9 Chapter 9: Additional Resources
We go over some tools to help you shoot, edit and produce 360 content and basic virtual reality experiences in-depth in Chapter 6, but here’s a list of additional resources.
360 photo editing
Knightlab’s Scene VR: An easy-to-use tool to create slideshow galleries of 360 photos that can be viewed in headsets
Spatial/360 audio editing
Facebook 360 Spatial workstation: Free (for now at least!) audio workstation to create rotating, surround sound for 360 video and cinematic VR.
G’Audio Works: Powerful Mac-only digital workstation to create 3D sound using object-based placement. A solution for professionals.
The Ambisonic Toolkit: A set of useful plug-ins for editing spatial audio. Works particularly well with Reaper, a powerful digital audio workstation that is also fairly affordable.
NPR Training: A guide to recording spatial audio for 360-degree video: A behind-the-scenes look at how NPR experimented with spatial audio for their immersive video projects
BBC Academy: Spatial Audio: Where Do I Start?: A fantastic resource compiled by BBC audio producers.
Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro also have spatial audio editing functionality.
Developing more interactive or advanced 360/VR content
ThingLink: A user-friendly platform to add embeddable media elements to your 360 videos
Adobe Catalyst: Geared more towards educators, this program allows you to add interactive elements, such as quizzes and information hotspots to build more immersive learning content.
Liquid Cinema: Geared towards professional filmmakers and content developers for adding more interactivity and special features, including forced perspective, picture-in-picture and branched video, without needing to code.
Unity: An ultra-popular cross-platform gaming engine used to create 2D and 3D games, augmented reality and 6DoF virtual reality content. Has a massive asset store and resources to help get started.
Unreal: An extremely powerful 3D game development platform that has a smaller community of users than Unity, but excels at high fidelity visuals
Spatial Audio
NPR Training: “A Beginner’s Guide to Spatial Audio in 360-degree Video” by Nick Michael
Your Detailed Guide to Spatial Audio for 360 Video Using Mostly Free Tools by No Film School
More resources and good reads
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression: Can you take a picture? A look at your right to photograph in Canada.
The 360 Guy: YouTube vlogger with lots of great tutorials and video tours.
Ben Claremont: One of the web’s leading expert’s on immersive shooting and editing.
360 Rumours: A leading 360 video website with the latest industry news and loads of useful tutorial content.
Online News Association’s Journalism 360 group: A global gathering of 360/immersive journalists and documentarians. Subscribe to their newsletter to keep on top of what’s happening in this space.