360 Panoramic Video Support

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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by DavidL »

I tried out the Eindhoven video.. very nice! The Gear VR doesn't always seem to like that resolution though (4096x2048), so I've been going with 3840x1920. Also, I've found that generating frames at 7680 x 3840 with supersampling turned off and then exporting from Premier Pro seems to improve the quality (on my hardware anyway). This is time consuming to do though and I've calculated a 2 minute video will take me 3 days to generate.
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Mark Christy »

Hi David,

Yes, if you think about it each panoramic frame requires 6 normal frames of data. At that resolution you're ending up with a very large frame size. That frame then has to be stitched for the spherical projection. Although we use all the cores of the processor to do it a lot of the hold up is just pure memory and disk shuffling.

7680 x 3840 is about 90mb uncompressed so nearly 600mb a frame!

Just for reference, I'm exporting the images as individual BMP's to avoid any compression artefacts. I then compile the BMP's into an uncompressed AVI using VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/.

Once I have the AVI I can run it through ShotCut https://www.shotcut.org/ to create the compressed format (and quality level) which I want.

Final step is YouTubes metadata injection tool should you want to host the video on YouTube.

Mark
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Joohansson »

Really interesting software! It's the only one I could find on the market that directly produce 360 videos, and it does it really well. I'm currently in the process of creating my first panoramic video. I will definitely evaluate some other great features as well, never tried Arena4D before but many tools are similar to Pointools which I used a lot, the Rhino plugin for example.

Edit:
It would be nice to have better control over the point size. I eventually found the gap filling button which works great for high res panoramas but sometimes I just want to increase point size from 1 to 2 pixels. That is possible in faro Scene and Pointools for example. It gives better screenshots when you have less dense data, but still want high resolution. In faro Scene you also have adaptive point size and realtime super sampling. I did a conceptual demo 4 years ago where I made points close to the camera large and points far away much smaller (1 pixel @ 4x screen resolution @ 50m away). That gave a really good smooth result, but I have not seen it implemented anywhere so far.

I also wonder how to get rid of the light box in the background? I have turned off lighting. See example:
Image
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Mark Christy »

Hi David,

Every point cloud has individual point size control, and a parameter that effects the "filling" option too. If you select your point cloud in the project tree you can right click -> properties or click the properties button at the top to see all the individual settings for the point cloud. You should see a point size and a point ratio value which you can experiment with.

The point ratio adjusts how large it makes the points as you get closer to them. It also blends the points together to stop it getting to blocky. The "filling" option must be turned on for this to have an effect.

If you want to quickly change the size of all point clouds you can use the 1-5 keys on the keyboard too.

There is also a point quality value which adjusts how many points will be loaded. For animations you want to make sure this is at 100% for the best looking output.

Finally to turn off the light box please see the SKY option under the Layers menu.

Hope this helps. Any other questions please don't hesitate to ask!

Many Thanks

Mark
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Joohansson »

Thanks Mark, I will try the point size setting tomorrow. I actually looked exactly there but didn't find any settings like that but perhaps I was too quick.

In the image I posted I had sky activated but I then turned off "sky" overlay but it still render the box? Currently processing with "filling" activated.
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Mark Christy »

Hi David,

Ok the other thing to be aware of is the default background of Arena4D is a Grey to Black graduated colour scheme. If you go to the System settings you can change the background bottom colour and top colour. Set them both to the same colour (I suggest black) for 360 images because although your view changes for the data, the background is constant and can lead to odd results!

Many Thanks

Mark
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Joohansson »

Changing background color did the trick! I also got the point size working and my point cloud was only at 30% quality. Setting to 100% gave me really nice results, thanks! Did you manage to encode video at 8k? The encoders I have tried only support 4k (4096x2048) and I had to downsample in virtualdub. Which encoder do you use in shotcut? This is my normal process:
1. Jpeg rendering
2. Virtualdub: Jpeg -> avi/lagarith lossless
3. Staxrip: avi -> mp4/x264

My 4k video is 400mbit/s @ x264 very high quality or 250mbit/s @ high quality, I can imagine 8k would have insane bandwidth. Is that even watchable? Any good panorama player I can use in windows 10? My experience with point cloud movies is that you can't compress it to same bandwidth levels as normal videos. That is because of all unique points/pixels, it's like 100% noise. Youtube is a good example where pointcloud movies are not even worth watching due to the compress level. Therefore I think 8k panoramic pointcloud is very hard to achieve with good result on today's computers. Motion blur would help a lot but then you can't pause the movie with good sharpness. Be able to pause the movie and move around is a very nice feature with point cloud panorama, maybe the only reasonable business use of such movies. One workaround would be to lower the framerate to maybe 2 fps. If you only want to pause the movie, then 25fps is not needed. Would be nice if you could set arena4D to lower frame rates to decrease process time? I guess increase the speed (m/s) would have the same result?

Edit:
This seems to work fine with my mp4-files:
http://www.kolor.com/gopro-vr-player/download/
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Mark Christy »

Hi David,

We have created higher resolution videos, but they take a long time to generate and most players struggle to play them back because of the bandwidth required to stream the data off disk into memory. 4K is the practical limit on most hardware at the moment. Like you say we can't compress too much otherwise the noise level gets too high.

In Shotcut we use H264 and make sure that there are not too many frames in the GOP setting. The lower you go the better the quality, but the larger the file.

Glad you got up and running though.

Many Thanks

Mark
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by Joohansson »

Two more videos. Make sure you set it to 4k.


youtu.be/


youtu.be/

Some nice effects from Gopro VR player (very cool during playback!):
Image

Image

Image
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Re: 360 Panoramic Video Support

Post by sommer »

Amazing – thank you Mark! Can't wait to check it out!
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