In Safari, though, you have a single equirectangular view that's not interactive. View in Chrome, for instance, and you get a regular video you can drag around to see from every angle. As is also the case with Facebook, though, exactly what people will see will depend on which browser they're using. If YouTube is your platform of choice, you can share directly from the Gear 360 Manager app or after editing in ActionDirector. Unfortunately, uploading to Facebook involves a noticeable loss of quality along the way. If your friends are viewing on a mobile device they can physically move it to pan around the frame if they're on a desktop, they can use their mouse instead. You'll probably get more traction on Facebook, mind, which can now handle both stills and video embedded in the timeline.
Originally launched as the oddly named Milk VR, and subsequently retitled Samsung VR, the company's own virtual reality library supports both professional content – including movies and apps – and user-generated content uploaded from the Gear 360. If you want a copy from the camera, you need to save it manually (you can select multiple thumbnails and save them all in one fell swoop, mind) otherwise, every time you view something stored on the camera's memory card, you'll need to wait for the processing to take place every time.ĭoubly-frustrating is the fact that there's no apparent way to store 360 photos or video on a memory card, which means you're limited to the generally 32GB of in-phone storage on the Galaxy S7. What's somewhat counter-intuitive is that processed media isn't automatically stored to your phone. As with the camera preview, you can choose between a 360 view – moving with a finger-drag or, optionally, as you physically move the phone – a panorama, or a split-screen with each of the two stills or videos. That happens on a per-view basis when you tap each item in the "Gear 360" tab in the app, the processing time depending on factors like length and resolution. Once you've captured a photo or video, it needs to be stitched before you can see it properly.
Samsung's dinky little tripod is good for impromptu shots, and the legs snap together to make a useful handle, but the best results often come when the camera is fairly high up off the ground which means locating either a regular tripod or something tall enough to stand the Gear 360 on top of. It's not so much about positioning – after all, everything around the Gear 360 is going to be in the snap – as it is height. If you're in time-lapse mode you can adjust the interval between shots in the app too the Gear 360 remembers your most recent setting, even if it's powered off or disconnected from your phone.īest of all, there's minimal delay after recording before you can take another photo or start recording video again.įraming with a 360-degree camera is a different experience than most of us are used to.
If you just want to quickly check that a pano you stitched in Hugin looks good, Hugin has a built-in panorama viewer, and a simply using the menu command View → Overview will take you to the Overview pane where you can drag the axes about to rotate the view, but you'll be looking at the sphere from the outside, not the inside.Manual settings include white balance, ISO from 400 to 1600, exposure from +/- 3.0 in 1/10th of a stop increments, and resolution, as well as the ability to toggle HDR and sharpness on/off. Most will use HTML5 and a web browser.īut if you don't want to use an online service, one tool that will convert any equirectangular image to HTML5, Flash, or QuicktimeVR is Garden Gnome's Pano2VR, but it's licensed. There are a plethora of tools that can do this, and even Facebook and Flickr can do it automatically with uploads that use the appropriate metadata and tagging, respectively. The PTGui stitcher, for example, can actually output to QuicktimeVR directly as well as to equirectangulars. The most common formats for 360x180 panos would be HTML5, Flash, or QuicktimeVR. To get an equirectangular to display interactively you have to deliver it in some interactive viewer format.