360 image editing plugins

- The technology of 360 degree photography is developing very rapidly. I have a Nikon KeyMission right here. This is a 360 camera, some people refer to this as a VR camera, and I'm not going to go into how that's actually a technically incorrect term. Oh, I really want to. Anyway, with this camera, you can do stuff like this. This is a single video recorded by this camera that you can pan around inside if you are wearing a VR headset, or swiping across your phone, or using your mouse to steer it on your computer.

Here you can see that we're steering it around inside this video, and that's what I want to talk about today. What I really am enjoying about this camera is not the ability to shoot 360 spheres that I deliver as 360 spheres, but to shoot 360 spheres, and choose bits of them to show within a video. In other words, choose a vantage point after the fact in post-production. It's like having a GoPro strapped to me that I can steer later. So I want to show you how I did that.

You can do this in After Effects or Premiere, but it requires some special plugins. Once you've got them it's pretty easy to work. I took this thing and stuck it to the gas tank of my motorcycle. I'm still working out the best way to do that. It's difficult to get a really stable mount, so it shakes a lot, and you'll see that, and there are things you can do to stabilize it, but that's still so far kind of the weakest part of my process. So I stuck it on my motorcycle, I rode the bike across The Golden Gate Bridge, and I came back with a movie. So, I'm here in After Effects. I'm going to create an HD res project, and then I'm going to drop this movie into it.

Let's open it up here, and this is the unwrapped sphere that the KeyMission produces. I'm going to just drop it in here. This actually started on the on-ramp to the bridge, so I'm going to come in here somewhere, and set an endpoint, and I'll just drop an out point anywhere, and then I'm going to stick this in my composition. Now, in my comp, it looks like this. This is just a crop of that larger 360 view. You can see that I can move the image around to look at a different part of it.

I can shrink it to look at the whole thing, but what I want to do is be able to steer around inside this composition as part of my video. As if the camera were moving. So to do that, I need a plugin. As near as I can tell there are two options. One is made by a company called Mettle, and it's a package called SkyBox 360/VR Tools. That gives you a number of different things including something called SkyBox Rotate Sphere. Another option is a package made by a company called Dashwood, and they make a few different packages.

Same thing, you get a number of different plugins. What I'm going to be using is something called the VR Toolbox, and more specifically a plugin called HMD Preview. So, both of these give you the ability to do things like add blurs and glows, put credits inside of a VR space, inside of a 360 space, so that they're baked in to the image in a very realistic way. So you get a lot of other stuff. We're only going to look at this one functionality, and I'm only going to look at the Dashwood one. I'm going to add that to this clip, and immediately my image changes.

It just zoomed in, and that's because I have a field of view control. I can specify how wide or narrow a field of view that I want. So, it's kind of like having a zoom lens after the fact. I'm going to take their default of 110 degrees. The other thing I get over here are tilt, pan, and roll. So, let's think about the camera move I would like to do. I'm pointed backwards, I would like to look at the front of the bike, so that's going to be panning about the Y axis, so all I have to do is change my Y axis value, and it pans over to here.

Now that I'm looking in that direction it feels a little claustrophobic to me, so I'm going to change my field of view to zoom out a little bit, and that looks a little bit better. So, this gives me the option to pick a camera angle, and just look that way through the rest of the video. But what's cool is because this is After Effects, all of these camera angles and even the field of view are key-frameable. I'm going to drop a keyframe right here on my pan. I'm going to jump forward, and now just change that, and what I get there is, this is not in realtime, but I get this camera move, and that's now baked into my video.

When I render this and output it, this camera move will be in there. I can show you a finished version of this. So this is a fairly complex camera move, made up simply by dropping keyframes on the three different axes, and as I do this you're going to notice a couple of things. Look at this right across here. That's a lens flare. That's a seam that's visible between the two lenses. There's a lens on either side of this camera. That's not something I can easily fix in post. We're about to see another problem as I do this smooth pan to the right here.

Here's the other seam, see that in the edge. I called out that smooth pan because this is one of the nice things about After Effects, because of the wonderful easing controls that it has on its keyframes. You can really make these nice smooth movements. Both of these plugins, the SkyBox and the Dashwood plugins, or the Mettle and the Dashwood plugins, come in Premiere versions, but Premiere doesn't give you that same level of key framing control. So I really like that option in After Effects. Now as for this seam, this is something particular to the KeyMission.

Another 360 camera may not have this problem, and I can very easily work around this problem if I just think before I shoot about the types of pans that I want to do. I'm never going to look straight down. There's nothing down there but motorcycle, so if I had tilted the camera up, that would have taken that seam that was above my head, and put it back behind my back somewhere, and so that would never have been a problem. If I knew that I was only going to pan to the right, and there's kind of only, there's no reason to pan to the left, because panning to the left is just oncoming traffic. So if I knew that I was only going to pan to the right I could have also tilted the camera more to the right to take that seam that was here, and put it back behind my body.

So with a little careful planning I can avoid the seams. This is really cool as far as I'm concerned, because for situations where I can't do a camera move, I'm thinking GoPro type situations where I want an action camera in a place, but I don't know for sure what I want to point it at, and where I might want to have some dynamic movements. This is a way I can get those. Now, my image quality here is not as good as what I'm going to get out of a GoPro, but if I'm working small, it's going to sharpen up a lot, and with a little bit of work I can actually pull a lot more detail out of it.

So, even if you're not sold on the image quality yet, this is something that's only going to improve, and it opens up an entirely new application for these 360 cameras. Not only are they a tool for getting full immersive 360, they're a tool for getting regular video. They're a tool for having a tremendous amount of control over shooting regular video in what would otherwise be very difficult circumstances.