JoanJetsetter's video: How to Shoot 360 VR Underwater

Find out how to shoot underwater in 360 degrees / VR! We used the 360Abyss during a complicated underwater shoot. Here's what we learned. Get a Dive Master Scuba diving is hard enough as it is. Couple that with managing a shot list and monitoring equipment and you have a mighty tall order. Someone has to be looking out for your safety, and our dive master extraordinaire was Dave Lieberman, the owner Diving Catalina. He kept his eye on us and the surrounding conditions the entire time we were in the water. Keep a Firm Grip on the Abyss With the Abyss camera, you can capture footage while swimming, holding the camera by its legs. However, you’ll want to keep your arms steady and locked, taking special care not to turn the camera. If the axis rotates, your viewers might feel nauseous when they watch it in a headset. Face the Primary Camera If you plan on getting shots where you swim with the Abyss, position camera one, the primary camera so that it’s facing you the entire time. Not only will this help your stitcher overcome ghosting issues in post, it will also help you search for the specific shots and help you figure out which sections are worth stitching in the first place. Use GoPro Brand Batteries Only During our test day, one of our cameras died suddenly, which meant that any footage captured afterward would be unusable. Bring Extra Charged Batteries You’ll want to bring extra sets of charged batteries and change them out after you’ve fine-tuned your settings and right before you get in the water. That way, you’ll have maximum battery life. The last thing you want is have to get out of the water and open up the camera to change out the batteries, which would be a huge time suck and place unnecessary strain on the crew. Organize Your Cards Develop a system to organize all of your micro SD cards so that all of camera one’s shots are on the same card, all of camera two's shots are on the same card and so forth. It doesn’t have to be a sophisticated system. Adjust Your Settings Based on Changing Conditions Consider the weather when adjusting your settings since coastal conditions can change pretty dramatically. It was overcast during our test run, so we shot at a 1600 ISO limit. The following day, the weather was bright and beautiful for the first half of the day and then cloudy during the better part of the afternoon. The changing conditions were frustrating for us, but sometimes you need to think about splitting the difference in order to save time. Shoot in Native Color For the most color information, shoot in native. We debated back and forth about this, but if you know you are going to color-grade the footage in post, native color is the safest best. Prepare to Spend Extra Time Stitching We knew going into this project, that the footage would be far too complex for any auto-stitch program. We had to force a stitch in areas where there was a lack of reference points to lock to. Another issue was prominent parallaxing caused by the camera operators proximity to the Abyss. In some cases, our arms were cut-off. Despite these challenges, our stitcher—Jimmie Rhee at Virtuality Lab—achieved an acceptable stitch with most of the takes. However, there were a few takes that were just impossible to stitch due to our limitations of reference points and parallaxing. ___ If you value experiences over consumerism, if you think there's more to life than the 9-5, if you want to travel to every country in the world before you die, subscribe to my channel, and let’s see where we end up next: http://ow.ly/Vx3Xs Snapchat: JoanJetsetter Blog: http://www.joanjetsetter.com/ Instagram: http://instagram.com/JoanJetsetter Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoanJetsetter/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoanJetsetter Vine: https://vine.co/JoanJetsetter Tumblr: http://joanjetsetter.tumblr.com/ Executive Producer: Skye Mayring Editor: Gerardo Jaquez Lechuga Music Always (Vlog Music) by Dj Quads https://soundcloud.com/aka-dj-quads Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/jIiE1ezj4cs dizzy by Joakim Karud https://soundcloud.com/joakimkarud Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/xseXbA2N6D0 Wild Flower by Joakim Karud https://soundcloud.com/joakimkarud Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AQWSIi1QU-o Magic by @TONEZPRO (OFFICIAL) https://soundcloud.com/tonez-pro Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/gr_sQ_nGejM