My first test with 360 Panoramic stereo videos [GoPro rig]

This is pretty good - the stitching is good around the central zone (+/- 40 degrees V). The more tilted shots are less accurately stitched. The blending (light/dark) is too sharp sometimes. The nadir hole is rather large.

thanks mediavr. Yes I got lazy and I didn't finish the stitch for the top part :)
I'm also worried by the nadir hole. It's definitely too large. We'll need to add a couple of cameras to capture it, or maybe I'll be able to squeeze some more degrees out of Hero3's fov.

Looks really nice! I am curious about how you stitched those videos? I did not see too many artifacts actually.

Hi Erik,

I just tried your movie on my Gear VR with the factory 360 video player:

-> the 2K version playes great.
-> the 4K version gives a load error.

But the 2K version looks already great, taking into account you are using simple GoPro 3...

So you just made a static setup, manually rotating your GoPro each time 60 degrees?
Resulting in a total of (2 x 6) + 2 shots?
So [left: 6 x 60 deg] + [right: 6 x 60 deg] + [left ceiling + right ceiling]?

Can you perhaps tell a bit more of your static test setup?

Thx!

Very well done! May I ask what cameras/stitching software you used? Doing our own tests right now and getting decent results, though I'm having trouble getting stitch lines where I want them...

2K plays back nicely, but 4K doesn't load. Assuming that the 4K works, may I ask how you managed to make an .mp4 of that size? All the video rendering programs I try to use won't make .mp4s more than around 2K x 2K.

Nice work, though!

Looks great - love to learn a little more on your workflows if you are willing to share - I have a twin GoPro with dual hero sync and hoping to replicate this test.. how many actual shots did you stitch together? What was your geometry - 6 x60 around and one up for each cam? Did you use PTGui, AP Pro, Videostitch for the final sphere?

Wonderful!

Unfortunately we did this after we actually built our damn 3k rig using HackHDs. But it was good for testing, and we now have a relatively cheap 360º rig.

How did you capture 180º in the vertical? We're having some trouble with stitching the zenith and nadir as the GoPros barely capture it right.

Did you use undistortion on the rig? If so how did you do it ?

Thanks

*edit* Also this will work way better than any rig that you can build with several directions, because this way you can keep the central camera in the same position reducing at least one eye's stitching to close to zero. But you probably already know that.

Hi everybody,

sorry for not being around on the forum, this whole thing is exploding really fast! Since the test you see here, we've built a full rig with 14 gopro 4, and we're delivering our very first project today :)

So , in order:

"cifanfan" wrote:
Looks really nice! I am curious about how you stitched those videos? I did not see too many artifacts actually.

Thanks. We use a compositing software for stitching. It's the only way, I think, to do a decent stitch. You have to cheat here and there, since it's physically impossible to have a perfect stitch.

"ladhani" wrote:
Hi Erik,

I just tried your movie on my Gear VR with the factory 360 video player:

-> the 2K version playes great.
-> the 4K version gives a load error.

But the 2K version looks already great, taking into account you are using simple GoPro 3...

So you just made a static setup, manually rotating your GoPro each time 60 degrees?
Resulting in a total of (2 x 6) + 2 shots?
So [left: 6 x 60 deg] + [right: 6 x 60 deg] + [left ceiling + right ceiling]?

Can you perhaps tell a bit more of your static test setup?

Thx!

Unfortunately, gear VR won't decode more than 3840x1920 at 30 fps.

Try this on your gear :)
http://www.hivedivision.net/File_Sharing/Projects/Pano/Asolo_2_RL.mp4

Anyway, the process for our setup is exactly as you described. It was only a rough test to understand if the idea could work, and to experiment a little bit with dimensions. Once we saw the result, we decided to build the full rig.

"andrewmatthews01" wrote:
Very well done! May I ask what cameras/stitching software you used? Doing our own tests right now and getting decent results, though I'm having trouble getting stitch lines where I want them...

We're using Nuke.

"andrewmatthews01" wrote:
2K plays back nicely, but 4K doesn't load. Assuming that the 4K works, may I ask how you managed to make an .mp4 of that size? All the video rendering programs I try to use won't make .mp4s more than around 2K x 2K.

Nice work, though!

As I said on the gear VR you won't have nothing more than 3840x1920@30fps at the moment.
For the compression we used ffmpeg. It's a command line tool, VERY powerful.

"joetheuntalented" wrote:
Looks great - love to learn a little more on your workflows if you are willing to share - I have a twin GoPro with dual hero sync and hoping to replicate this test.. how many actual shots did you stitch together? What was your geometry - 6 x60 around and one up for each cam? Did you use PTGui, AP Pro, Videostitch for the final sphere?

as they said, 6x60 around + 2 on the top, just because the fov is not enough to cover the zenith with a single camera.
For the stitching we use Nuke, a compositing software.

"sprafa" wrote:
Wonderful!

Unfortunately we did this after we actually built our damn 3k rig using HackHDs. But it was good for testing, and we now have a relatively cheap 360º rig.

How did you capture 180º in the vertical? We're having some trouble with stitching the zenith and nadir as the GoPros barely capture it right.

Did you use undistortion on the rig? If so how did you do it ?

Thanks

*edit* Also this will work way better than any rig that you can build with several directions, because this way you can keep the central camera in the same position reducing at least one eye's stitching to close to zero. But you probably already know that.

We capture the zenith with 2 cameras: it's not for stereo (it's pointless, on zenith and nadir), but just to have fov enough to close the sphere.

We undistort everything in post, with the compositing software.