This year we've seen numerous affordable consumer 360 VR cameras hit the shelves and the Mashable video team is eager to try them. Recently the Ricoh came out with their Theta S 360 VR camera and resident BMX stuntman/Video Producer Jon Lynn took it for a spin around New York City and the results are pretty cool. But we had a few hiccups in the post process, so we wanted to share some of our experience.
Say you've recorded an awesome day out with your friends and want to share it with the world. There is some sort of sharing function directly from the mobile app but instead we want to edit in Adobe Premiere. If you pull the video files directly off the device using a USB cable, this is what you get.
The desktop app does not like these files. In order to get any useful files you need to download the video files to your mobile app one by one via the device's wi-fi. Unfortunately this is a slow, tedious process. In one example I transferred a 12 second, 24MB file to my iPhone6 and it took 70 seconds. In my testing I was shooting a minute or two at a time and had about 15 files, so this took a while to get them onto my phone.
From here you can view them in the Theta app in 360. Unfortunately the app does not use your iPhone's accelerometer like the YouTube player does. But it's still pretty cool to swipe around on the screen to view the full 360.
Right: Once in the mobile app you can view your video and swipe around." />
Now that your footage is in your app you can watch it. As we said, the app doesn't respond to the accelerometer like the YouTube 360 player, but at least it's watchable and interactive. We want to edit and upload this footage to YouTube.
(My own preference for pulling photos and video off of my iPhone is Mac's built in Image Capture utility. Luckily the video clips end up in your camera roll and not locked away inside of the app. Find your video clips and grab them.)
You can upload your raw clips to YouTube and the player recognizes these as a 360 video. You might need to wait a few minutes and refresh your browser until the little arrow indicator appears in the upper left corner of the video.
Now onto editing the footage. For that, we're using Adobe Premiere. Your preview will look a little weird but you can see the image. We're not trying anything fancy here, just some cuts and adding music. You can see our usual Mashable watermark in the upper right corner but this will just end up getting distorted. For the purposes of this post we're not going to get into that.
Now that you've exported your edit you can upload to YouTube, right? Nope. The export does not retain the necessary metadata in the file from the camera to tell YouTube this is a 360 video - we need to add this back.
Luckily there are tools for this and some documentation on YouTube's site.
We used the 360 Video Metadata app for Mac. It's simple. Open the video file in the app, click the "Inject" and you are prompted to name the file. Upload this file to YouTube and you are done.
Here's Mashable Video Producer Jon Lynn riding around New York City with the Theta mounted to his handlebars. We recommend opening this on your mobile device for the best viewing experience. The YouTube app responds to your accelerometer and you are virtually sitting on his handlebars.
