In my playing with 360° cameras from 360Fly, Samsung and GoPro, I have come across lots of anomalies and head scratching situations to make them “work” in terms of editing the footage outside of their native apps.
The reason for this is that while some of the packages supplied are passable, some are only just and some downright woeful in their execution, especially if you want to do fine editing, add titles and export to other apps, such as the Vegas Creative VR 360° we reviewed last month.
We even found some editors – higher end ones at that – wouldn’t read the MP4 or MOV files the cameras exported!
If this has been your experience, on the Windows 10 platform at least – this may be because your hardware and drivers are not up to snuff. We thought our Dell desktop was right on the cutting edge; it is less than 12 months old, but Pinnacle Studio and Corel VideoStudio, both of which have had native 360° editing built in for some time, wouldn’t read the files from the Samsung Gear 360° in particular.
Well it turns out this is a Windows 10 problem – sort of. As the files are HEVC based, you need the Windows 10 HEVC extension installed from the Windows Store (a hefty AUD$1.45 purchase!) as well as a Skylake or newer processor and a Nvidia GTX960 or later video card.
Once done, all good!
Film, Video & Virtual reality 