Most people think of a 360° camera such as the new DJI 360 or older GoPro MAX as one capable of taking 360° photos and videos. And once they have their still / video, use a website such as memento360.com to display it, allowing the viewer to pan around the vista.
Alternatively, depending on the exact format, 360° imagery can also be loaded to services including Facebook, 360Cities or PanoCool.
The truth is though, if you own a 360° camera and only use to make these sorts of images (or the popular “tiny planet” type photos), you are no way using the camera to its fullest extent.
I have had a GoPro MAX for a few years now, and despite a flurry of 360° photos when it first came out, and a few aborted attempts at making VR based images, I have hardly touched it at all, as I too didn’t understand the potential that was there, mainly due to the fact there was no real software to take advantage of it.
However, my interest in 360° footage has resurfaced after receiving the DJI 360 for review.
Why so? Let me explain.
360° Mindset
You have to have a slight change of mindset when using such a camera. Certainly, you can shoot a 360° video and have the ability to pan around the footage when playing it back, but this is selling short the full capabilities of such a camera in a creative sense.
In reality, a 360° camera / camcorder is only as good as the software you can get to manipulate that shots taken, and this especially applies to video footage from such a camera as against still images.
It’s with video from the DJI 360 and its companion software, DJI Studio that I am concentrating on in this article.
Multiple Cameras in One
I don’t know if anyone will remember a breakthrough in photographic imaging that was shown quite a while back now, when the famed basketballer Michael Jordan wired a bunch of GoPro cameras together in a circle and had them all trigger at once as he did a slam dunk in the middle of that circle or cameras.
The resultant image from each camera were all stitched together to make one shot that when viewed, was akin to a single camera rotating around him as he took the dunk and seemed to be frozen in mid-air.
At the time it was mind blowing and right up there with the original Michael Jackson “morphing” video.
Now if you think about it, this is exactly what you have with a camera like the DJI 360; a single camera capable of acting as infinite number of cameras around both a horizontal and almost vertical plane.
And this is where the software comes in. Specifically, DJI Studio which is a free download and designed exactly for what the engineers had in mind for the DJI 360 camera.
Keyframes and Interpolation
The key to understanding how to take advantage of the functionality afforded to you is by getting familiar with what are called keyframes.
Most good video editing packages support the use of keyframes so you may have come across them before in your travels, but if not, a keyframe is simply a snapshot of a video’s image at a particular single point in time. Depending on the software and the controls it allows, you can change aspects of the video at different keyframes, and the software will automatically interpolate the differences in the intermediate fames between the two points.
This is best shown by way of a simple example.
If your software allows you to digitally zoom into an image and then back out again, you might place a keyframe at the point you want the original video to start being zoomed into. Next, you’d use the functions of the software to zoom into the video at the desired point, then at the location where you want the zoom to stop when the video is playing back, add a second keyframe. Next, you would find the point you wish the video to be back to “normal” and, again use the software to zoom the video back out again and then place a third keyframe at the zoomed out point.
When played back, the video will show the standard zoom but when it reaches the first keyframe will start to zoom in until it reaches the second keyframe and then zoom back out again until it reaches the third.
The distance between the keyframes will dictate how long – or short – the zoom is. If you wanted to hold that zoom for a period, you would place another keyframe between the second and third keyframes that is identical to keyframe number two, thus holding that zoom value.
You can add clever things to keyframes too such as how fast or slow to zoom in and out.
As you may have guessed, its not only a zoom function that can be keyframed. Other aspects can equally have keyframes such as contrast, brightness, hue and saturation, rotation and much more. Sophisticated packages like DaVinci Resolve let you add all sorts of effects using keyframes, and motion graphics applications like Adobe After Effects take the options available to an even higher level of sophistication.
Adding specialised plugins ups the anti even further of what is possible.
Keyframing Camera Angles
But getting back to the DJI 360 and associated DJI Studio software, whilst these can also be keyframed, what also have the ability to do is keyframe the camera angle.
I am not using this article as a tutorial for DJI Studio by the way; that is a separate project I am working on via a video tutorial on and hope to have available within a week or so.
As you’ll recall, because the DJI 360 is shooting in 360° simultaneously, you can keyframe the actual direction and angle you want displayed in your final video.
As the camera angle changes, so DJI Studio calculates the frames need to fill the image between keyframes.
By adding multiple keyframes for different angles, effectively you are creating a multi-camera shoot with a single camera!
There are many examples that can take advantage of this functionality; if you are shooting backwards from a boat towing a ski-er for example, you don’t’ need to turn around and shoot forward as the DJI 360 is already doing that – just use DJI Studio to add keyframes letting you pan around the different directions you want as the video plays.
Or, if you are a racing car driver, a DJI 360 on your dashboard / windscreen will shoot all directions at once letting you create a video of the race itself from different viewpoints – the driver, the rear of the car, of the crowd at the side and so-on.
I am sure you can think of many opportune ties this can be used in your day-to-day shooting, where using a DJI 360 (or similar) lets you add a whole new complexion to your videos.
Once you have all the keyframes set in your videos 9and you can add more than one to a DJI Studio timeline of course), simply export it out in whichever format you want to allow playback in a standard media player such as VLC.
Tracking
In the Mac version of DJI Studio, and very soon to be available in the Windows version, extra functionality is available using a tracking facility – and of course, this can be keyframed!
By drawing an identifying box around a subject – a person, dog, car, boat, whatever – the DJI Studio software will track that object as the video plays keeping it as the main subject. This makes the job of creating a final video of a moving object very simple indeed.
Other aspects of the video frames can be individually keyframed as well as the tracking such as zooming, colour changes and so on.
Conclusion
I have seen some people refer to DJI Studio as a “fully featured” video editor. It isn’t.
Sure, it does have a lot of functionality, but it has been designed by the DJI engineers I suspect primarily as a 360° editor, and this it does very well.
And you can add music and different filters to a video if you wish using DJI Studio, but in reality, I’d be using the program to fine tune my 360° camera angles and keyframes plus doing any tacking, and then pulling the resultant exported video into DaVinci Resolve or similar for finishing with transitions, effects, colour grading, audio and so on.
This way you get the best of both worlds, and as both packages are free and both available for Mac and PC, you have nothing to lose either!
You can download DJI Studio from here and DaVinci Resolve from here. I have separate tutorials on DaVinci Resolve here.
A Final Note
One important thing to mention is that you don’t HAVE to shoot in 360°. The DJI 360 is quite capable of acting as a “normal” camera, albeit giving you the options of different wide angle lenses all in the one package!
Bargain!