Professional Features

360° (Equirectangular) Videos

The Professional license allows to export 360° (Equirectangular) videos. In the Setup, select the Video Export tab and change the settings as described here.

We recommend to use one of the 360° Presets. For custom settings, we suggest to follow the following guidelines:

• Video Type: Select 360° Equirectangular Video
• Width should be twice as large as Height. Use Width=4096, Height=2048 for good quality
• Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1
• Interlacing: Progressive
• Format: Either AVI Raw or MOV PNG. Both are lossless formats and the quality will be the same, AVI RAW may work better with other compressors such as Handbrake, but MOV PNG will produce smaller files instead.
• Framerate: Good question, we suggest 30. You may experiment if 48 or 50 or 60 will improve things.

Similiar to normal video export files, the generated files are compressed losslessly and require further compression with an advanced codec such as MP4. Please note that because of the lossless compression, the generated files will be HUUUGE, so you may first experiment with smaller resolutions and framerates. The width should be exactly twice as large as height. Higher resolutions than 4096x2048 will most likely make not much sense for your application and will only increase file sizes into extremes. If you plan to create videos for playback on smartphones, it may also be possible that your phone will not be powerfull enough to play very high resolution files properly if the bitrate gets too large.

Okay, after you created the video file, you can edit or encode it using other tools just like for normal video exports. We suggest to encode the files with an MP4 codec. If you do not have a video editing software, you can use the free tool called Handbrake to compress it to an MP4 file. Make sure that the saved resolution and framerate stays the same when compressing the file to MP4.

After you created an MP4 file, you need to inject some metadata into the file so that Youtube or whereever you want to playback the file, can detect the file as a 360 degree video. The video player of your smartphone also requires this extra medadata. Most video editing softwares including Handbrake cannot add that metadata automatically. We suggest to use the same free tool that Youtube recommends in Step 2 of the following website:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6178631?hl=en&ref_topic=2888648

It is a free Python tool, that will produce a new MP4 file with the injected 360 degree video tag. It should work fast. After that you are done and can copy the final MP4 file to your phone (or upload it to Youtube or whereever you plan to show it to others).