Making 360 Degree Video Has Gotten Pretty Easy (But There is One Non-Obvious Step)

Today I published my first story using 360 degree video, the kind of video that you can watch with a Google Cardboard and turn your head and look around the room as it plays. You can also watch it the old-fashioned way and change the perspective using your mouse on a regular flat screen. It turns out that it's pretty easy to make one, though there is one funky step.

The story is about two young women who are working to get their vegan, paleo version of Bulletproof Coffee onto the shelves of health food stores and corner shops in urban areas. It's called Metabrew, and it is meant to be a cleaner, healthier kind of energy, without the sugar or the coffee crash.

I took a Samsung Gear 360 and filmed for a few minutes while they put together a batch at their kitchen co-working space in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I stitched them together using Samsung's Action Director and uploaded it all to YouTube.

And... it didn't work.

It turns out that there is one more weird little step you have to do before you upload to YouTube. I'm sure that this step will get built into all editing software soon, but for now it isn't.

It's detailed in this page on YouTube. The non-obvious part is in Step 2. You need to download this very light program and run it on your completed video. It just adds some metadata that tells YouTube to treat it differently.

Pro-tip: one time I had to run it twice before it worked. No clue what went wrong, but just in case you upload and it still comes out weird.

Please check out my story and have a look at my two minute long 360 degree video. It's the first one the site I work for has ever posted. If you think it would be tough to make one of these: surprise. It really isn't.