A Little Sunday Drive in 360 degrees.

We had occasion to drive out to Christina Lake, the next town to the east of us, today. I took advantage of the opportunity to use the SP360 camera to work on capturing highway driving.

This video is the drive out from downtown GF to mid Christina Lake. I used a piece of music from Kevin MacLeods’ excellent website incompetech.com.

I shortened the video run time to match the music. So it’s traveling along faster than normal speed.

As I did this one I thought about how to do titles and credits again. In my previous video I put them around the edge repeated 120 degrees apart. I wasn’t happy with the result. Likely the limited drawing abilities in Premiere’s Titler and my limited ability to utilize them to best effect.

Here’s the thing with titling and 360 degree video: Unless it is visible to all angles it might be not seen. Unless satisfactory pre-warping is done the titles get a wavy look to them when they run the circumference of the viewing dome.

So where to put the Titles?

This time I chose to put them in the apex of the dome. So the viewer just has to Look Up. To make them aware I use the hand point up symbol from the Wingdings font and put eight suitably rotated and place versions around the circumference with all pointing to the centre. Then I could just make them all bounce up and down by making the Scaling go from 100% to 80% and back again.

Oh before I forget: If you want to see this and get the full 360 degree video effect you have to watch it with Google’s Chrome web browser at this time.

Ok – now that I’ve looked at it I can see some issues with the titling

1. because I wasn’t sure which would be the initial angle that the video start with the titles were upside down when you looked up from the ‘front’ direction.
2. the actual amount of time that the titles were on was far too short to accommodate the clumsiness in turn the view right side up.

And I’m still not all that happy with the rendering … if you watch it in Firefox and the unwrapping is not happening the image looks nice and clear. Watch it as a 360 degree video in Chrome and there’s a definite soft mushiness. Kind of like the difference between the SD Wide and the HD versions of the Hero camera.

Oh Deer

At least once a month I get to do 6 hours of highway driving in one day. In the mountains. I like it. Especially in the winter (I’m weird that way).

One thing that’s not nice about that is the possibility of running into wildlife. It’s happened once to me – a deer deciding to cross the highway at the wrong time. The next time was in town and the deer actually ran into my car as it tried to leap over it … it happens.

Well yesterday we did that long trip and on the way back it almost happened again.

That previous time didn’t have such a nice outcome: