Exporting as 360 video after audio tweaks

[Nick Batt]

I'm actually trying to just replace the audio in a 360 video without reframing, wonder if this is a solution - eg:

Import 360 video, replace audio , re export as native 360 with new audio or maybe extra footage comined (also 360)

Cant seem to find a way for this to be done, dont really want to buy a new NLE (premier or FCPX) just to do this, assuming it is possible?

Many thanks

n

[Andrew Hazelden]

Hi Nate,

You have several options for replacing the audio track in an existing 360VR video.

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If the final rendered video is a 360VR movie you can use the free Spatial Media Injector app on this GitHub repository to tag the MP4/MOV file as a panoramic movie:

https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases

If the final rendered movie is a VR180 movie you can download an archived version of the (now discontinued) Google 180VR Creator app and use it to tag the video as a 180VR movie:

https://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckless/viewtopic.php?p=41898#p41898

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When editing your footage you can choose your preferred workflow:

If you don't want any video re-encoding steps to happen on the video track then the free ffmpeg utility could be used for the task. 

ffmpeg can be told to directly copy the existing video track over, and then a modified audio track can be inserted into the new MP4 video file.

This revised MP4 video would then have the 360VR Spatial Media Metadata tags injected back into it.

This is an attractive option if you have a 5.7K video and are using Resolve (Free) or a DAW (an audio editing tool) to edit just the audio track.

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If you are comfortable with Resolve/Resolve Studio for video and audio editing you would edit the 360VR content in a "full-frame" fashion. You would ideally work at the original video resolution and frame rate. No reframing effects would be applied.

The edited video would then be exported via the Resolve Deliver page. 

This video file could be encoded by Resolve to an MP4 directly with either an H.264 or H.265 video codec. Your GPU might be able to help accelerate the video encoding task if it supports hardware encoding options.

If video quality mattered a whole lot, you could optionally use a 3rd party video encoding tool like the free Handbrake program to encode the MP4 video from an intermediate DNxHR or ProRes video export if you are tech savvy and want to go the extra mile.

This revised MP4 video would then have the 360VR Spatial Media Metadata tags injected back into it.

Regards,

Andrew Hazelden

[Nick Batt]

Ok great - excellent summry of information, Resolve is my preferred route.  I will try that, but for some reason Resolve cant export to mp4 with those dimension, some issue with the codec, that was on PC I'll try on a mac and see if that works better.

[Nick Batt]

I should add I imported a 360 video exported from Insta360 Studio app, but when it came to exporting the video again (without any reframing) Resolve failed with a codec error - it didnt know what to do with it....

[Nick Batt]

Thanks for all your help!
I found a workflow - export from resolve at 100MB/s in native format. then use this tool:
https://macdownload.informer.com/spatial-media-metadata-injector/ (works on my m1 mac)

To inject, and seems to not recompress so takes much less time than injecting using Compressor or another recompression tool

[Nick Batt]

I have managed to export the video from resolve, but its not behaving as a 360 video now, am I missing a step?

[Andrew Hazelden]

Hi Nick,

I thought I should clarify that the macdownload dot software informer link you posted is giving you access to the same program as the files hosted on the official Spatial Media Injector GitHub project page I mentioned in my initial reply. The program is an Intel x64 compiled app from 2018 which means Rosetta emulation is needed on an Apple Silicon ARM64 CPU based system.

Yes, the speed to add the metadata is a lot faster then doing a full video encode. The Spatial Media Injector utility is adding a few kilobytes of spatial media metadata information to the video file without re-compressing either the video or audio tracks. This is a lossless process that does not impact the image quality.

Regards,

Andrew Hazelden