Forum Discussion
Keeping bearing constant without cropping with 3d movies
Short answer - track the movie and re-render it into a 360 panoramic format. Consider this movie (in cross-eyed side by side equirectangular format). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JXi175-W...
Yes using a proper 3d tracker rather than a panorama stitcher program is the thing to do for universal situations.
I think the 3d Camera Tracker in After Effects itself will do a good job after some testing. If you convert your aligned equirectangular 180/180s to rectilinear 120/120 degrees AE made a very accurate looking 3d track (x, y, z, roll, pitch and yaw, fov, plus scene feature locations) -- that is, after masking out foreground motion. So the problem is to then how to render out the constant bearing 360/180 equirectangulars from After Effects --
[edit] which I have worked out eventually after learning a little bit about After Effects Expressions scripting -- what you need to do is take the value of the yaw data in degrees from the 3d Camera Tracker and use that to shift the 180/180 equirectangular frames (in 2D mode) left or right the correct number of pixels in a 360/180 composition window. For instance my script for the Position Transform values of the layer containing the 180/180 frames is
newh = thisComp.layer("3D Tracker Camera").orientation[1] - 50.5;
newv=position[1];
[1800 + 10*newh, newv]
and here is the result
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcaXdI1bdLI
this is a very fast step once you have got the 3D Camera Track, and you are not rerendering the panorama in 3d so the quality is not affected at all.
Put your mouse cursor over the large skyscraper to the right of the movie. You can see there is no yaw jitter and minor global yaw drift.
BTW. ..... Also I notice there is this very cool freeware PC app for wireless modem remote control of Alexmos gimbal controller boards. Very sophisticated camera moves could be programmed with this that could be converted without software tracking to constant bearing 360 movies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmkmtFvnwCM#t=16
BTW also ... the latest Blender 3d has a different distortion model available in the Camera Tracker which is much better suited to fisheye lenses with strong distortion they say
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.71/More_Features
(under Motion Tracking)
Also when I was looking at tracking workflows I tried the After Effects to Blender script here and it worked ok with the latest Blender .. at least all the camera track type stuff looked like it was exported properly when I opened it in Blender
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?249084-After-Effects-camera-into-Blender
Also I have put another couple of example conversion videos and downloads on the Oculus sub-Reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/28ifft/tracked_rift_3d180_panoramic_movies_you_can/
Also I have been trying Matchmover from Autodesk which is free now. It did an ok job too. Seems about as fast/slow as the 3d Tracker in After Effects. For like 3000 frames it takes about an hour for track and solve.
I think the 3d Camera Tracker in After Effects itself will do a good job after some testing. If you convert your aligned equirectangular 180/180s to rectilinear 120/120 degrees AE made a very accurate looking 3d track (x, y, z, roll, pitch and yaw, fov, plus scene feature locations) -- that is, after masking out foreground motion. So the problem is to then how to render out the constant bearing 360/180 equirectangulars from After Effects --
[edit] which I have worked out eventually after learning a little bit about After Effects Expressions scripting -- what you need to do is take the value of the yaw data in degrees from the 3d Camera Tracker and use that to shift the 180/180 equirectangular frames (in 2D mode) left or right the correct number of pixels in a 360/180 composition window. For instance my script for the Position Transform values of the layer containing the 180/180 frames is
newh = thisComp.layer("3D Tracker Camera").orientation[1] - 50.5;
newv=position[1];
[1800 + 10*newh, newv]
and here is the result
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcaXdI1bdLI
this is a very fast step once you have got the 3D Camera Track, and you are not rerendering the panorama in 3d so the quality is not affected at all.
Put your mouse cursor over the large skyscraper to the right of the movie. You can see there is no yaw jitter and minor global yaw drift.
BTW. ..... Also I notice there is this very cool freeware PC app for wireless modem remote control of Alexmos gimbal controller boards. Very sophisticated camera moves could be programmed with this that could be converted without software tracking to constant bearing 360 movies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmkmtFvnwCM#t=16
BTW also ... the latest Blender 3d has a different distortion model available in the Camera Tracker which is much better suited to fisheye lenses with strong distortion they say
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.71/More_Features
(under Motion Tracking)
Also when I was looking at tracking workflows I tried the After Effects to Blender script here and it worked ok with the latest Blender .. at least all the camera track type stuff looked like it was exported properly when I opened it in Blender
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?249084-After-Effects-camera-into-Blender
Also I have put another couple of example conversion videos and downloads on the Oculus sub-Reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/28ifft/tracked_rift_3d180_panoramic_movies_you_can/
Also I have been trying Matchmover from Autodesk which is free now. It did an ok job too. Seems about as fast/slow as the 3d Tracker in After Effects. For like 3000 frames it takes about an hour for track and solve.