Use FFMPEG to Automate Equirectangular Conversion of 360Fly Video Clips
My laptop is perhaps not amazing, and for whatever reason, 360Fly Director only wants to convert short videos. Long ones simply do not work. Luckily, the camera has a 4 minute video chaptering feature. Sadly, Director does not have any batch processing features. If it takes 8 minutes to convert a 4 minute video and I shoot 1 hour and 20 minutes of video, I have 2 hours and 40 minutes of sitting in front of the computer mostly waiting and occasionally pushing a couple buttons. This is extremely boring and I would like to go to bed!
Thanks to https://github.com/prouast/equirectangular-remap I was inspired to develop a command-line solution based on FFMPEG. This is the result.
Copy your camera's footage into a folder. Open your Mac or Linux terminal and cd to that directory. Run 3840x1920/processing_script.sh. Consume the output in footage_folder/equirectangular/ready_for_davinci/ in your favourite editing suite. I use Davinci Resolve. Consider deleting all the videos in footage_folder/equirectangular when you're done.
I dislike that there is an intermediate step, but when I tried doing it all in one step, the output was black and white.
There are lots. Firstly, I am not responsible for your use of this script. If you lose your footage, that's your business. Don't complain to me, etc.
The blindspot size was found via trial and error. I do not have good math for it, nor did I do an especially precise job of measuring the one that 360Fly Director inserts.
I did not develop a map and a script for all the resolutions that 360Fly Director has. I only need the big one.
There are random, rambling notes in here that I made to preserve my sanity while I figured this out. I know nothing about video processing.