It has been a quite short semester. I really have enjoyed the VR class, I wish I can take this course every semester to make my own VR videos every year. The experience of producing a VR video is so amazing, the feeling of making a VR video is totally different from making a normal video, I feel more sense of achievement. Every time I load my video into Oculus Go and check how it works, I will be amazed at what I have done, and how they have turned to something real enough that I can feel I am in it. I am very thankful for my choice of taking this course, and having such amazing professor Naimark and learning assistant Dave and all my classmates, especially Amy and John who are my teammates working together for the final project.
For the production part, shooting comes the first. The process of taking footage did not have many problems, people passing by hardly pay attention to the camera during the shooting. The only problem we meet, from my perspective, is the antenna. For the first footage, I bend the antenna too low that the camera can include it into the footage, and we cannot delete it in Pr, this is a relatively huge problem. There is one point needs to be mentioned, is the setting in the phone application of the Insta 360 Pro 2, we need to have the setting of 360 3D, or the footage we take cannot be stitched correctly. Also there are problem exporting the footage from the SD cards, even though we did not meet the problem of the corruption of the footage, some of the other teams had met the problem which was upset. And we also need to make sure the setting in the stitcher, so that the video stitched will be in two parts, and the part for left eye will be placed top with the part for right eye placed bottom.
For the Pr part, I and John have been working days for the final effect. I found out that if we want to apply the effect in Pr that are not included in the folder of immersive video, we need to put the effect seperately in other cover to be applied to the video. If we put other effect with the effect of plane to sphere, the video will be shrinked and distorted, which has been troubling us for several hours. Then I try to apply the effect posterize, and other effect to the video, these work well, except for the problem that there is a bar in the middle of the video showing that the effect needs GPU acceleration. And the problems is not solved till now, I have checked the option of GPU acceleration rendering in the setting, so I am thinking about it might be the problem of GPU, or I should not apply these effect to the video since these effects might be too many for the video. Since our theme is data, so we want to realize the effect similar to movie Matrix, and we apply the effect of VR glitch which perfectly fits our idea. Then I play with key frames to do the animation with mask, we draw the mask of all the buildings, to make the effects only work on certain buildings in sequence, since the video only takes one minute, so for each mask, we need to include a lot of buildings at the same time, or we will not have enough time to make buildings start becoming glitchy one by one. The hardest part of drawing the mask is to draw the mask of the sky, we need to sketch the frame of all the buildings which takes a lot of time and is very hard to have a very detailed frame of all these buildings. Thanks to the camera for being at one spot, we only need to have one mask for the sky since it does not move. After the finishing the glitchy effect, we try to change the HSB of the video, and find out a color combination of purple and green, as all the buildings are changed into green, combined with the effect of glitch, everything look so similar to the scene in Matrix or a apocalyptic scene. Playing with key frames and all kinds of effect can always bring me surprising result, so does it in VR video, after finishing applying all the effects and load the video into the headset, I am so amazed by myself and feel so proud. But still we need sound, which we make things even better. But the result is that the spatial auido work station did not work really well, so we failed to make spatial audio for the video, but just do several sound correction and manipulation for the video. This part is mainly done by John, so I appreciate him a lot.
For the demoning part, since I have another project to show, so I only spent a few amount of time doing the demo. But still I try my best to show the video to as many people as possible and receive many good feedbacks from them. Everyone I have shown to are amazed and enjoy the video. I am very proud of myself every time they praise the video, it is the sense of achievement that the producer of a video can receive positive feedback face-to-face from the viewers. Even though there are some problems for the viewers to watch the video due to the controler and the interface of Oculus Go, everyone enjoy it very much.
For conclusion, I want to say everything just end so fast. I really want to enjoy more, it is a pity for me that I can only make one video, and I have tried more for the video. I can make something better that can satisfy myself more, but still, want we have made is quite a success. Next time if I am going to make a VR video, I will definitly work better since I have the exeperience and will not make same mistakes. Also I will try more new things except for just adding effects, I really want to add interaction to the video, but this time, since we do not have enough time for that, we have not done that. But I will definitely explore the use of Unity in the interaction part of VR videos, that will bring more fun and possibilities for it, I want something not just an experience, but something to interact with. I love this course, for all we have achieved, and all the amazing faculties and classmates.