V16: dual fisheye stitching of separate files

3d87c4 wrote on 9/3/2018, 6:40 PM

I've been tinkering with the dual fisheye stitching, using footage from my Kodak SP360 4K cameras.

The dual fisheye stitching fx assumes the front and back images are side-by-side in a single file, but the SP360 footage is in separate files.

Is there an easy way to combine them so they will be compatible with the stitching fx? Obviously they could be combined in a separate project and either rendered to a single file, or read in as a nested file, but it would be nice if there was something equivalent to the pair as stereoscopic 3D subclip.

In the meantime, I've been putting the front and back clips on separate tracks, synchronizing by aligning the audio tracks, offsetting the fisheye images so they appear side-by-side when composited (add). I then have to apply the dual fisheye stitching fx to each clip and adjust, independently, to match things up.

The results aren't bad, and this is profoundly faster than stitching and rendering from the Kodak software, but seems like a lot of extra steps.

One other point, the SP360 4K's field of view is 235 degrees, but the stitching fx max's out at 220 degrees.

Comments

set wrote on 9/3/2018, 8:01 PM

You can try put both footage side by side in one project, and then put this project VEG file into another timeline, put 'Dual Fish Eye Stitching' FX to the nested VEG project media.

The only downside of this workflow, will be a 4096x4096 project size limitation.

3d87c4 wrote on 9/3/2018, 9:39 PM

Yes, I mention nesting above, but would prefer to do it in one fell swoop, if possible.

set wrote on 9/3/2018, 9:50 PM

Except someone might one to try making a script of it, including the 'placement' 'positioning' of the clip.

unfortunately I'm not the expert for this.

3d87c4 wrote on 9/4/2018, 1:04 AM

Once I have the first clip, or two, set up I can copy & paste attributes to set up the rest. I haven't compared the render times of doing this in Vegas versus the Kodak stitching software.

Here is a clip of the descent of a recent SCUBA dive, stitched entirely in Vegas 16. The results are similar to what I'd get from the Kodak software, but there is a bit less of a stitching artifact along the seam.

For grins, I took this a step further and stitched together a 2D clip from my Vuze+ camera. This is a stitch of four synchronized cameras. It took a lot of pan/crop, masking, and compositing to get everything lined up. It would be nice if there were an fx that creates an equirectangular projection from a single camera that could be cropped after the fact. I'm not very experienced with compositing...

3d87c4 wrote on 10/12/2018, 3:33 PM

Still tinkering with the dual lens stitching fx:

This time, I'm using it to create a 180VR video...almost...from some LucidCam footage I had laying around in my hard disk---side-by-side 3D fisheye video clip.

I applied the dual fisheye stitch fx to get equirectangular projections of the left and right views, then used the reorient fx to get the left and right eye views side-by-side (a -90 degree Y rotation).

Vegas 16 cannot treat the result as a 3D clip so, to adjust the 3D alignment I have to generate an intermediate render or nest the project in a new 3D project. Nesting introduces another issue---the aspect ratio is wrong until I uncheck the maintain aspect ratio box in the clip properties.

Once I have the 3D corrected I can render it to a side-by-side full 3D file with a 2:1 aspect ratio.

Vegas doesn't apply the VR180 metadata, so I have to reboot my computer to Linux and run it through the Google VR180 creator too before uploading to YouTube.

So close, but so far... It wouldn't take much for Magix to make this work right.

Greg-Kintz wrote on 7/9/2019, 5:23 PM

I'm another one hoping Vegas 17 offers 180 / 3-D video, and at 5.7K as most other newer VR editors do.