360 Camera Accessories 360 Camera Techniques

Make a drone invisible using 360 cameras — see these 360 video demos

Make a drone invisible using 360 cameras
Make a drone invisible using 360 cameras
You can use a pair of 360 cameras to make a drone appear invisible in a 360 video.  This is the approach used by Kodak PIXPRO with the SP360 4K Dual Pro Aerial Kit (which I will show next time).  Now, 3D printed mounts designed by Jean-Marie Cannie have made it possible to do the same with many types of 360 cameras, using the very popular DJI Mavic Pro drone.  I wrote about Jean-Marie’s mount previously and now I’ve had the chance to use them.  Here are sample videos with the mount.
First here’s a video showing how easy it is to use Jean-Marie’s mount (Note: puh-leeeeze hit the “Thumbs Up” button on YouTube!   These videos take a very, very long time to put together and your Thumbs Up would really help to make the videos reach more viewers, which would make them more worthwhile to create:

Here is the 360 video version

What you need:
– Karamba Mavic top mount, bottom mount, and extension clip, all available here.
a pair of hotshoe to 1/4-20 adapters
– two Xiaomi Mijia MI SPHERE 360 cameras. Discount code: MIJIAYTB or see other codes here (or other 360 cameras, preferably light, thin, stabilized, and inexpensive)
– DJI Mavic from Gearbest, Amazon or B&H Photo.  You can compare the prices (including taxes, shipping and of course availability) between these three stores.  Full disclosure: Gearbest’s Mavic has Chinese documentation but the English manual etc. are available online.
– video editing software with multi-track capability and if possible, 360 support (including the ability to rotate the video).
The concept is that you need to combine the top half of the 360 video from the top camera, with the bottom half of the bottom camera’s video.  In this video, the approach I used was to mask the videos then overlay them (I used Premiere to do this, although many other video editors can do this too).  The tricky part was that the stabilization of the two cameras was not in sync, so I had to keep them aligned by keyframing their movements.  Yes it was extremely tedious.  I’m going to try other approaches and find the best one.
Next time, I will also show a demo of the Kodak SP360 4K Dual Pro Aerial Kit with the 3DR Solo quadcopter!
To make sure you don’t miss these and other cool techniques, reviews, and news about 360 cameras and accessories, here are ways to stay updated:
Subscribe to the 360 Rumors YouTube channel.
Subscribe to the 360 Rumors mailing list (if you ever forget, it’s also on the right side of the nav bar on top).  I promise I won’t sell your info to other people.
Thank you and please take a second to hit the thumbs up on the video! 😀

 

About the author

Mic Ty

2 Comments

Click here to post a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.