Recording 360 video in msfs

User Support Hub Virtual Reality (VR)
17

I’ve done it! I used the example OpenVR driver I’ve mentioned before (GitHub - leandroarndt/Simple-OpenVR-Driver-Tutorial: A sample OpenVR Driver for you to learn from) and After Effects’ VR Converter effect to transform the cube recording to 360 degrees footage:

Cube recording organized at an After Effects sequence.
Cube recording organized at an After Effects sequence.1920×810 108 KB

At this first image you can see that I also used an animated color correction (Lumetri Color). It was less difficult than I imagined before, but there will be visible seams on binocular 360 degrees footage. Always. The final result, though, was better than I had imagined.

VR Converter plugin applied to the cube recording to get 360 degrees footage.
VR Converter plugin applied to the cube recording to get 360 degrees footage.1920×810 90.3 KB

At the second image you can see the VR converter applied to the cubemap on a separate composition.

The composition tree at After Effects is:

  • Binocular 360 degrees.
    • Left eye 360 degrees (top view)
      • Left eye cubemap (color correction applyed here)
    • Right eye 360 degrees (bottom view)
      • Right eye cubemap (color correction applyed here)

The ambisonic audio was applied at Premiere Pro. I used both cubemaps to convert the audio of the front and right views and use them at Premiere (other channels had been muted, as you can see at the first image).

There is also one more problem at the video: some wobling caused by lost frames. One recording goes on, but the neighboring recording stops for a while. I’ve recorded the original videos at 1440px, but the next ones will be recorded at 1024 to fit the 4K VR standard (4096px wide) – this should solve that problem.

You can see below the resulting video. I uploaded as it is to demonstrate the technique. It is actually part of a bigger video I’m recording. It will be an immersive version of the video I uploaded before this one.

Two last tips:

  1. Convert your After Effects footage to H265 or H264 before using it at Premiere Pro.
  2. Upload your video as private and only after processing change to public. The video above is public, but isn’t available at high res right now because YouTube takes a lot of time to process it: the SD version (unusable) has been processed 4h ago and the video is available since then, but not at 4K.

PS: do not post at YouTube as shorts. It won’t work correctly from the subscribers’ notifications.