Top 12 tips for creating 360-degree VR video for journalism

VR is hitting us by storm. Jamie Stark shares his tips for shooting and editing 360-degree video for journalism. VR workflow in Adobe Premiere Pro CC has some new additions to better your VR needs!

12 tips for shooting and editing 360-degree video for journalism

A few tips from filming and failing:

1. The Golden Rule of Immersive and 360: Ask yourself, does this story need 360? If you are taking the viewer somewhere they otherwise could not be, perhaps you are telling a better story with 360. But more often than not, you can stick with one camera and save immersive technique for another story. 2. Place an audio recorder under the 360 camera rig tripod, so it is automatically edited out of the scene by the editing software, and sound comes to the listener from the same location as the visuals. 3. For your audio recording, try to use something with 360 capabilities, like the Tascam model I used. In immersive shooting, you never know where sound may come from. 4. Tripod height: best to set at eye level with your subject so the viewer feels comfortably aligned. 5. Don’t forget video portraits of your subject(s), most likely from 4–8 feet away from the camera(s). 6. When using a multiple camera rig, like six or more GoPros, ensure your cameras are all on the same settings. If not, you will be sad in the editing room when one frame won’t stitch with the others. 7. Find a VR/immersive journalist friend. Google doesn’t yet have answers to some of the questions you may have for troubleshooting, and it can be more fun and professional to struggle through the ethical and editing conundrums together. (Shout out to Anna Yelizarova and Naomi Cornman from Stanford.) 8. I would edit in Adobe Premiere over Final Cut Pro, since Premiere has native support for VR, and seems to produce higher quality exported clips in my case. You can also do color correction in Premiere if needed.

Click here to read the full article from Stanford Journalism