rant: VR? Really!?

… found this charming photo of Steve/rippletraining, @CreativeSummit2017, which, imho, illustrates the whole dilemma of VR in all its shining glory:



Really? I mean, really??
This…



… never succeeded in our living-rooms, but those 'helmets' shall do?
Sure, there are niches for VR: games (… wear such a device for an hour or so…), real estate and holidays broker, theme-parks (VR on a rollercoaster - yeah! ) …

Steve is an enthusiastic scuba-diver - and he looks exactly like that on that pic.
I'm enthusiastic about the future of AR - but this?
Nerd-toy. Dead-on-arrival. :S

Convince me!!

VR for news. You are there. NYTimes as a 360 report every day. No glasses. Move your phone to look around you.

Tom Wolsky wrote: VR for news. You are there. NYTimes as a 360 report every day. No glasses. Move your phone to look around you.

hm, hm, hm… sure.
yeah, CNN.mobile does cover some aftermaths in 360 (stills) too…

But is an NLE not meant for story-telling? And don't 'we' do everything to focus the audience to the story?

In that context: Yes, I've seen the trailer to 'Ready Player One' and I've read some comments from the Story-telling-Meister Spielberg… ("What if I miss a plot-point, because I've turned around the other moment? Cannot rewind!")

naw, … not convinced. :S

But you use 4K video in a 1080 timeline for the same reason, to have the same type of flexibility.
And who hasn't edited really nice drone footage and was thrilled to have it?

From my viewpoint:

There is 360 video which needs no goggles. Also, YouTube and The Facebook and I'm sure others support it fully. In fact, we here where I work are just starting to incorporate it into our work. Very active and quite large community of 360 video makers, users, whatever.

4K let's you zoom editing in a 1080 Timeline.
360 let's you get any angle from one clip, keyframing where the view angle points and when. Choose to pan or straight cut, in just one clip. And most 360 cameras film in a frame size that's more like UHD. Put that into a 1080 timeline, then not only can you pan around in one, single clip, you could also zoom.

Then there is 360 VR that uses the goggles, for most like virtual training or virtual gaming. But even so, editing 360 video with them would be a hoot. I'd love to give it a try.

Another legitimate tool for an artist to tell a story, like 4K and drones. The only bad tool is the one you ignore. Hell, we even run our 360 camera mounted under a drone, filming in UHD resolution. "The times they are a chaingin'..."

FCPX.guru wrote: … 4K let's you zoom editing in a 1080 Timeline.
360 let's you get any angle from one clip, …

excellent point - 360-recording adds a new <pun ahead> dimension of re-framing.
… if your panorama-cam delivers some insane resolution - but, that is just a matter of $$$. Sports comes to mind… my mind

Wording makes the difference: 360 ≠ VR
ok, 360 in an NLE makes sense - for a very tiny, privileged group of editors.

hmm… we'll see…

Had a number of discussions about the auteur theory, but news is different. Think Santa Rosa fires, driving through the neighborhoods. It’s very powerful and immersive.

My initial reactions are the same as Karstens. I see the need to get involved in 360 video but I don't see its appeal to me as an editor with an interest in storytelling. Even corporate work gives me options to craft a story that I don't see in VR which seems more of a technical exercise. Maybe I'm missing something or the tech is in early stages. Not sure if it will die like 3D - I think it will become a whole other thing independent of games and film/tv/trad storytelling visuals.

3D all over again. How boring Perhaps Motion update will cheer us all up...

Fun thing with 360 video is that it had been there in the mid 90's and was really cool.
Just add a QTPlayer extension (an Apple one) , add a SMILE link to your video and you were able to play your 360 video.
For those who had no access to the plugin you could render your video to "cube faces" and use QTPlayer in VR mode.

Regarding "modern times" 360 makes sense with video resolutions up from 8k by 4k - anything else is SD times

Also the lack of depth-of-field, no choice of lenses etc makes no real sense for normal stories. Though there are interesting approaches there.

BUT for scientific, learning and those things it makes a perfect sense. When I was able to move around I made a lot of those for R&D (and for art projects)
But it was I nightmare of data shuffling .