Gadgetory

in creating cnet's 360 degree video tour of Bletchley Park we learned a lot about the nature of this immersive new video technology its challenges and its enormous potential this this river yes crafting a 360 degree experience is very different to the 2d video we normally produced the first principle is the same figuring out what story you want to tell in our case is a story of Bletchley Park Britain's code-breaking HQ throughout the Second World War here teams of cryptographers including Allen cheering and golden Welshman worked tirelessly to break German Enigma transmissions invaluable efforts that not only pushed computer science forward but are credited with shortening the war by several years today the park is open to the public and welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors every year who come to learn about the parks code-breaking history and to walk in the footsteps of its famous figures who worked in cramped prefabricated Hut's sworn to total secrecy concerning their intelligence gathering roles capturing the spirit of these rooms is a huge job but to do so we've opted to use a particularly small bit of kit the Ricoh theta s available for just three hundred and fifty dollars or 300 pounds so you might be thinking that this camera is way too small to be doing 360 stuff like this and you're sort of right the thing is with 360 video at the moment everything is a trade-off that's just where the technology is right now so you can capture 360 with a with a big GoPro rig that has six GoPros in it and afterwards though the feed from those six GoPros gets stitched together however what you often get with that is a little bit of overlap where the joints haven't quite gone smoothly enough but what you do get is the resolution because we're shooting mostly indoor scenes where there isn't any movement we're actually using stills and this the recos camera can capture very high resolution stills indeed the video resolution because we're just two cameras isn't so high but for stills it's perfect and the join that you get is much less visible so that was our decision in the end the first challenge in shooting 360 is not appearing in the frame yourself we can't be anywhere in the frame so whenever we take right so that stills you have to close the door and take you like that have to do a lot of a lot of hiding on this shoot in case we're in some of the 360 images let's duck down together oh yeah big star a wonderful hiding place by a sign he's disgusted of himself the stills captured by the feature s form the basis of our 360 degree tour that there's lots more to capture from stills to ambient audio for up close storytelling nothing beats 2d video and as we want to incorporate a lot of flats footage into our 360 sphere out comes the Canon c100 for close-ups on this original Enigma machine it is a wonderful so can you can you do that yes ago back in the studio it's time to put it all together editing 360-degree photos and videos is done with the image flattened out like a map of the world when assets are superimposed onto this they become part of the sphere using an Adobe Premiere plugin called sky box 360 we're able to tweak the scene before adding our narration track music and sound effects the final step is to use a code injector to add metadata to the file that tells YouTube and Facebook to render our video as a sphere and now you're ready to enjoy Bletchley Park in glorious 360