How to use VR Converter on 360/VR Footage
In Adobe After Effects, you can use the VR Converter effect to quickly convert the Output format of your 360 media. Select from projections like equirectangular, cube-map, and full dome.
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Introduction
In After Effects CC, you can use the VR Converter effect to quickly convert the output format of your 360 media.
So, let's take a look at a few used cases for the VR Converter effect.
What I have here is some 360 video in the equirectangular format.
I'm going to go ahead and select my video
Applying the VR Converter effect and setting the input format
and I'm coming here to Effect, and under "Immersive Video", I'm going to locate VR Converter.
You'll see we have an Input and an Output, we also have an Output Frame Width option and a few other options down here to reorient the camera view which is very similar to the VR Rotate Sphere effect.
Now, the settings are presented in a nice orderly fashion and you really need to follow them in the order they're in in order to get the best results.
So first, I need to come here to "Input" and select my input.
Default it's set to "2D Source", this formats actually in equirectangular, so, I'm going to select this and come down here to Equirectangular 2:1.
This just lets the VR Converter know of what kind of format we're dealing with originally.
Now, under Output you'll see we have
Converting 360 footage to different VR output formats
a host of options we can select from, one of the common ones is "Cube-map 4:3" so I'm just going to go ahead and select this.
And you're going to see how this quickly converts our 360 footage seamlessly from the equirectangular format to now be a cube-map format.
And what this is, it's actually six sides of a cube and you can see how they're all kind of unfolding.
And you can see they're all seamlessly connecting.
So, depending on where you're sending your media to you may need to convert a file from equirectangular to one of these other formats.
Let's go ahead and navigate back over to the Output and select one of the other options we have.
Another common option is the Fisheye (FullDome), so I'm going to select that.
This is only going to be 50% of our video, it's kind of like a 180 degree projection.
I'm going to go ahead and zoom out here, we can see how this looks.
And so, it's actually split the video right down the middle.
We only have one half of the sphere.
However, if this wasn't the half that we wanted, we could navigate over here to the "Reorient Camera View", and I can actually adjust this on the pan axis, and you'll see how this actually changes where we see our 360 video.
I'm going to go ahead and set this back to 0.
You'll also find a few common VR output formats for platforms like Facebook and Gear VR.
So, I'll come here to "Output" and I'm going to come over here, and I'm going to select "Cube-map Facebook 3:2".
And when I select this, it's very similar to the cube map projection we saw before.
However, it's been a more orderly fashion with just six blocks lined up and this will be perfect if you upload this to Facebook.
That way it's already going to be in the correct format.
And again, I can come back over here and select another output such as the "Cube-map Gear VR 6:1".
You'll see it's a very similar format but it's lined up all the sides in a line.
Resizing output frame width for delivery requirements
Another option we have is we can very quickly convert the output frame width of our footage if we want to adjust that.
So, I'm actually going to come back over here to the Output and I'm going to change this back to "Equirectangular 2:1".
And you're going to see the current Output Frame Width is 4096.
And this is seamless.
But if we go ahead and change this, let's say I had a client that wanted me to send them something in 3048, I just typed that in and click over here, and you're going to see now, this went ahead and resized our footage seamlessly to fit within that size limitation.
And again, we have all the reorient options we need if you need to go ahead and level out your footage or make any changes with those settings.
Resetting settings and removing the VR Converter effect
If you do decide to remove the VR Converter effect from your footage, it's a good idea to go ahead and change the Output Frame Width back to the original size and also make sure the Input and the Output are on the original footage settings as well.
What you learned: How to convert 360 footage in After Effects with VR Converter
VR Converter makes it simple to switch between different VR output formats.
Change your composition frame width quickly and seamlessly.
VR Converter also includes projections options to reorient the VR camera view.
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