Special Consideration for Using 360 Footage
As excited as we are about using our GoPro Max camera to film 360 videos, and editing them in Adobe Premiere or Adobe After Effects, there is one special thing we need to consider before getting to the editing stage of a project.
As it turns out, the videos recorded in this camera, when set in 360 mode, have a resolution of 5.6K (5376 x 2688 pixels) which is much larger than the resolution used by standard computers in Full HD. To put it into perspective, let’s look at the following image:
(Image source: https://www.kandaovr.com/)
We can see that this resolution is almost three times as wide and two times as tall as a full HD resolution. This might be a problem since not all the computers and devices are compatible with this type of resolution, and I came to learn about it as I wanted to start editing the footage for our current Virtual Reality project.
When I wanted to export the video from the GoPro camera to a legible format in Adobe Premiere (it is natively a .360 format), the software told me I was missing a codec to be able to manipulate this video. A codec is basically a software that helps the computer decode (or encode) a video file, and in this case, given the format and resolution, I needed to find the HEVC or High Efficiency Video Coding, which basically helps me export the 360 video to a MP4 format, which in turn is editable by software like Premiere.
From my research, nowadays most computers come with this codec by default, not in my case since my computer is a couple years old, but it can be easily acquired in the Microsoft Store: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/p/hevc-video-extension-codec/9nr3fsth8k4p?activetab=pivot:overviewtab
After installing it, my computer was indeed capable of manipulating this video and most importantly, export it to MP4 in order to start the editing stage.
