Lessons

Lesson Info

Other VR/360 Accessories

When we look at stands, I we do a lot of run and gun stuff into a lot of lightweight things, and we do a lot of stuff in the field. And so having really heavy C stands is not something we typically work with. When we do a studio shoot, we do something that scripted and organized, and there's a bigger crew than having heavy stands is really nice because the cameras don't wobble and you feel very safe about it all. Um, but in general, we use pretty lightweight impact light stance. Um, one thing that's nice toe have onset is usually a sort of shorter stand because in VR, which will go into is you want to make sure that the camera is positioned so that the audience has a place in the scene. And so maybe in a scene you might want the audience to be kind of in a circle of people sitting in chairs. Um, and I want the audience to be sitting in that moment and so you can take a shorter stand and put it on a seat. Um, and then when the audience actually puts the headset on the feel as if they're...

sitting in that seat. So we like to keep around some short stands, Um, and some sort of room or normal height stands power. Of course, these air typically just a series of GoPro's, so they do the batteries to die pretty quickly and taking the wriggle apart and taking out the batteries is, you know, in replacing the batteries is not a very easy task. So what we do instead is we fill up a 1,000,000 little portable battery bricks and fast charging battery. Ricks. And then we, you know, send those. So we, like, sort of have them is kits. And any time we stopped down, the recording will be powering up where you kind of top off the GoPro's as we go. Um, so that's been really effective on and then in order to either. If if there's an opportunity where we you know, we're gonna go stop down for lunch, we could take the whole rig charge. All eight cameras are all 12 cameras. Are all 16 cameras with these sort of rapid 10 port USB chargers. Or we could just fill up our bricks again, you know? So while we're shooting, we're filling our bricks when we're done shooting were using the bricks to feed to the defeat of the camera rig. Um, and this is one approach. This is Ah, an approach that you wouldn't have to do. Um, you enough to use this for one of those sort of, um, all in one box rigs. So the GoPro Odyssey rig that doesn't require this That has its own battery solution. And it's one unit. The dark corner rig, which was the Sony A seven round up that also has sort of these big battery packs is designed to all have one battery, so each camera is not charging separately. But when you're putting together kind of a GoPro set up this, we found this to be the most effective way on dso they sort of as you're shooting, they're draining a little bit. And then every time you're done shooting your topping them off when it comes to memory, just think it's going to take a lot of memory to make a VR film to make a 3 60 films. So, um, for every minute of footage that you would normally get in a regular film, if you have four cameras in this VR film, you're going to get four times as much footage for that same minute of time. Now, if you have eight cameras around your VR rig, you're gonna get eight times as much footage for every minute right of time. Now, if you have 16 cameras, you end up with 16 times as much footage for the same minute. So very quickly, um, that minute becomes extremely, extremely heavy. Piece of data, extremely heavy file. And once it's all stitched, it's like this heavy file. So we're creating these very big heavy files. Um, because they have a lot of cameras involved. Now, if you're shooting with just a Samsung Ah, little gear 3 60 Not a big deal to very lightweight, small, low rez cameras. You know, not so bad. But when you get into those sort of Sony a seven rigs, um, and even a GoPro rig were shooting at high resolution. You, uh it does add up quickly. And so having storage kind of in mind before you go out and shoot is really important, because otherwise you won't have anywhere to offload it to. You literally couldn't have that much storage on your computer. Um, So, uh, what we do is we typically get two rounds of cards. Um, you know how many cameras there are in the rig? Well, just get double those cards, eh? So we have a backup set in case on the shoot A card errors, or we fill up everything from the first round. Will just we can keep shooting. Went off to offload because it takes a long time to offload this footage. Of course. Is this so much? Um, we bring around portable hard drives for end of the day. You know, we'll dump the footage, organize it, will bring it into a hard drive. Um, and then on then, at the end of the day, at the end of the week, we kind of archive everything into ah ah, bigger, deeper storage, using raid. So that just backs it up and make sure it's not going anywhere. Um, because sometimes these portable drives can can fit. Although, well, we really like our lace Lissy rug IDs. But, you know, we have had experiences where portable hard drives have failed, and we've been lucky to have, you know, we hadn't cleared the cards because we have that second set. So, um, so sometimes, you know, over doing it with the memory is really valuable. Um, it's kind of like having insurance policy. A lot of times you never use it. But the one time you did do that back up, um, and it mattered. It really matters. Assed faras playing back what you shot. So now you know, we've gone out, we've shot stuff, and we have our camera. We've got a microphone. When you have all the footage and you want to play it back, you're gonna need something to play back into. Now, you could upload it to Facebook, 3 60 and you could look around your phone like this, Um, and that be fine, but I'd recommend getting a quick little headset. So this is the same sun gear VR. This is the newest one. It's Navy blue. Um, very cute. And this is a Samsung phone. Um, I think it takes pretty much any modern Samsung phone. You can, uh, once you make your little file on your computer, that's 3 60 Let's say you've stitched together your shot. You've done a quick stitch of your shot. Um, and so you could think of it as sort of Daley's a lot of times on a shoot, we will shoot, let's say 12 shots or 16 shots throughout the day. We will then take those that night and stitch, do a quick stitch of each of those for about 30 seconds of the shot and then drag it all into the phone and then put the phone in the headset. And in the morning you can watch back those 12 to 16 shots and you say, like, Okay, I see what's going on here. That's kind of weird. We got too much sun. People are too far away. This one's you know that person's running by, but I'm not. But it seems kind of, you know, shaky. What's going on here? And so all of a sudden it lets you kind of review the footage you shot in a real way, in a way that's not just looking at a piece of a big quilt. Um, without this, you end up just sort of scrubbing through the footage, which is a series of pieces of quilts and imagining what the rest of the quote will look like. This is probably the most ideal wayto watch back your content, Um, and then computers, computers, computers, computers in VR. The main thing is graphics cards. So if you're gonna be experiencing a lot of er, if you're going to be editing any VR if you're going to be, you know, getting more and more into VR at highly recommend going with NVIDIA graphics card getting like you can either go to a custom piece here. You can get one that's already built. They're called V. Already. Um, they sell in video has three sort of super high end graphics cards. One is called the GTX 10 60 the GTX 10 70 lastly, the GTX 10 80. Um, I'd recommend going with a 10 or more. It is expensive. It's an expensive graphics card, but otherwise you'll have dropped frames inside your content. It can leave you. I mean, not only might the content stutter, but it literally might make you nauseous because your computer is like churning on the footage as its feeding it to you. Um, so, um, one sort of limitation in all of this is having a really high end graphics card to make sure that when you're watching things back off a computer on Oculus dropping frames and therefore making people nauseous. Um, if you're just doing lightweight normal, sort of like a quick little video for you tube with the Samsung camera. I mean, you could do all that on your laptop, you know, on a Mac pro, um, anywhere you would have premier would be okay, But when you as you get upto higher experiences or higher definition experiences, having a really powerful graphics card is just his requirement. And lastly, eyes software. So, um, what we're gonna talk about in the next video is actually around software. Um, there's a few different pieces of the pipeline. The most popular and sort of easiest to get into is ah is a suite of software by a company called Color, and it's spelled with a k k o l o r. And it was acquired by Go Pro a few years ago and they make a few different products. Um, that that entity, it's you could think of it. It sort of as an adobe umbrella with a lot of different products inside. So the color umbrella includes the products auto Pano, video pro and then auto. Pano Giga is another product inside that umbrella. Um, now these two different products, one allows you to do quick stitching and kind of setting everything up, and one allows you to do a more refined, more robust stitch. If you really want to get in there and tweak little things frame by frame, um, you know, so that you can bring them back into the other and bring it out as a video. Um, in some ways, you could think of them as you know, as really as sort of. They work together like Adobe Products work together. They can all like, link up. Eso having out of panel video pro and then auto paint gig. Oh, Giga are sort of the two main products. Now I think you're in for about a few 100 bucks to buy a seat to that software, but it's pretty powerful for what it is. The next level up the next piece suffer up outside of that for stitching. Ah, that a lot of people a lot of big studios are using is called nuke, and that's £8000. So it's a big difference. Few $100. A few $1000 sort of the next level up eso I think for in most cases this is gonna be fine, you will get you what you need. Um, and then on then some cameras actually come with their own. So part of the reason I really recommend that Google camera and and a few others the Nokia camera is that they stitch it for you. So you don't even have to go through these programs at all. They stitch the content for you, upload it, and it comes back stitched. Um, I think eventually that will happen before now. Um, the way all those GoPro set ups work and that sort of an easiest entry point is those ghost GoPro setups. Uh, in order to sit to those, you do need this software. Um and then lastly, Adobe premiere for everyone that's editing in Adobe, um, that is has become more and more a sort of of 3 60 a ble editing environment. There is a plug, a series of plug ins that Fabian will talk about, but one in particular is called skybox and that allows you to have graphics and sort of all the warping happens in the right way, so that when you put on the headset, when it's wrapped around a sphere and you're looking on the round, all the graphics makes sense and then all wonky and weird. Um, but ah, but in General, Adobe is really has become and every update has been showing that they're committed to offering up tools and being a good environment for people to edit and create content in 3 60 so that's pretty much suffer. Great. So that's all the gear that you need. Um, of course, there's, ah, few little odds and ends that I'd recommend you pick up along the way as well. A level or multi tool. Make sure to get some bongo ties. But in general, I think that should give you a lot of, uh, should get you pretty far. Um, every price point from $350 Samsung Gear Camera, $15,000 Google and GoPro Odyssey rig um, to the $60,000 Nokia, um, you know, and everything in between. And I think it's really not about the technology. There are Super Bowl commercials that are the most popular Super Bowl commercials in the world, and they cost $20 to make right. It's not about the camera issue with, and it's not about You know how high quality your graphics cards are. It's really it's about you, right? Um, no one's worried about the quality of the ink in the book. They read. They want to meet the writer. They want to hear this story. So I would say Try not to dwell too much on the products and on the tech. I know it's fun. I love it myself. But that's not really what separates people that are great at making this content in people that are not great at it. It has to do with the creator and the ideas they have.