Stereoscopic Video - a metadata NIGHTMARE
We start our innocent journey with the sale of my Zedd camera from Stereolabs. I was under the impression I could use it as a camera to make stereoscopic VR content, but that was not the case. Also, their software would hiccup during videogrammetry capture making some bizarre torn and overlapping hellscapes.
So there I was with four hundred bucks, and the desire for a new camera. But hark! What's this?
The Qoocam from Kandao, makers of other hilariously expensive camera rigs has made a small portable convertable 360/Stereoscopic camera! Sold.
I wanted to incorporate 4-channel, spatialized audio into my recordings. The desktop application that Kandao made to take the raw capture and turn it into uploadable VR content doesn't have a way to incorporate off-camera audio. So we fall back on my old friend, Sony Movie Studio 13 Platinum. (they should have stuck with the name VEGAS, it's way more catchy.)
So there I was in my timeline with the new audio synced up. I wanted to upload my glorious video to Youtube in the hopes that people could watch it on whatever device they have. For some reason, very recently, they took out a checkbox in the upload process that lets you select how the video is projected, or just tell youtube "Trust me. That it is stereoscopic footage," and call it a day. This, is no longer an option. This means that I have to have the correct metadata on the video file that I am uploading.
Vegas unfortunately eats all the existing metadata (even when matching the project settings to an existing clip) when exporting. This makes sense to me, you are creating a new file. Do whatever. However! When searching online I found people advising the use of Sony AVC or MainConcept AVC codecs for encoding this crap. Sony AVC supports stereoscopic metadata, but throws an error because it won't accept the resolution I want to render it as, and Main Concept supports the 4k resolution, but not the stereoscopic metadata!
"Fuck this," I said, and finally read the youtube help. Thinking so... so naively, that it would help. Yes, there was an article about VR video, yes they had a utility to help me assign metadata to a pre-rendered video file. But only if it was 360 or OVER UNDER. My entire project is good! Rendered in an equirectangular projection and stabilized! It is laid out horizontally, not interlaced or anaglyph. Why has youtube forsaken my content? If only there was a small checkbox. To tell youtube. The layout of my stereoscopic content.
While writing this I realized that... hey I could just export my video in over-under. But Kandao does it funky with a bunch of deadspace off to one side so I would be expanding my filesize twofold for literally no reason.
Vegas supports taking two different clips and making them into a single stereoscopic clip, but the qoocam software doesn't let me export just the left or just the right channel
How is this difficult, I don't get it.
I guess I'll just upload it to facebook.
So apparently the magic, secret sauce, is right clicking
your clips in the Vegas's library and declaring them to be stereoscopic clips already.
Yeesh. What a ride. Thanks for reading with me.
So there I was with four hundred bucks, and the desire for a new camera. But hark! What's this?
The Qoocam from Kandao, makers of other hilariously expensive camera rigs has made a small portable convertable 360/Stereoscopic camera! Sold.
I wanted to incorporate 4-channel, spatialized audio into my recordings. The desktop application that Kandao made to take the raw capture and turn it into uploadable VR content doesn't have a way to incorporate off-camera audio. So we fall back on my old friend, Sony Movie Studio 13 Platinum. (they should have stuck with the name VEGAS, it's way more catchy.)
So there I was in my timeline with the new audio synced up. I wanted to upload my glorious video to Youtube in the hopes that people could watch it on whatever device they have. For some reason, very recently, they took out a checkbox in the upload process that lets you select how the video is projected, or just tell youtube "Trust me. That it is stereoscopic footage," and call it a day. This, is no longer an option. This means that I have to have the correct metadata on the video file that I am uploading.
Vegas unfortunately eats all the existing metadata (even when matching the project settings to an existing clip) when exporting. This makes sense to me, you are creating a new file. Do whatever. However! When searching online I found people advising the use of Sony AVC or MainConcept AVC codecs for encoding this crap. Sony AVC supports stereoscopic metadata, but throws an error because it won't accept the resolution I want to render it as, and Main Concept supports the 4k resolution, but not the stereoscopic metadata!
"Fuck this," I said, and finally read the youtube help. Thinking so... so naively, that it would help. Yes, there was an article about VR video, yes they had a utility to help me assign metadata to a pre-rendered video file. But only if it was 360 or OVER UNDER. My entire project is good! Rendered in an equirectangular projection and stabilized! It is laid out horizontally, not interlaced or anaglyph. Why has youtube forsaken my content? If only there was a small checkbox. To tell youtube. The layout of my stereoscopic content.
While writing this I realized that... hey I could just export my video in over-under. But Kandao does it funky with a bunch of deadspace off to one side so I would be expanding my filesize twofold for literally no reason.
Vegas supports taking two different clips and making them into a single stereoscopic clip, but the qoocam software doesn't let me export just the left or just the right channel
How is this difficult, I don't get it.
I guess I'll just upload it to facebook.
So apparently the magic, secret sauce, is right clicking
your clips in the Vegas's library and declaring them to be stereoscopic clips already.
Yeesh. What a ride. Thanks for reading with me.
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