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The pilot episodes for six original series launch today on Samsung VR Video service, along with the announcement of grants for a select set of indie filmmakers to create original VR episodes.

Revealed at Tribeca Film Festival, which runs until April 29, in New York, the new Samsung initiative aims to advance the VR medium within the independent VR filmmaking industry, another aspect of Samsung’s commitment to VR and the VR filmmaker community. Samsung continues to advance its 360 Round solution, with the latest of those updates announced recently at NAB, as ProVideo Coalition mentioned. The premiere of Samsung VR Video’s Pilot Season touches an important segment of the whole concept: the creation of content.

Through the program, a select set of indie filmmakers received a grant from Samsung to create original VR episodes and were offered the opportunity to utilize the 360 Round camera, Samsung’s professional 360-degree camera designed for developing and live streaming high-quality 3D content. In addition, filmmakers receive exclusive distribution via a dedicated channel on the Samsung VR Video service.

Pilot Season will be available on Samsung VR Video from today.To find the Pilot Season debut episodes, with a Samsung Gear VR with Controller, powered by Oculus, coupled with a compatible Galaxy device such as Galaxy S9 or S9+, head to the Oculus store and navigate to Samsung VR Video service. Within the service, users will find the Pilot Season in the “Featured” section….read more

11 filmmakers give us the 360° camera low down.

As the founder of eevo, an interactive VR / 360º video company, I speak every day with filmmakers exploring the world of VR. They are hungry to learn more about creating interactive 360º video and spatial audio experiences.

Whether for the sake of storytelling, real estate tours, medical content, art, or tourism, they often ask the same question: What 360º camera should I be using?

I’ve had some ideas, but I wanted to give them the best possible answer. So I decided to reach out to some of the amazing creators I’ve met to see what they had to say. While I didn’t expect to find too many similarities in people’s thoughts on this matter, it turns out that professional creators agree on quite a few things, both in regards to their approach to 360º filmmaking and to the equipment they choose to do it with.

Armando Kirwin, Independent Director of VR

Former EP at Vrse.Works, filmed 360° video for NY Times, Within, Facebook, Airbnb, Muse, Mastercard and more.

Recommended 360º Cameras:

• Insta360 Pro — $3,500
• Yi Halo — $17,000

“I strongly believe that you should select the best camera on a case-by-case basis for each project, or even for each shot, that you pursue. That being said, my current favorite camera is the Insta360 Pro. I took it with me on location in Cameroon and found it to be easy to operate, reliable under diverse shooting conditions, and capable of generating a pleasing image. It’s also priced very fairly. I now recommend this camera to most people who want to get started in VR production.…[continue reading]

It’s been an exciting decade for video and still-photography cameras, but if we were to sum 2017 up as anything, it would be the year that virtual reality (VR) cameras became accessible to a much broader “prosumer” and consumer market. Previously, filming footage in full 3D 360-degree VR was limited to those with deep pockets. VR cameras were the domain of movie studios and Silicon Valley startups hoping to define the new media. It required the funds of the super-rich, remaining wildly out of reach for office and home users.

But 2017 saw some significant changes on this front. Facebook introduced Surround 360, a family of VR cameras for licensing, not for sale, to partners to help get this technology into the hands of average Facebook users. At Humaneyes Technologies, we launched the Vuze VR Camera, the first consumer-focused VR video camera with a price below $1,000. The industry also saw the introduction of a middle tier, with Insta360 Pro hovering around $3,500 that allows for live streaming in full VR….[continue reading]

Something to remember when shooting spherical video is that everything is visible in the shot.  Even if you think you are being clever by hiding behind a boulder or a tree, you might not be as well hidden as you think. This can make it a challenge if you only want your subject in the scene, or especially challenging if you don’t want anyone to be in the scene. If you need to be directing on-camera talent, this too can become difficult. There’s no traditional way to feed the subject their lines, or for that matter, know if it was even a good take or not. It is possible to view the talent by affixing a smart phone below the spherical camera and streaming video to another device. You may even try setting up a security camera in the rafters so you can monitor the talent’s performance from another room. If the camera is far enough away from the spherical camera, it may not even be noticeable.

Camera Angle and Placement

Something else to keep in mind when framing up your shot is that no matter what spherical camera you’re using, it will essentially be recording at a very wide angle. This means you will want to put your spherical rig a bit closer to the subject than you might think. A good rule of thumb is to place your subject 3 to 6 feet from the camera.  If the subject gets too close to the camera, the seams — places where the different cameras’ fields of view meet — will become noticeable. This can cause parts of your subject to disappear into the seam. If they get too far away from the camera, they simply become much too small to seem important in the scene, and the viewer will begin look elsewhere. By placing your subject at the optimal distance, the viewer will feel as if they are actually there in the scene….[continue reading]

2017 was the first year when VR was a consumer reality. Headsets were available from a variety of vendors and at a variety of price points. Commercial markets for design and manufacturing began to adopt VR as a visualization too. And plenty of consumer VR experiences became available, from games to immersive video experiences, so nobody had an excuse for letting the device gather dust. First-gen VR experiences have wowed some users and disappointed others, but it’s clear that the technology will improve rapidly in terms of both the technical specs and the creative aesthetics. So where do we go from here?

Nowhere to Go But Up … Way Up

Most observers are expecting continued strong growth for VR in the foreseeable future. In its just-released Worldwide Semiannual Augmented and Virtual Reality Spending Guide, IDC projects AR/VR spending to climb by almost 95% in 2018, growing to a worldwide total of $17.8 billion from $9.1 billion in 2017. What’s more, the firm sees that robust annual growth rate holding steady through 2021. The fastest-growing segment of the market? The public sector — essentially infrastructure maintenance and government training — for which ICG expects a five-year compound annual growth rate of 156.7%….[continue reading]

For the first time since being introduced to the market, over one million (yes, that’s 1,000,000+) VR headsets flew off the shelves in a single fiscal quarter.

This is a historical milestone for hardcore gamers, and a perhaps eye-opening moment for casual players who might not be as familiar with VR.

With sales at an all-time high, there’s no arguing that the market for virtual reality (VR) headsets is heating up. First thought to be a “fad” or gimmicky piece of tech, professionals within gaming and other industries are now changing their tune, touting functional VR as a technological breakthrough that could impact any number of industries and change our daily lives for the better….

…Virtual reality is sure to continue its projected growth, with new headset options, applications and software set to hit the stage in the coming months and year.

However, there is one other alternative that is gaining attention: augmented reality.  Augmented reality, or AR for short, is a direct or indirect view of a real-world environment whose elements have been modified or “augmented” by a computer-generated sensory input such as video, sound, or graphics….[continue reading]

For those of us who have been around since the prestreaming days, neck deep in film and videotapes while we wrestled with edit decision lists (EDLs) and three-point edits, the idea of storing a list of all these physical assets in a computer—the metadata about the media assets—was an admirable goal.

The content creation industry has traded in paper edits and EDLs in favor of maintaining EDLs and performing non-linear editing (NLE) on the same computer. But the ability to move the media asset management (MAM) online, digitizing the assets and upgrading the metadata so that the digital clip itself was searchable and easily accessible—in other words, the concept of digital asset management (DAM)—seemed akin to the Eighth Wonder of the World. “Digitize once, use often,” was a recurring sales mantra.

Yet, the maturation of MAM and DAM solutions over the past 20 years, as they expanded to include online-only content and new delivery methods—from YouTube to over-the-top (OTT) premium content delivery—has generated a bit of a conflicting growth pattern.

In some ways, growth in feature sets for DAM and MAM solutions have stagnated, in no small part due to the need by most solutions providers to put their solutions “in the cloud,” thereby virtualizing an offering that used to require multiple beefy servers—one for uploading, one for indexing content, one for search and retrieval, and so on.

The move to the cloud was driven by the solutions providers themselves, since not every customer wanted to part with the ability to buy a product for use in an on-prem solution. But there were enough greenfield cloud-based MAM customers with an aversion to capital expenditures (CapEx) to allow these MAM solutions providers to justify the move from local servers and operating systems to cloud-based nodes with specialized operating systems. In the intervening 5 or 6 years, while MAM solutions have been moving to the cloud, feature enhancements suffered at the hand of bringing basic parity between the on-prem versions and the newer cloud versions….[continue reading]

Check out the new Immersive Video effects in After Effects and Premiere Pro CC 2018 in this tutorial. Including free 360 footage!

Adobe has been committed to offering content creators more options when it comes to editing 360 video and VR content. Adobe backed up that commitment this year by acquiring the SkyBox 360/VR plug-ins from Mettle. The SkyBox plug-ins are a staple for many 360 content creators working in After Effects and Premiere Pro. Adobe recently integrated the 360/VR effects into After Effects and Premiere Pro CC 2018, and the effects have been relabeled under what is now called “Immersive Video.” In this tutorial, we are going to explore the basics of these new Immersive Video effects for 360/VR footage.

You can quickly toggle all of the 360/VR Immersive Video effects in After Effects and Premiere Pro by simply searching “VR” in the effects list. All of the 360 effects have “VR” in the name, so this makes them easy to identify. The VR effects range from basic utility effects, seamless post effects, and unique stylization and filter effects….[continue reading]