the plugin gets more and more popular there will be "leaks" and "cracks", but piracy IS illegal, so that's not a good idea. Rather look for some more community-created plugins that let you do the same sort of thing.
Once you have your plugin installed and the 360° video loaded up, using the plugin you can "warp" overlays of text and images over the video so that they won't look HUGE and overwhelming for the viewer watching the video and a lot of the times this is very nessecary as they won't be able to see all of what you put in at once. The video is strected out and a viewer can only see a small portion at a time, keep that in mind because perspective is KEY with editing. What you see in the editing "rectangle" will be blown up massively in the viewers face. As you move the picture, text or other overlay around the video, it should automatically "stick" to the closest part of the sphere, allowing it to look flat when the viewer is looking at it.

Plugins out of the way, you will still need a way of seeing what you just created. The latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015.3 supports previewing 360° video. All you need to do is click the wrench below the video preview and then VR VIDEO and it will automatically switch to a 360° video view. You will need to mess with the Field Of View (FOV) settings and other perspective tools to let you "emulate" your VR headset.



3. What does the video SIZE need to be? Like the actual PIXELS?
Well, 360° videos are much bigger than you think... To see a video in good quality you need to keep more than just their viewing perspective in mind. Let's take a simple 4K video for example (3840x2160) that seems simple enough to remember, much like Full HD (1920x1080). BUT with VR, things get a little more complicated as there is no locked size or suggested size. For a 4K 360° video the resolution would be +- 4096x2048 BUT remember, that is the WHOLE picture, not just where the viewer is looking... If you want the viewer to see a 4K video anywhere he/she looks, the video would have to be a whopping 12288x6144 pixels. That is MASSIVE and that resolution is regarded as 12K... Yeah...
Scaling down to more reasonable sizes and resolutions, we look at 2K 360° video (2048x1024), everywhere the viewer looks will be +-.5K video (512 pixels), that is somewhere just above 480p on YouTube. Moving up another bit, we have 4K 360° video we mentioned earlier (4096x2048) where everywhere the viewer looks, they will see 1K video (1024x768), which is just above 720p, although not true (1280x720), more of a 4:3 ratio, rather than the standard 16:9 or 16:10. It sounds confusing, but you don't need a lot of side view when in VR, you can use surprisingly little as the viewer is put so close to the action.
YouTube and Google reccommend 16:9 stitched videos in 4K (3840x2160) for 360° as seen HERE

(Source)

4. Other resources:
So I was watching YouTube which really inspired me to create this thread, as well as the competition, and I saw a new video from Tested (Adam Savage and his friend's YouTube channel - Yes, the one from Mythbusters) on editing 360 video: LINK And that really inspired me to look more into it because making 360 video gameplays is a really cool new field that people are only starting to look at. I know YouTubers like MumboJumbo and Xisumavoid have made VR videos in the past of their Minecraft Redstone creations, and I've been wondering about VR video since then.

So to wrap up everything, editing VR or 360° video is something of the near future for a lot of YouTuber gamers and other people, and it's a cool new part of everything. You yourself may not be able to create the video because you can't average more than 10 FPS in Minecraft, and it won't physically be possible to record videos on a much larger scale (pixel wise), or you don't have enough time to render out a video of that quality, because it is possible to render on "bad" GPU's, but it is not the fastest thing in the world as many of us know. Using something like a NVIDIA GTX 970 or 980 would make the job at least a little faster, and using something like a "VR Ready" card like the NVIDIA GTX 1070 or 1080 would make the job so much faster. More and more video editing software that natively supports VR will pop up; there will be more updates and more free addons and programs coming in the future. So by the time you're done understanding the concepts of VR editing, then you can take your channel to the next step by starting to use VR content.

And another thing, if you are looking to upload some 12K video to YouTube, note that the video file will be MASSIVE if you want it to look good. Internet constraints will be something that will stop a lot of YouTubers from creating and uploading long VR content. So a lot of people who do already work in VR upload only short videos and as far as I know, there haven't been a lot of YouTubers uploading whole gameplays in VR or something of the sort. It would be cool to watch a horror game play out in VR and see a floating facecam in the middle of the video or something similar, because you can really feel like you are experiencing the action with the YouTuber themselves and you can really connect with the content a lot better, even if the video isn't just a hoor game. The videos could be about pretty much anything and people would still enjoy the content because they can feel like they are more involved and that they get to "control" something, even though they aren't really controlling anything but their Point Of View (POV).
5. Bonus tip:
Just remember to ENABLE GPU RENDERING, even if you don't plan on creating VR content if you don't know if you have or have not enabled it yet, or if your editing software supports it, GO CHECK NOW! It will make rendering so much faster and much better to work with.



So overall this was a very lengthy post to the Freedom! Forums, and I hope that this inspires some YouTubers to create VR/360° content if they are able to and help them along their journey. VR really is the future of entertainment on YouTube because it is ever increasing in popularity with free mods or even things like bits of cardboard to turn your phone into a home theater or VR headset. Are you going to look forward to creating VR content? Are you going to even attempt it? Can you even pull it off if you are going to chase after something so new, ie. Hardware wise, internet cap wise and other things? I'd really like to know, because the only thing that is really holding me back from creating VR content at the moment is my internet connection as there is a really low cap and I'm sure that the coffee shops with uncapped WiFi may get angry if you leave your phone/tablet/laptop uploading a video overnight.
-TechNobo
 
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Row

Forum Administrator // YouTuber... -ish
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Amazing tutorial! Learned a bunch. I've been thinking of trying out creating 360 myself ^_^