Shooting and editing immersive video is not very straightforward. Thankfully, Hugh Hou has made a million tutorials on this subject. I’ve been experimenting with the techniques he’s outlined to try to find what works best for me. This week I tried Mistika VR again and I found that it doesn’t do a noticeably better job than other methods. It’s also really expensive. I’ll have to miss out on it’s ability to reframe 180 degree video into rectangular 16 x 9 video. The Canon VR utility is easy to use and does a decent job (though my copy refuses to recognize my purchase and limits me to 2 min exports – ugh).
Today I used the Canon VR Utility to stitch my footage from the Canon R5C and export it to ProRes.
I then took that ProRes file and added the Canon LUT and did noise reduction in Davinci Resolve.
Then I exported left and right eye views and combined and compressed them with Mike Swanson’s Spatial Video Tool.
Well, I did that whole workflow for a 10 second test clip. I’m now exporting 5 min clips which will take about 12 hours (!!!).
I also recorded ambisonic audio for this but I don’t know what to do with it yet. I’ll have to work on that later.
You can also skip the Canon VR Utility and do that part in Davinci Resolve using the Karta VR plugin. I’ve done that before and it works well but I’m unclear if I can export left and right views without first exporting a side-by-side video that then gets chopped into left and right. I guess that’ll be another experiment.