Early Lessons in 360-Degree Video

Yes, the footage does take up a lot of hard drive space. 24 minutes of "raw" 5K insta360 One X footage takes up 10-12GB. I believe that Insta360 Studio app exports the clips at 5120 x 2880, either at 100mbps or 150mbps.

Once you export those clips from .INSV to .MOV, the footage is still too heavyweight to be dropped directly into the Premiere timeline, even on a bad ass gaming PC with discrete graphics card. You'll have to spend some hours while it crunches down the proxy clips. Otherwise you can't scrub through the timeline to make cuts.

Here is a sample of bike racing footage from the handlebars of two pro cyclists. Use the mouse or trackpad to pan around. Curious what you guys think about that viewpoint. Is it lame? Or pretty exciting to follow the peloton from this angle?

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/326053307 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySYS_BPiDK4

Vimeo will recognize your upload as 360 VR automatically, and even lets you change field of view, etc in the clip settings:

YouTube is a bit more of a pain to work with, you'll need to use their metadata inject tool or run a Python command line script to add in all their required bits.

You can see the stitch line down the middle (where the sky gradient jumps from light to dark blue, but you can't see the camera mount (which is pretty cool).

In the YouTube version, the view is super wide but locked to spinning L <-> R 180 degrees. That's probably my fault, but I don't have the patience to figure this out. YouTube will probably fix this down the line.

HOW your users consume the 360 content is by far the biggest question. Seeing this footage in a head mounted display (or Google cardboard even) is way more fun than viewing it on a flat computer screen.

There are still some hiccups to be resolved, but I think now with the Insta360, Ricoh, Garmin Virb, GoPro Fusion cameras dropping to below 600-700 bucks, you'll be seeing a lot more of this content. We're not far from 360 VR replays of sporting event in my opinion.

I thought about some about 360 videos and oh boy it looks hard. First of all it uses obnoxious amount of data. Oculus go for example has resolution of 2560 x 1440 (1280x1440 per eye) and horizontal fov in region of 90 degrees. You need about 5k in horizontally to fill 360 degrees of horizon and at least 1440 vertically for video to look decent. All this bandwidth and even that is not that good. For best vr experience you would need to go for 360 3d video so final resolution is doubled. That gives us 5120 x 2880 video. Couple that with 60fps for additional immersivness and I don't even want to know how many gigabytes you will need for any mid length video. And that is only technical part of problem.

Second problem is that there is no framing in cinematic sense. You don't worry about filming crew accidentally getting in frame or bouncing off mirror. You need to either hide them entirely or embrace somewhere in 'frame'. It's okish in documentaries or videos from live events (eg music concert from front row). Immersion in headset gives you another problem. Any scene cut needs slow fade to black so you don't induce motion sickness (no fast action scenes with changing camera every other second). Speaking of motion sickness, camera must be fixed or move very slow.

Vr and 180 or 360 movies are very young and we need whole new generation of filmmakers but from what I have seen it has great potential. Properly made 180 3d films are immersive and you actually feel like you are there

I’m not sure how I feel about 360 videos. Maybe it’s because I never tried it with a headset on.

Does anybody have examples of really well done 360 videos?