Hello.
My name is Steven Calcote and I'm a director here at Butcher Bird Studios.
Canon asked me to give you an inside look at the editing process
on our 180 degree VR production tutorial featuring the
Canon RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye Lens.
Now the first thing that you'll learn is how we use the Canon
plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro to process the footage.
Then we'll take a look at Premiere's workflow and built in VR tools
to show how we edited everything together.
We'll also discuss a little bit about how we treated the tutorial versus
the wedding story, and then we'll output the final 180 degree VR film.
Hopefully you'll take some of these techniques
and use them in your own shows as you film with this fantastic lens.
If you haven't seen the 3D production tutorial yet,
please take a look at the link in the video description below
because you're going to want to understand how this all plays in VR.
You'll also see some other resources
and great links, so definitely check those out.
Now, let's jump in.
To kick off our post-production for the tutorial video
we used the Canon EOS VR plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro.
After downloading either the .dmg in macOS or the .exe in Windows,
double click and follow the installation prompts.
After this, the workflow will be the same for both Mac and Windows.
We'll cover how to use the plug-in within Premiere during our next section.
Note that you also have the option to use the standalone
Canon EOS VR Utility to process your footage.
But since we use an Adobe workflow at my studio, our case
study will focus on the Premiere Pro plugin.
Here's one of the footage folders captured during our film shoot.
The MP4 files contain metadata that allows the Canon EOS VR Plug-in
to automatically convert the footage into equirectangular format.
When you select one of the clips and click on the "Source"
tab under "Effect Controls," you'll see the plug-in at work.
Here you have
the ability to deactivate the automatic parallax correction or make corrections
to pan, moving the image left or right,
tilt, moving the image up or down,
and roll, rotating the image clockwise or counterclockwise.
We were careful to level each shot during production,
so we didn't need to make any adjustments to the plug-in's default settings.
Here's a pro tip: 8K footage is going to be a lot for most systems to process.
For instance, this 52 second clip has a file size of 7.9 gigabytes.
We used Premiere's built in proxy function to make footage
lighter weight and easy to edit in real time.
To use this workflow, select "Create Proxies"
and your preferred footage settings.
We like Apple ProRes since our studio uses both Mac and PC stations.
This will fire
up Adobe Media Encoder and begin processing proxies automatically.
You may want to leave
this cooking overnight if you shoot a large amount of footage.
Make sure to add the "Toggle Proxies" option to your playback toolbar.
This allows you to easily deactivate and reactivate proxies while you edit.
Proxies are on when the button is blue.
You should also drag over the "Toggle VR Video Display"
button to your playback toolbar.
This will give you a reference
view of what your audience will see in a headset.
Now let's talk about how we edited the 180 degree
VR footage.
First up, let's
check out the key sequence settings for our 180 degree VR production tutorial.
Timebase is 29.97,
frame size is 8192 by 4096, and under VR properties,
projection shows equirectangular, layout shows "Stereoscopic Side by Side"
and horizontal captured view is 180, while vertical is also 180.
Now let's talk about the editing process.
We ended our production tutorial video with a wedding montage.
It gives a sense of how one might feature some stereoscopic footage from a wedding.
This was actually our simplest edit for the show,
using only one layer of video cut to a single music track.
For this sequence, we narrowed our selection to six clips.
From there, we followed the same process you would use
for a 2D video, we trimmed the clips to focus on our favorite moments
and then joined them together for the montage.
Finally, we used
standard cross dissolves to soften the transitions.
These work as well in 3D as they do in 2D.
It's a good idea to keep checking the VR Reference View
to make sure you like all the shot details when you see them closer up.
Don't forget to turn on proxies
if your system has any issue with viewing the raw footage in real time,
of course you can also lower your playback resolution as well
for even speedier performance.
We'll cover some more advanced editing techniques later,
but let's take a moment to talk about how we outputted the show as 180
degree VR.
For the tutorial video, we focused on exports in two formats,
Oculus TV on the Meta Quest 2 headset
and 180 degree VR on YouTube.
First up, Oculus TV,
our preferred settings for viewing in Oculus are 8K, which requires
the HEVC format at 100 megabits per second.
To expose parameters for the higher bitrate settings,
first, click the "More" button under the video tab.
Then under encoding settings, change the tier parameter from "Main" to "High."
This will then allow you to enter 100 megabits per second for the target bit
rate.
For any 180 degree VR export, it's important to confirm
that "Video is VR" is checked under the video menu.
Then make sure the frame layout is set to "Stereoscopic - Side by Side."
Finally, verify that 180 is entered for both horizontal and vertical field of view.
Once the export is finished, you can load the video
directly onto your headset.
Now let's talk YouTube 180 degree VR,
where we've found ProRes produces the best quality results.
So we select QuickTime as the format
and then Apple ProRes 422 HQ under the video menu.
Under the video pull down, select "More" to reveal the VR settings
and then scroll down to the VR video section.
There, confirm that "Video is VR" has been checked
and that "Stereoscopic - Side by Side" appears in frame layout.
Also make sure that 180 is the setting for both horizontal
and vertical field of view.
Note that with the latest edition
of Premiere, you can log in and post to YouTube directly from the export menu.
This is particularly handy with large output files that you may want
to leave running overnight.
Once your video has been uploaded and YouTube has finished processing,
your viewers can move the video around in 180 degree VR using a mouse.
Notice the "VR180" label below the video title.
Now let's take a look at some advanced editing techniques for 180 degree VR.
We thought of the production tutorial as three shows in one.
First, the teaching element hosted by Brandon Chin,
second, the wedding story as told by a videographer
capturing the event stereoscopically, and third, the close up
video experience, which we featured as an additional layer of 2D video.
Here are a few of the built in Premiere functions
we used for each of these stories.
For this scene, you'll see we used a lower third
to identify the host of the production tutorial.
We could have built this text in Type Tool, but our graphic designer
sent us a PNG, so we simply added it as an additional video layer.
Then we used the "VR Plane to Sphere" effect under the "Immersive Video" submenu
of the video effects folder in the effects tab to automatically convert the layer
into a stereoscopic format that floats nicely in VR.
By the way, "Stereo Disparity" changes
the apparent depth of this layer in VR.
We used this "VR Plane to Sphere" effect any time we wanted to feature
a close up of the Dual Fisheye Lens or a view of the camera menus
or a real time reference of what a filmmaker sees through the lens
on top of the final shot in VR.
Another technique we used
involved a built-in Premiere VR Transition.
In order to show viewers we were shifting from the wedding camera
to the tutorial camera, we applied the "VR Spherical Blur Transition,"
which you can find in the "Immersive Video" category of the "Video Transitions"
folder in your effects tab.
The final advanced technique I'll mention is really a workflow consideration.
For those of you in a studio environment
like me, an efficient review process is crucial.
Now that Premiere displays Frame.io as a built-in workspace,
it's super easy to respond to review notes.
And it looks like it's time to wrap it up!
Now, whether your project consists of just a few shots or generates
hours of footage, you have a ton of flexibility given Canon's utility
and plug-in options as well as Premiere's built in VR capabilities.
Don't forget to check the video description below for some great links
and resources.
You can easily expand your stereoscopic filmmaking capabilities
by adding spatial audio or trying more VR transitions, or even by experimenting
with narrative structure, and those are just a few possibilities.
So in the end, I want to just say thanks for tuning in and checking out
how we edited and export a 180 degree VR film using the Canon EOS VR system.
I should point out, however, this is one workflow possibility of many.
The one that we featured is just what worked best for my team
and it was super efficient for us.
However, you should feel free to experiment
and optimize what works best for your own workflow.
Well, we're excited to see what you come up with creating
your own stories with the
Canon RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye Lens.