Action Director 2.0 How to more reliably frame videos

[MainFragger]

I have recently been given the opportunity to work on a film project to film parts of it in VR. I am using both Gear 360's and Instaone X's to film my content.

I am using THREE different softwares to edit, but all of them seem to be falling a bit short of what I need them to be able to do easily.

So for now, lets concentrate on the one YOU are going to care about most.. Action Director 2.0/3.0....

I have roughly an hour of material filmed that breaks down to roughly 19 clips.
If I drag one of them to the time line, I figured out that I can adjust the angle of view in one of the clips and produce/export it. Most of the time that works fine.

The tricky part is what happens when you drag multiple clips to the time line at the same time. I learned the hard way, that you can set the angle of view in your first clip..but the moment you change that angle in the second clip, it also makes the change in all of the other clips on the time line. Is there a setting to keep it from doing that? Because otherwise, the process to get your clips lined up right is a bit arduous.

You have to drag the first one to the time line, make your angle of view adjustment, and then produce it. Then you have to do delete that file from the time line and do the same for each following file. Bad enough..But things get trickier still when you are breaking up some of your clips with multiple trims of a single clip. NOW you are trapped with ALL of the files to the timeline. So NOW you have to chose the the clip AFTER the one you want to change the angle of view for, select it, cntrl-a to select all, and then deselect the one you want to edit, and remove the rest from the time line. Correct the angle of view in that clip, produce it, cntrl-z to bring back the clips you removed. Remove the clip you just edited. And now redo that process for each clip you move onto until you have the last one produced. THEN remove all of your clips..put the produced clips back on the time line, and produce it again as a single clip.

Thats a LOT of work to do to just frame your clips right. It would be nice if you could just frame each clip on the time line without affecting the other clips.

I'll save the next two issues that are kind of related, but not exactly for my next two posts..

 

[MainFragger]

In my previous post I mentioned that I was editing 19 clips. Which I then produced to a single clip for my final product.

I find that one of two things happens on SOME of the clips. And I can't seem to figure out why.

1. If I adjust the angle of view for a certain clip and produce it. Every few clips will NOT have accepted my assignation and be pointed in a different direction. You can tell, because when you are on target, your subject is at the center of the video, but when you are not, your subject is on the left or right "wings" of the distorted equarectangular video. At first I thought I was just messing up..but I've done this enough now, and tried to be careful about it, to see that sometimes the software just seems to not do what I am trying to get it to do.

2. The weirder issue is when you are looking at the video in Movies and TV in Win10, and it looks fine. Everything is where its suppose to be. But then when you play on your VR headset, your subject is still at the back of the video instead of the front of the video. If I do multiple clips, most of them come out right, but a few always do this to me. Its getting really annoying. My "work load" could be greatly increasing, and dealing with issues like this is going to make my work more daunting..

 

[MainFragger]

Action director was clearly specifically set up to work with Gear 360. However, I now have two different VR camera, one of which is a different brand. And the snag I've run into is that it technically has a 4K mode, but its 4K resolution is different and slightly higher than Gear 360's.

Now they are both 2:1 even though the numbers are different, so there is no "distortion" because of the difference. But it would be nice if I wasn't locked into specific resolutions..or it at least had a "keep the existing resolution" option. But instead, when you go to produce, it gives you a list of set resolutions and never lets you set it to anything different.

While there is no distortion...in watching raw video from the other camera, versus produced video, there is actually a pretty clear lost of resolution..and its also clear that video is more compressed. Which is kind of disappointing.