Hey guys, it’s Gaba VR,
and this time I show you how you can edit and export your 360 videos
for YouTube or any other social media platforms.
Right now I’m in the middle of creating my next course to my channel,
about 360 reframing techniques for professional use,
but besides, I keep on shooting 360 contents, too,
and some of you guys asked me about my workflow of editing these videos.
Well, I’ve already talked about a lot of things in this topic,
among others like color grading, stabilization and nadir replacement...
I don’t say that this is the best method ever to edit 360 videos,
but this is the way I do this both in professional and private projects.
So, let’s jump into it.
Planning our workflow, we have a couple of options.
First, we can do some adjustments and render our video footages
with a software provided by our camera manufacturer.
For instance, Insta360 users can download and use Insta360 studio.
It has a couple of advantages,
as you can pre-cut your clips, preparing for further editing,
you can stabilize them and refine stitching.
But of course, it makes your workflow way longer,
as you have to go thru all your recordings and you have to wait all the renderings to be done.
Personally, I don’t prefer double processing my videos,
so in most of the cases I start with the non-stitch workflow.
It means, after installing the Insta360 plugin,
I can import the raw insv files directly into Premiere Pro.
It’s very important that I select only one video from each pair
(you know, from the front and back lens), so I can avoid duplications in Premiere.
Now, the Insta 360 plugin automatically makes some adjustments,
just like in the standalone app.
But, of course, we can play around with further settings.
I right click on the footage in the project folder,
and I go to the ‘Source settings’ to get access to further options in stitching and stabilization .
Unfortunately, these settings are not so reliable here, in Premiere.
I mean, if you close and reopen your project, some of these settings will be lost.
So in such cases, when I need Dynamic stitching or I use a camera case or whatever,
I prefer working with ‘pre-rendered’ clips, instead of the non-stitch workflow.
Anyway, if you only have one or two clips in the sequence which need special settings,
you can still work this way,
but you should double check everything in the Source Settings before rendering.
But now, let’s continue editing.
After importing my videos into Premiere, I make sure that my Sequence settings totally fit to the clips.
So usually I pick my first video and create a New Sequence.
This way I can be sure, that my video fits to the timeline perfectly
in terms of video and audio, too.
And then I move the rest of my clips to that timeline.
Of course, if I was shooting with different settings, with different resolutions,
I can create further Sequences to arrange them.
But when I only have 5.7K videos, they go to the same timeline.
And now, as I press the play button I can see how my computer handles these videos,
while the Insta360 plugin stitches them in the background.
Of course, working on the same computer, I know what limitations it has,
and even though I have quite a powerful PC, I prefer creating proxies before starting editing.
And at this point we have to decide whether we spend some time with
pre-rendering our videos in Insta360 studio or spend a little bit less time with creating proxies.
Because it’s true, that we gain some time with the non-stitch workflow,
but we also lose time with creating proxies for a smooth playback.
It depends on you, which method you prefer.
But in my case, I like to create proxies for a practical reason,
because these 360 videos are huge and they need huge storage capacity.
I like to keep and save my raw materials,
so if I created a stitched version of all of my clips, keeping both the original and pre-rendered files
I would need way bigger hard drives to store them all.
But using proxies saves me a lot of space,
and even more, I can delete these files after I finished working on a video.
It won’t affect my Project, as I still have all the raw materials,
and all my editings will be there in Premiere,
and I can open it anytime in the future, if needed.
But of course, if you don’t have a strong computer,
maybe, it would be recommended to create proxies anyway,
doesn’t matter if you rendered your videos in Insta360 studio beforehand, or not.
But now, let’s see how proxies work.
I select all of my videos, right click on them,
I select Proxies and Create Proxies.
Here I have some default settings, and usually I pick up one of the low-res options,
and que them in Encoder.
Unfortunately, the basic proxy settings are not optimized for 360 videos,
so we can see black bars on the top and bottom of the frame during editing.
But now, I just turn off Proxies for a while, and turn on the 360 preview.
If you don’t have any of these icons here, click on the plus button add them to this panel.
Clicking on the 360 view, I can see my videos in the 360 space,
and I can look around, right here, in Premiere.
But the next step is customizing this preview.
I right click on the window and first, I hide the controllers.
I don’t like them.
And then I right click again, and go to the VR Video settings
to resize my preview window.
I change the vertical field of view to 60 degrees.
This way, I can see everything in a more common aspect ratio.
And now, if I turn on Proxies,
you can see, how those black bars on the top and bottom affect the 360 view.
You can see small black circles on the sky and on the ground.
But don’t worry: it won’t affect the final look of our videos.
These are the basics how I set up a project,
and then I start cutting the clips, creating the movie.
When it’s done it’s really important to check out and correct the horizon lines, if needed
and set up the main direction of the single videos,
to make consistency between the different clips.
And then I can play around with color grading and further editing.
It’s really important, that I always turn off Proxies during color grading,
so I can see the clips in full resolution, and I can see their effect perfectly.
Color grading is one of the last steps, so at that point I don’t playback my video.
I rather watch my clips as stills, making sure that I have a nice and balanced image.
And besides watching the full picture, I check it out in 360, too.
I color grade my videos using Adjustment layers,
so I can turn on and off my effects with one single click if needed.
I can watch my video without grading, just to check out cuts and rhythm of my movie anytime.
But using Adjustment layers, it’s very important to take care of the cuts.
In 360 videos I don’t like hard cuts, so I apply a smooth transition almost everywhere.
And I have to create a transition between the adjustment layers, too,
unless there will be a visible color change at each and every cut.
But creating the same transition between the Adjustment layers is not a good solution.
It generates artefacts.
So usually I arrange my Adjustment layers in two rows,
and create a manual fade in and fade out, keyframing their transparency.
So practically I create a kind of manual crossfade between them,
but this time there will be no artefacts during rendering.
And when everything is done, and I saved my project,
it’s time to render my video.
If I start working in the beginning of the timeline,
and I have nothing after the end, I can simply click on export.
But if I don’t have such a clean timeline, first I have to set the locators
to the beginning and the end of my movie before exporting.
I have my own presets for rendering 360 videos.
I keep the original size: in my case, it’s usually 5.7K.
I export in mp4 H.264 with target bitrate around 50 mbps
and maximum bitrate around 60.
Of course, you can go even higher, but in most of the cases it’s enough for me.
And I make sure that I check in VR rendering, so the video will contain all the metadata
which help YouTube or Facebook to recognize the 360 video.
And I don’t need to inject metadata afterwards.
So basically, that’s all.
I prefer exporting with Adobe Encoder,
because as the software has to stitch the raw videos
and apply all the effects in the same time during rendering,
sometimes we can meet encoding errors.
It depends on your computer setup, but there can be some critical points in your editing,
for instance if you use masks, multiple video layers upon each other
and complicated things like that.
So if you run into such a problem,
exporting in Adobe Encoder can help you to locate where the problem is.
Premiere Pro simply crashes with an error message and you never know why,
while Encoder saves your broken video, too, so you can see which frame caused the error,
and you can play around with the editing at that point.
Maybe you have to turn off an effect, or pre-render a short sequence before the final export,
or maybe, you can simply restart your computer or the Encoder and the problem simply disappears.
But the point is that you can locate and hopefully solve any problem in rendering.
After all, I hope this brief overview will help you to make your own video editing workflow faster,
easier or simply more efficient,
and you like these tips and tricks.
If you do, please thumbs up
and for further 360 contents and tutorials, please subscribe to my YouTube channel,
and if you have any questions in this topic, please leave a comment below,
and I do my best to help you, guys.
See you next time!