How to Create a 360 degree video with Twilight Render

The Twilight Render Team shares tips, ideas, helpful hints, and more on using Twilight Render
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Fletch
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How to Create a 360 degree video with Twilight Render

Post by Fletch » Wed Nov 23, 2016 3:05 pm


Watch the above video in HD resolution!

Render a test spherical animation by setting your camera to "Spherical"
Render your camera animation using the Render Animation dialog, see the Camera Animation Video tutorial HERE. Be sure to maintain your spherical camera setting when rendering the animation.
Be sure to render with 2:1 aspect ratio. For the above video we set width of the animation to 2000x1000 pixels.

In Twilight Render V2 Pro use the FFMpeg automatic video codec to turn your image sequence into a .mp4 format video file.
Before you upload the file to YouTube you have to put some code in the video file that tells YouTube to process/handle that video as a 360 degree video. This is known as "injecting meta data". In order to inject the meta data you use a python script code tool. Don't let your eyes roll back in your head just yet - it's not as terrible as it sounds. But if you are on a secure network, it may take jumping through some hoops as you will not be able to just download and run the tools as you might if you were on your home computer. So ask your network admin for assistance if you can't run the meta data tool.

It goes like this: Open the tool's GUI interface and browse to the file, open it, and the tool will automatically ask you for a new name and save the video file with the injected 360 degree meta data. That's it. No fuss, no coding on your part.
Here are YouTube's official instructions and links: just follow the steps under "Step 2" on this page.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6178631?hl=en

The problem is, the tool they offer may not work on your machine. We tested on a Windows 10 machine, and the tool didn't work, the GUI did not open as expected. So we had to follow slightly different steps.
Follow the 3 bullet point steps precisely as written under "Windows Release Notes" on this page:
https://github.com/google/spatial-media ... s/tag/v2.0
Github.com wrote:The Windows release requires a 64-bit version of Windows. If you're using a 32-bit version of Windows, you can still run the metadata injector from the Python source code as follows:
  1. Install Python 2.
  2. Download and extract the metadata injector source code. (and unzip the file)
  3. From the "spatialmedia" directory in Windows Explorer, double click on "gui".
    ...Alternatively, from the command prompt, change to the spatialmedia directory, and run "python gui.py".
After you've successfully saved your .mp4 video file with the meta data "injected" now you load it up to your youtube channel as you would any video on your channel. Youtube will automagically do the rest, like parse the video to make all the versions from low to high quality and encode it for all the streaming bit rates, etc.

For highest quality results on Youtube, you need to render the animation at the highest reasonable resolution. 4000x2000 should be extremely high quality, and it should render ok if you render with Easy Low render setting. If you use the Alternate AA render settings 02b, the anti-aliasing will be better quality... if your camera is moving slowly, that's recommended, but if the camera is moving quickly the AA doesn't matter as much. 25 to 30 frames per second is the recommended frame rate. Be careful which frame rate you choose, because not every frame rate is supported, and some frame rates are going to all a lot of render time, while not visually making a difference in the resulting video. 25fps is the ideal compromise for quality vs render speed.

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