Tips & Tricks - ImmersiveStorytelling/DocumentationMasterclass GitHub Wiki

Here is a list of things we came across that may be an issue or a big help:

SSD

Place your projects on an Solid Sate Drive if possible.
Because of the heavy load on your hard drive, it may be possible that a normal HDD will be a bottleneck for the project. Your videos will not play smoothly and will lag.

25 fps vs 29.97 fps

When you shoot a video with the Garmin camera it will record in 29.97 fps, wich is an American standard.
When you convert the .mp4 file to a .hpv file, you should pay attention to that.

You have two possible solutions:

  1. In the HPVCreator-tool, you choose an fps of 30. Because you can't choose 29.97 the video will be played a little faster, but you won't be able to see that normally.
    2. In Unity, you can set the speed of the video to 1.1988 to match the exact speed of the original video. You can do this through the HPV_Manager.

Ubuntu sub-system

When you are running a Windows 10, use the built-in Ubuntu sub-system for converting the videos with FFmpeg.
It seems to be running faster than in Windows' command prompt.

Time Converting Files

The converting of (big) videos takes quite a lot of time.
Takes this into account!
If possible, let your computer just convert the files over night.
You can for example couple the ffmpeg-commands so that it'll convert all your videos at once.
ffmpeg -i video1ToConvert.mp4 -f image2 /pathToFolder1/nameOfImageSequence1-%06d.png && ffmpeg -i video2ToConvert.mp4 -f image2 /pathToFolder2/nameOfImageSequence2-%06d.png
When the first command is completed, it will automatically begin to convert the second video (the second command, after the &&)

Stitching

When you chose for the camera to automatically stitch the video, you have to keep in mind that where the two halves meet, a piece of the video is being cut out. This is important for the placement of the camera.

So when an object or a person stands right in that stitch, it will look deformed and incomplete which may be an issue for the story. This also counts for moving objects that move through the stitch. You will clearly see the stitch and will have a weird conversion when the object moves from one half to the other half.

An option to avoid this, is by acquiring a software tool to manually stitch the video. Or by buying a 360° with just one lens.

Filming with Garmin 360°

When filming in automatically stitch mode with the Garmin camera, the quality will be maximum 4K as an mp4-file. When you do want to manually stitch the video, it is possible to film videos in 5,7K in raw format.

Warning!

While shooting video's, the battery empties very fast. Make sure you the brattery is completely charged before you start shooting and have extra batteries or be able to charge the camera between shots.

Moving around of the user

One of the biggest challenges was still to get people looking around as much as possible in the virtual world. At the event, we noticed that people do look around, but don't have the reflex to turn around completely which at times may be necessary.

Be sure to encourage and attract people to look around.

During the development, we found that when a person must be seated for the video, they rotate around more when sitting on a rotatable chair instead of a fixed chair where looking behind isn't very comfortable. So always keep into account that not by only distractions, but also by the comfort of movements of the user will make the user want to look around more.

Ending of each Shot

On default, a video in a sphere will keep looping if nothing happens. This can be quite inconvenient for stories.

For example, when you have a shot of one minute long where a lot of things happen and the program waits for the user to turn around, it may well be possible the user doesn't has the reflex to look to the correct angle. If then the minute finishes, the movie will start over. This is something that may not happen.

A solution for this is to make sure that for every shot you record you end with a static end, so that when the video ends, the program sets it on pause. This way the video won't be played over and nothing changes untill the user looks towards the correct angle out of boredom.

Ending of the Story

Don't forget to include a proper ending to the story, so that when the last video ends, it doesn't start over again.

Too small angle to detect

When you're using an angle too small to detect wether the user has looked at a certain direction, it may not be detected at certain moments. Make the detection angle wide enough.

A good idea is when setting an angle to look at, to detect between +10° and -10° of that angle.

Changes on the ground when switching shots

Not only can you look sideways, but also upside and down. Be careful when recording two different video's with changes, that nothing right under the user changes since it can be seen from there.

Adjusting Variables on Running Time

When you are running the program, you can adjust variables in Unity. By stopping the program, the variables will reset back to the variables to those when it started. So whenever you have to adjust a variable permanently, you have to do this when the program is not running.