Who of you did alread tried to make it’s first step in producing a 360 degree video? You might more likely find it’s not wasy to tell beforehand if a 360 degree shooting should be done from a fixed position or from a device in move. At SXSW 2016 in Austin I could talk to some of the worldwide pioneers in that field and could also get some first hand impressions.
First of all: everything in this field is in motion. No one had found THE solution for doingvthe best 360 shot. Most of the two-camera solution lack a decent resolution and can so only seen as ‘gimmick’ than as a professional communications tool. Apart from the 62.000 Dollar camera from Nokia (which still lacks a working sofware), there is only the GoPro family a professinonal alternative. You need to combine at least six GoPros Hero 4 (or 7 to get Full HD) for a professional approach.
Tripod or vehicle?
Best solution for an easy postproduction is a camera mounted on a small tripod. In this way the editing and stitching is far more easy than using a 360 degree camera on a moving device (car, bike, sagway or slider).
The physics are the limit! If you have a device going faster than 20mph, people who watch the video with a VR gear might get sick. If you move faster the objects have to be quite far away from the camera (filming out of an airplane cockpit).
A reasonable solution for videos from a bike or on a boat is a helmet camera as we already know it from ski- and surfing- action videos.
Our friends ans colleagues from wormhole in California are using 6 GoPros on a helmet and are happy with it. After a while the helmet gets really heavy and you have to exchange the camera person.
For results where you want to show a full HD experience in the browser window you need to have even a bigger rig with at least 7 GoPro cameras.
