From the course: Adobe Green-Screen Workflow

Using a panoramic photo as a virtual set

From the course: Adobe Green-Screen Workflow

Using a panoramic photo as a virtual set

- I'm a big fan of panoramic photography. It's one of my favorite genres to shoot because it allows you to see expansive landscapes or rich environments. Plus with the addition of things like VR cameras, it's getting even easier to capture virtual reality or 360 degree views of images with video. Let me show you how you can use a still image and easily cut it up into pieces to create a panoramic environment, but you can use the same techniques on footage layers as well. Now in this case, I've already got some 360 degree photos. This one's a full 360 and this one's more of a 180 degree field of view. Now what I'm going to do is drop my footage layer in and then behind it place this environment. It's quite large. In order for this to work, you're going to need to download a script that can process this and turn it into a cylinder. Now this is a script called pt_pano invented by Paul Tuersley. You can download it for free if you're just using it for educational purposes, but if you use it for a production, please make a small purchase. What we can do now is select that layer, now choose File, Scripts, Run Script File. Navigate to your download. It should be called pt_Panorama and click Open to load the script. Now this gives you a new control panel. You can choose normal mode which will create no overlap or alt mode if you intend to actually do a lot more manipulation. You can also decide if you want those layers to accept lights or shadows which can be useful. I'll leave that deselected for now. Specify the angle of panorama. This one's a 360 and the number of sides. I view the number of sides being about how many shots I took when I made the panorama, but you can have more or less. For example if you said four sides, it would basically make a box. Adding 16 sides starts to round that out into something a bit more like a carousel. Eight would be an octagon. So you can add more sides if you want to create a smoother transition on this backdrop. When I click Make Panorama, it turns this into an environment and it adds a 3D camera. If we zoom out a little bit here, you can better see it. There is my active camera and here is Custom View 1. Now what you can see there is that we are essentially inside the cylinder. So let's go back to just one view and you'll notice that now that backdrop can be easily rotated. And as it spins around, you can essentially look anywhere within the frame that you want giving you a corrected natural horizon line and the ability to use any of this shot. Additionally, the camera controls allow you to control things like a zoom so you can zoom in or out within the frame to see more or less of this environment and it's really quite versatile. In fact if you think of it this way, let's take a look at this scene for a moment, you get an idea of how it's really built this like a cylinder. And you could actually place your actors inside of this environment. This would allow you to use multiple cameras if you want or to create the sense of walking or moving through a scene because as the subject moves, you can turn that backdrop to match. This is also incredibly versatile because it allows you to capture a very large environment and then during post production, you could turn or rotate it however you need. Now we'll explore how to make these panoramic files a little bit later, but remember a lot of cellphones even have built-in camera apps and so do you a lot of DSLRs that make building the panoramic in camera possible. Personally, I'm a fan of a stitched panorama which I'll show you in a bit, but this is pretty simple to use and allows you to take these images and it doesn't have to be a 360. Remember if you have something that's less than a 360, you can use that too. Let's just remove this from the scene for a moment and I'll drop in this 180 view, select it and choose to run that script, recent scripts will appear there in your list and I can specify that this was a 180. And when I click OK, you see that it creates the arc. Now we can easily rotate that and use whatever part of the shot we want up to where it runs out and this gives us a straight horizon line and a very flexible backdrop for use in our green-screen production.

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