Last week we walked a 25 mile loop around the South Downs Way over 2 days, staying overnight at an old inn. This is a 15 minute collection of moments I filmed on the Theta so that you can walk it with us!
It was wild and windy, and there were lots of pubs and cliffs and sheep. The South Downs Way is an ancient path in the south coast of England. Bill Bryson described this part of it as “one of the great walks of England… On a sunny day like this one, it is a world of simple, bright elements; green land, white cliffs, deep blue sea, matching sky.”
I shot and cut this on holiday last week, and now I’m busy at work this week – so although I want to cut it down and add titles, I thought I’d post it here now as a first draft.
I’d be interested to know how it works for you in VR as a longer video, with time to look around and see the sights.
Hey Rupert. How do you view this stuff. Seeing more of it about these days. What’s your workflow fir editing and previewing. Do you have to cut wearing an oculus rift
Hey Adam! How are you?!
The Ricoh Theta S shoots using two fisheye lenses, which it records as two circles onto an HD frame.
Then they have a Desktop app which does two things – it converts those circles into a 1920×960 file which is easily viewable as a whole frame. (A bit like an anamorphic conversion)
And it allows you to see it as a 360 video that you can move around up/down/left/right in.
I drop those converted clips into Premiere and cut them together – not viewing them as 360 but just as the whole picture, then export them as a 1920×960 H264 15mbps file. Finally YouTube provide a desktop app which writes some metadata into the file to say that it’s an Equirectangular 360 file. Then you upload that and YouTube sees that it’s a 360 file because of the metadata, and so displays it in a 360 player. Facebook also recognises it when you upload the same file, because of the YouTube metadata.
Also…
The Theta conversion application is slow, and you can only do one at a time, so I created a Mac desktop app to batch feed it files, which means I can shoot 100 shots like I did for this, and then let it convert overnight.
I’m planning to write all this up and publish my batch conversion app.
Very cool! I like that you made this work for both flat and spherical (I see lots forgetting that). Also, publish that batch conversion app – I need one!