Adobe After Effects CC includes tools that make it easy to work with 360 and VR footage.
In this tutorial I will show you how the Immersive effects in After Effects CC designed specifically for equirectangular footage make it easy to stylize your 360/VR video without incurring any unwanted artifacts.
All right, so in my After Effects CC Composition I have some 360 video that's in the equirectangular format.
This is the format your video is usually going to be in after it's been stitched together and this is the format you're going to need if you're going to do any post on it here in After Effects CC and some telltale signs of equirectangular footage are these curves on the video you can see on the boat here and on the buildings here on the horizon line.
I also want to note that whatever is in the very center of your equirectangular footage that's going to be where you're facing forward if you're viewing this in a 360 headset and you can see the front of the boat here.
And what's over here on the backside is going to be the back area.
So, you can see the back of the boat and we have this building here with red bricks which you'll also note that that's the same red building over here.
So, this would be the back-seam of our 360 footage.
Around the horizon line is the least amount of distortion that's visible on our video but as you get closer to the top and bottom poles there's going to be more noticeable distortion because of the curvature.
It's important to note that most traditional effects in After Effects CC are not compatible with 360 footage and just to demonstrate that I'm going to apply a Gaussian Blur to this footage.
I am going to select the Blur and just apply it and I'm going to come over here and increase the Blurriness and I'm also going to turn on Repeat Edge Pixels and the reason this isn't compatible is because over here on this back seam line After Effects CC for these traditional effects does not know that these two areas are going to be connected.
So, if we look at this from a first-person POV we can look at the back area here and you're going to see a noticeable seam line that's giving me some artifacts and again this is a result of using an effect that's not created specifically for VR.
However, After Effects CC does have some VR Immersive effects that are created specifically for VR footage.
So, I'm going to come up here to the Effects & Presets panel and a quick way to toggle all those just to type in VR and you're going to see a full list of the Immersive Video effects and all these are compatible with equirectangular footage.
So, I am going to go ahead and apply the VR Blur effect to our 360 video and I am going to come over here and increase the Blurriness again.
And now if we look at this in a POV view if we look at the back area of the seam, we're not getting any artifacts or a visible seam line and that's the difference between a Traditional effect and a VR Effect.
It's also important to note that traditional Glows or the Sharpen effect would also create that same seam line error as you can see again here from the POV.
But Adobe has also created specific VR versions of those Effects that will work on 360 video with the VR Sharpen and the VR Glow effect.
I'll demonstrate the VR Glow effect very quickly here.
And I'm just going to type in a few configured values.
And now if we look at this in a POV view we get a nice glow effect on our footage again with no artifacts on the back seam or at the top and bottom pole areas.
There are also some unique stylized 360/VR Effects such as the Digital Glitch and Chromatic Aberrations.
Let me go ahead and apply VR Digital Glitch to my 360 footage.
And you can see we get this glitching effect all over our video but you'll notice that the glitching is kind of curved again accenting the equirectangular format of this footage.
So, this is going to look correct when it's viewed back in a VR headset.
Now this Effect also has quite a few different options under the Distortion and the Noise and we can even control the Distortion Evolution.
I can toggle that and the Color Evolution.
As you can see it's kind of going back and forth there.
And we also have control of the Master Amplitude which is very cool.
We can see this go back to the normal view.
Let's take a look at the VR Chromatic Aberrations effect.
You can see we are getting some Chromatic Aberrations occurring on our 360 footage much like you would see on traditional footage.
However, in 360, it's a little bit more complicated because again everything is visible, so there has to be an area where the Chromatic Aberrations comes to an end and where it's at its most distorted.
And we have control of those options over here with the Falloff Distance, you can adjust how much of the 360 video is being affected by the Chromatic Aberrations and how much separation you're getting from your Red, Green, and Blue channels.
As you can see this POV view you can get some very unique looks, animating things with the Chromatic Aberrations effect.
Finally, I want to show you the VR Fractal Noise effect.
I am just going to drag and drop that on my 360 footage and this is very similar to the Fractal Noise effect you're used to in After Effects CC.
But again, this effect has been formatted to work with 360 footage, so it is seamless.
This opens the door to creating lots of customized 360 effects like Smoke, Fire, Water, and Fog.
And you can see we have a lot of different Fractal Types here from Basic to Turbulent Sharp, Max and Strings.
I'm going to go ahead and set this back to Basic.
We're going to create a little bit of subtle fog on this Venice footage, kind of looks like fog rising from the canal here in the early morning.
So, down here on the Blending Mode I'm going to set this to be a Screen Blending Mode and I'm going to lower the Opacity of the overall effect.
And then I'm just going to set a keyframe for the Evolution and I'll move down here in time and I'll go ahead and set another keyframe here with the Evolution rotating it.
And now we can go ahead and see what this looks like from a POV perspective.
As you can see, we get a nice subtle Fog effect to your animating which again looks like fog rising up from the canal.
Again, After Effects CC offers quite a few different VR effects for your 360 videos and all of them have quite a few options over here as you can see even in the Fractal Noise effect of the Transform and all the various Sub Settings.
So, that's an overview of the Immersive effects available in Adobe After Effects CC.
