YouTube hosts 360 videos with user control that I’m keen to play with. There’s a Facebook page for the software package many use to overlay telemetry data on their action videos called, mind-blowingly, Telemetry Overlay. Some of the content people are creating and posting is wildly good if you’re in to that sort of thing. Using action cameras, sensors and watch/phone apps they’re getting a rich stream of data that the software makes possible to present in all kinds of ways. 

Last night I played around with a clip to try to figure it out. The process itself isn’t that complicated after watching three or four tutorial videos, but it takes a while. Clips first need to be exported using the software that comes with the camera, then brought into the Telemetry Overlay to add the gauges, then brought into video editing software like Final Cut Pro to do a polishing edit and export it to a final file before finally uploading to YouTube. It’s a lot of rendering and editing, but the editing at least should get faster as I post more.

Since Nat bought me the 360 camera, I’ve been playing around a lot with editing that. A flat camera is fine and my videos continue to have those looks straight in front and back. I’ve heard that people watch them to learn about routes they might not have known about, or to judge conditions on a given day or through, say, an ongoing street work detour. But the 360 is a lot more dynamic. I’m getting better at editing where the camera is “pointing”, I get to choose what the viewer is looking at: maybe it’s a focus on a close pass, or a train going by, or the construction progress on a building. Fully 360 videos in which the viewer decides what to look at are different. Maybe the viewer will want to focus on a new business that’s opened up or an oncoming cyclist they might know. It’ll be fascinating playing with these. 

I’m not satisfied with where I placed the gauges on this first try, but no biggie. I’ll get better with practice. The next thing I want to figure out is how to incorporate the multi-cam clips into the fully 360 video. Goals.

Random Saturday morning thoughts.