- In this video we'll run through
how to edit 360 degree footage, of a 360 camera,
and the key things you need to know
when editing in 360.
(bass and drums)
Hey, it's Justin Brown, here from Primal Video.
We release a ton of content
to help you get better results with your videos, faster.
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and all the links to everything
that we mention in this video,
you can find linked in the description below.
So let's jump into it.
We've released a lot of videos in the past few months
on 360 videos,
and it's getting increasingly popular,
as the technology becomes better,
and the prices come down significantly.
If you've watched this channel much,
then you'll know my thoughts on 360.
It's an incredibly powerful medium,
for really engaging with your audience,
and inviting them into your world.
When it comes to editing 360 video footage,
you can imagine things get a little bit different,
to regular video.
Support for 360 is rolling out
to many of the major editing software packages,
and in this video we're going to take a look
at the process for editing 360 video,
and my tips to get the most out of 360.
And make sure you stick around to the end,
because we're going to cover
the best export settings for 360.
Before we start, it's important to be aware
of the key differences with 360 video.
The first one is the obvious one,
is that we're dealing with 360 video and not regular video,
meaning that the resolutions,
or the size of the video files
are normally quite a bit different
to what you would find as normally
a 1080p, or 4k video file.
So essentially what you're editing
is a different resolution video file,
and you want to make sure you're keeping that resolution
native, or you're editing in the same format
and the same size that has come off your 360 camera,
but the file that you're editing is what's called
an equirectangular video file.
And that's where you've got a video file
which is the flattened version of the 360 image,
so whether your 360 camera has two cameras,
four cameras, eight cameras,
or however many cameras you've got in your 360 camera,
what you'll be editing is an equirectangular version
so it's the flattened 360 video file,
from your camera.
So what we're not going to cover here
in this video is how to get your video footage
into that format,
if it's not natively done in the camera.
Some of the cameras will require some processing,
or some conversion to get it into
that equirectangular format.
Depending on the camera you've got,
leave that one up to you,
but what we're talking about here is editing
the equirectangular format,
which is the process that you'd have to get to
to be able to edit anyway.
And the second thing you need to be aware of
when you're editing 360 video
is when you're adding things like titles or animations
or graphics to your videos,
and how they're placed in that 360 space,
so they look good when someone's watching them
back on their mobile device, or with a headset on.
Okay, so now that we've covered off
on the basics let's jump into the 360 video editing process.
Now we recently did a video on the best
360 video editing software,
and I'll put a link up in the cards now
if you haven't seen it yet,
but in reality there's not currently a huge difference
between the two best options.
And the two best options in my opinion,
at this point in time,
a cyberlink power director for Windows,
and Adobe Premiere Pro, both Mac and PC.
So those are the top two options,
and really the process with both of them
is pretty much the same.
So in this video we're going to use Adobe Premiere,
as it's one of the more popular options.
Now again if you're not using Adobe Premiere,
you could grab the trial version,
and there'll be a link in the description below,
or you can follow along in whatever
video editing software you're using that supports 360.
So it might be Power Director,
or at the time you're watching this,
there could be others that support it natively as well.
I know that Final Cut has it coming really soon.
So you can just follow along in your own software
even if you don't have Adobe Premiere.
Okay so here we are in Adobe Premiere Pro,
and I've got my 360 video footage imported here.
What we'll do now is select the video footage
and drag it down,
to this icon here to create a new sequence,
or a new timeline
with that video footage in it.
The reason we do that is so that the sequence,
or timeline is created with the exact same settings,
and resolution, as our video files.
And that's really important for 360 video files,
as you'll see here,
as the resolution of these files
is 3,840 by 1920, so it's not like a regular video file.
These files are a bit different,
so you need to make sure that you are 100 percent
using the same resolution that your camera is recording in,
and that you are editing in that same resolution.
But you can see this is the footage that we've got.
And this was shot on a cruise,
back when I was testing out the Samsung Gear 360.
So this footage is a bit old now,
but you can see the footage that I've got here
is just like normal video footage,
so you can just treat it as you would
normal video footage that you would normally see
in Adobe Premiere.
We'll lower the quality here,
so that we're gonna get a bit better playback
to probably about a quarter.
And if we play back the video now
you'll see that these video files are
in the equirectangular video file format.
So that means they've already been stitched.
And you can see that there actually is a stitch line
in the video footage here and here,
but this is essentially what you'll be editing off,
so at this point you can make any cuts in your timeline,
using command K and picking up clips
and moving them around.
So you can edit as you normally would,
and do all of your usual editing tasks,
but it's not until you start bringing in
texts and effects and start looking
at how everything looks and works together
in 360 video space,
which is where it becomes a little bit different.
So to do that you come up here to your playback monitor,
and hit this little settings spanner,
and you want to choose VR Video, then choose Enable.
And what that's given you now
is a 360 view where you can click and drag,
to look around in 360 space.
So that you can see what's going on in your video.
So you can see that if we press spacebar to place this,
this guy here is playing mini-golf on the boat,
and you can see if I spin around the other way,
you can see the pool,
there's people in the pool,
and we'll just transition then into the next shot as well.
So this is 360 video editing.
So from here, you can apply things like color correction.
so you can come down here to your video effects,
and under color adjustments let's add the lumetri color.
Then we come up here to effect controls,
and you've got the same controls that you would find
in any other video clip.
So you can brighten and darken your clips,
and apply all your effects as you normally would.
So I just removed that now.
So to show you how to bring in other graphics or titles
into your scenes, I'll just import
our standard primal video lower third super,
or the title screen.
Okay so here is our lower thirds super,
we'll just come back to the start here,
so let's say I want to bring up the title here
at this point.
We can do as we normally would,
we'll click and drag our title down into the timeline.
And if you hit play then you're not gonna see it,
because it's somewhere else in that 360 space.
So what you can do is turn off the 360 view,
and you'll see it there,
as a normal video file.
So if we play that now then you can see that
that animates in at that point.
So we can pick it up and move it around
as you normally would here.
You can come up to effect controls,
and you can adjust the position,
and move it around this way which in turn
will move it around in 360 space,
or we can kick back into our 360 view,
VR enable, spin around and go and see it,
there it is down there.
And then we can then move it and reposition it
using the same tools here.
So we can slide it around left and right,
and we can bring it up a bit there,
and adjust the height,
and you can see that if we play that back,
the animation and everything still works.
But what you'll normally find is that the scaling
is normally going to be out,
so you'll want to adjust that,
and scale things down a little bit more
than you normally would for 360 video,
because on playback in 360 they are stretched up.
So we can reposition that now using X and Y,
and now when we play that back
and move that around you can see that the title
is playing back and it's actually locked in
at that position.
And it animates in, and animates back out.
So that's how easy it is to add in and position
your graphic elements, and to scale them
and position them where you'd like them
in the 360 space.
So in regards to an actual Adobe title,
if you want to add one of those in,
we'll come down here to the type tool,
now we will actually need to turn off the 360 viewing,
so we'll turn that off and now you can click,
with the title tool selected,
click on your video, and type out your title.
Test tile, test one,
and we can add another title down here as well,
test title two,
okay so we've got two titles there,
and we can click and drag and reposition those
wherever we'd like.
And then when we view them in 360 space,
VR enabled,
then we spin around you can see them there,
test title two, the other one is back around here
on the ground, test title one.
So it's really easy to be able to add in
your titles in 360 space,
and it's all just about being aware
where they're gonna show up,
and you might want to kick it into this VR view
or this 360 view,
to be able to see where everything actually is,
and how they'll look on playback for your viewer.
In regards to the actual exporting of your video files
this is another critical step.
So you need to go file, export, media,
as you normally would.
Now to import in here as we mentioned at the start,
to match our camera resolution to our timeline resolution
to also our export resolution.
So you need to match the same across all three.
Otherwise your 360 video isn't going to play back properly.
So what I like to use here is the YouTube built-in preset
for 4K, because it's actually 4K 360 video footage
that we're looking at here,
and then we just need to match the width and the height
of our exported file to our camera,
and to our timeline so we just tick this little box here,
so that'll match the source and you can see
that's removed the two black bars,
the top and bottom of our preview there.
And you'll also want to scroll down here
and tick this little box that says
Video is VR, and you want to make sure it's ticked.
If it's not ticked, then your video
is not gonna be encoded correctly,
which means that the metadata,
or the tags inside the video,
aren't going to tell places like YouTube,
Vimeo or Facebook that your video is actually a 360 video.
And really if you are editing in 360,
Adobe Premiere normally does a really good job
at auto-detecting that your video is 360,
and this should automatically be ticked,
but it's a good idea to come down and double-check
that it's ticked before you export your video.
So then you just need to hit export,
and you will have a 360 video that is ready for upload,
to places like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo,
or any other provider that supports 360 video files.
Alright, so that was the walk-through
of 360 video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Now the fundamentals are gonna be very much the same
in other 360 video editing software,
like Power Director, so you can apply those there, too.
But in regards to the export settings,
that we promised you at the start of the video,
what are the best export settings for 360?
Well there's really two things that you need
to keep in mind when you're exporting.
The first one is that the quality definitely matters.
So the way that 360 works when you're playing back
a 360 video is it's actually
zooming in on your footage, and making it bigger,
and stretching it up to give it that spherical,
360 look or feel.
So you want to make sure that you're exporting
at the highest quality possible,
which means the highest bit rate possible.
So if you've got a 4K 360 camera,
then you'll want to make sure
that you start with the YouTube preset for 4K.
And I think at this point in time,
that's got a megabits per second,
or a bitrate setting, of 40 megabits per second.
Now I strongly advise to not go less than that,
unless you really need to keep your file sizes down.
Wherever possible, upload the highest quality video
that you can to places like YouTube or Facebook,
and let them deal with the compression beyond that.
So once you've selected the preset for YouTube 4K,
again, depending on which camera you've got,
and the resolution that your 360 video is captured at,
you then need to match 100 percent
the resolution for the file that you're exporting,
so that it matches the file that was originally created
from your camera.
Now the 360 videos are actually captured
at a different resolution than standard video,
so it's not a 720p, 1080p or 4K video resolution.
They're actually different.
So you need to make sure that those match.
And the way that you can do that in Adobe Premiere,
once you've picked the preset that you want to export to,
you can tick the box that says Match Sequence Settings,
and that will automatically match the resolution
that was used in your editing,
in your timeline, which should be the resolution
that your camera created the original files at,
if you followed the process in this video.
And the last export setting that you need
to make sure is selected,
is right down at the bottom on the export window,
in Adobe Premiere there's a box to tick for VR Video.
You need to make sure that box is ticked,
and that's going to make it easier for YouTube
and Facebook to know that the video that you've got there
is actually 360.
It's actually going to dump some metadata into the video
saying that it's a 360 video.
So you need to make sure that that's ticked.
Now on the topic of editing,
if you're looking to edit faster
and get better results without wasting time
or any rework, then check out the video
linked on-screen now which runs through
the ultimate video editing process,
and includes a free checklist guide
to help get you started.
I'll see you soon.