Do you want to get paid and work as a professional DIT on a 360 VR film set or commercial?
Welcome to our brand new series on becoming a VR DIT, hosted by Matthew from Light Sail VR.
If you don't know Matthew, he is the VR wizard behind the recent 360 commercial for Adidas
and many more Hollywood-level VR productions. In this series, we will cover what a professional
DIT is. How to build a DIT Cart with a custom build computer and live monitoring systems.
We will show case how to shoot with the Blackmagic 12K to create 12K 360 videos with
the best image quality. We will talk about media management - such as offloading and
backing up your media safe and fast. We will even talk about Touchdesigner,
STMap, PTGui for live monitoring within a VR headset like Oculus Quest 2.
And most importantly, a VR DIT is there to help the cinematographer, help the director,
and help all the stakeholders who have creative sayings in the project, to make sure what you
capture on set is something that everyone love. This is why having a capable VR DIT on set
is so important. And we will teach you how in 3 separated video tutorials. Let's dive right in.
so what is a dit a dit stands for digital imaging technician but really what that translates to is
someone on set who collaborates with the director and the cinematographer and other stakeholders
to showcase what is on the camera and display in a format that people can creatively collaborate
with so typically in a digital workflow which is what the digital imaging technician stands for
cameras these days shoot in a flat log profile everything's really flat the colors are all off
right if you look at that on set you wouldn't have any idea whether it's exposed properly whether the
colors are correct so your dit takes that image applies what's called a lut or a lookup table
does some sort of color correction to that right and displays the image out so that the client so
that the directors the cinematographer can be looking at an image that's not the final grade
but in the right color space right because a lot of these cameras shoot in what's known as a log
color format and you want to translate into something called a rec 709 color format now
in vr we've got a couple of really interesting challenges many 360 cameras don't really offer
a great way to view what you're actually seeing and it's not like you can stand necessarily behind
the camera all the time and also view it uh so it presents some interesting you know problems
on the blackmagic 12k one of the amazing things is it contains all of the professional outputs
one would need to actually build a professional dit setup that's what i've built so what i
expect a dit on my set to do is to be able to take the feed take the fisheye footage
wrap it to equirectangular and then wrap it again to rectilinear so equirectangular is of course the
360 degree like flat map view right rectilinear is taking this spherical fisheye and making it
like the 2d image and hopefully what i've tried to do is match like for example youtube's 360
field of view although that can be changed so one of the apps that i use to do that on this machine
is called TouchDesigner there's a couple things that you need here on touch designer
so one of the first things you need to do is you need to bring your video signal in
so from the camera i've got an sdi out it is going into the blackmagic 12k on the computer and into
touch designer and that is my fisheye image okay and if i was to put that on this monitor
it would look kind of like this this cable is sdi goes out of the camera and into the blackmagic 8k
deck link card and into touch designer and the raw signal is the fisheye and that's what's
on the screen right here right so this is the hal 250 it's 250 degrees edged edge horizontal
and you can see it clips on the top so it's about 203 degrees on top um at least that's
what i've calculated it out so it's fair good it's enough overlap to definitely stitch it
so what we want to do as a dit is we need to take this image which looks nothing like
the final product and turn it into something that actually makes sense and the way we do
that is by using something called an st map these can be generated there are these like
green and yellow and red maps and these can be generated using Andrew Hazelden's KartaVR
tools uh bless that man he is just a genius and a gem of a human being and that'll take our fisheye
lens and unwrap it into our equirectangular so we'll end up with something that looks like this
right there um and i think this is flips so let me unflip that there we go so now we see it in
the spherical format and that's pretty awesome because now we can see everything that's being
acquired in a format that's traditional to how we would see it in the edit page right seeing
it all at once yes it's still distorted but you know um everything's a little bit easier to see
but this isn't really what the final is going to look like so what i expected dit to do is
also to take that and to unwrap that and this is why touch designer is so great so we'll take
our spherical image that we have here and what we're going to do is we're going to project it
on the inside of a 3d sphere same thing that you do inside like a video rendering engine right
and then we're gonna put our camera inside that sphere right in the center that looks at it so
we can see our texture and when all that is hooked up what we have is this right now this is looking
into the wall right but i've built in a handy slider here that allows me to move back and forth
and see and pan around just like i would on youtube for example in this field of view right
now is currently set up to be similar to youtube it's not 100 but again you're just trying to get
in the ballpark it's pretty good a couple of other things to note on the blackmagic camera
itself it is recording flat it's recording log you do want to make sure that in the menus here
go over to the monitor function and display your 3d lut
um that's really important because if you see it off it's very very flat but i can go ahead
and put the display light on and now i've got my my color balance stuff
there's so much more you can still do with this really at the start of just exploring this but
this system's been working really well for me now you'll notice i also have the sumo monitor here
what is so fantastic about this is that i can go ahead and hit record
on the take as the actors are happening and we'll record right to this s this um ssd right
in here so if i click record there the actors do all the stuff here i'm gonna bounce over
there's here boy hugh doing a great job and then when we go here and hit stop i can then
immediately jump to playback and that's really phenomenal because now i can see
what that last take was on youtube and i can show the stakeholders on set and i can show the
director and i can show anybody that needs to make a creative decision about that last take without
needing to bring it into the computer to stitch it to run it through Mistika which is great and does
give you a great experience but it also takes time however that is the second part of what a dit does
so monitoring on set i think is really important for VR DIT some people might
argue that a vtr technician is more like the proper role for that but i think that
getting the image to look the way people need to see it is part of what a dit in vr should do
the second part of course is managing media blackmagic what i love about it is it's got
one ssd super fast usbc it's a thousand megabytes per second read write right and that very very
quickly can go on to some hard drives to be backed up on uh but not all cameras are like
that let's take the Insta360 Titan there's eight sd cards let's take the YI Halo 17 micro sd cards your
vr dit needs to be able to manage all that data and bring it in and work with it quickly
um i was on a job we were shooting on zcam s1 four cards director wanted to see stuff right away
had my four card sd reader popped in all four cards
very fast transfer brought it in stitched it was able to show something in under an hour now
i know it sounds like a pretty long time but for all that work it's not that much and i think
a vrdit needs to understand the stitching process and be confident enough to do that
here's a really important point to understand if you want to get into being a vr dit
you need to understand what a usb bus is right so yes you have maybe 12 usb ports on this particular
motherboard but you only really have two usb buses right and that's going to share
500 megabytes per second of bandwidth right so if i have uh sd cards that are like 10 sd cards
suddenly my rate of transfer for each of those sd cards is only 50 megabytes per second and that's
really much slower than i want to be so by adding usb cards by using super fast ssd hard drives you
can now offload media a lot faster a lot of times people just think like ah thunderbolt ah usbc
oh that's fast oh and they forget to look at like well what is the media that you're offloading to
because the maximum read write speed of your media is typically your bottleneck and then after
that it becomes well are you saturating your bus what's the maximum rewrite speed of the actual bus
and in the case of usb you've got a total five 3.0 usb 3.0 you've got five gigabytes per second
so then you can just start doing some basic math right about well how many cards am i gonna offload
what cameras are they coming with what are the sizes of the cards and how fast does that need
to offload onto a drive and be backed up to another drive on set you want to use certain
tools to back up your media from your cards the tool that i use the most is called hedge
i like hedge because it's really fast it does do checksum verification i find it a
little bit faster than like ShotPut Pro which does a very detailed checksum verification um
but hedge is great and it can copy your one card to two hard drives at a time
which definitely saves you a bunch of energy so how do you generate this st map
um that could be a tutorial in and of itself but you need to understand how pt gui works pt gui is
another tool that vr dits need to understand because they need to understand how to take
a fisheye lens from any vr camera unwrap it and stitch it together to generate something like this
once you can generate these st maps you now have a real custom way to be able to do live previews
like this to be able to work in DaVinci resolve uh to do like color correction with the KartaVR
toolset so that i think is pretty important
we built a dit cart with a custom-built computer we have a monitoring situation we have a
blackmagic 12k with my 250 lens we've talked about how a vrdit needs to not only be you know your
downloader of media and backing up all that stuff but also really needs to be able to understand and
handle the image on set and all of this was born out of a necessity because i had clients asking
me for things for solutions that weren't invented yet right or that i didn't have an off-the-shelf
answer for so you know when a client says hey what is this going to look like on youtube
it's not really acceptable to take it from the cards stitch together upload it to youtube and
wait for it to process in order to answer that question they want to know now on set so by using
touch designer and by using a rig like this we can throw up an image right on the monitor here that
has the same field of view and the same unwrapping as youtube so that way they can see for example
what's my starting frame you know we just did a recent project with adidas
and that was really important because they brought up an excellent question hey this is living on.com
it's on the web people are viewing this mainly on their desktop computers what happens if they don't
click and interact with it what's the default frame and that way we could view everything on
set and assure people that yes the head height is really good yes the spacing of all the women is
appropriate hey everything that we want in frame if no one were to touch it is perfect and that
is what a dit is there to help do it's helped to it's there to help the cinematographer it's help
the director and help all the stakeholders who have a creative say in the project to make sure
that what you're capturing on set is something that everyone loves because that's the goal right
Thank you for watching episode one on how to be a professional VR DIT.
Next episode, we will cover the Blackmagic 12K workflow and how to build Matthew's DIT Cart.
We will give you a list of hardwares to build in the most cost-effective way. In episode three,
we will talk about live monitoring inside Oculus Quest 2 onset using Oculus Air Link,
Touchdesigner, NDI, and Matthew's Free Unity Software. So don't forget to subscribe to
CreatorUp and hit the notification bell. If you need more help on professional DIT workflow,
how to use Shotput Pro to backup, how to manage media for Insta360 Titan, Kandao Obsidian Pro or
Insta360 Pro 2 - then you need to check out our 360 VR Filmmaking masterclass. Link right here.
I need your feedback. If you want to invite Matthew back to our 360 VR Filmmaking Masterclass,
and learn how to create STMAP and dewrap any fisheye with PTGui 12, comment below
and let us know what kind of professional workflow you want to learn. So we can create them for you.
We want to support anyone who wants to become a 360 VR filmmaker and tell your story in VR.
I hope to see you in my masterclass, or see you on a professional film set. Ciao!
maya angelo famously said people will forget what you said people will
forget what you did but people will never forget how you make them feel
the ability to make your audience feel love or hate join or despair fear or enjoyment
had never been more at our fingertips than now with virtual reality 360 storytelling
if you have ever wondered how to make a film documentary or fictional peace using this new
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please come join me as it is my mission to give you this power to touch to inspire and to create
in this 360 vr filmmaking master class we will give you a framework to work from as
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you