Capturing 360 Footage from Video

ARDI offers a tool that helps convert video taken from a mobile phone to a 360-degree panorama. Although this isn't as effective as a true photo-sphere, it's an extremely inexpensive way to build up your 360-scenes.

You may have seen a number of products that build panoramas out of a number of individual photographs. This works very well for landscape photography with distance targets, but it often struggles with the close-up environments you regularly see in our market, where tight confines are common.

First, sign in as a user who is able to create footage.

Next, search for (or create) the asset that represents the location you want to capture.

Go to Details|Asset Tools|Create 360 Scene. You'll be given three options - under Video, pick Capture Now (Video).

A page will appear that looks like the example above, with a video feed from one of your back-facing cameras.

If your phone has multiple back cameras, click on cameras and choose it from the list - using the wide-angle camera will give you the best results.

Orient your camera so the image is in portrait orientation (tall rather than wide). This ensures your video covers the maximum amount of the floor and sky.

Hold your camera out straight and point it to the horizon.

Pick a feature around your scene that will be your 'start' point. We suggest picking something that isn't very important, as there will be a small 'seam' in your image at this point.

Press record and slowly turn in-place a full 360 degrees, stopping when you return back to the feature you picked at the beginning. It's OK for the movement to vary in speed, but try to follow the horizon at all times instead of following objects in the scene (such as fences or pipework).

Press 'Upload' to send the footage and wait for approx. 30 seconds (times will vary depending on server load and upload bandwidth).

After the video has been processed, you'll then be able to crop the final image. If you've over-scanned (ie. spun a little bit too far), this lets you get rid of any part of the image at the end that overlaps with the start, and vice-versa.

On Android devices, you can click the 'horizon' in the top-right corner to turn on auto-stop. This will attempt to stop the recording automatically once you've completed a loop. However, this feature can have poor performance on some models of phone, so this isn't always enabled by default.

When the horizon has a red dot in the center, auto-stop is enabled.

If you upload a video captured using auto-stop, the 'cropping' step will be skipped.

On older devices that end up producing jerky video, you might need to drop the video quality from 1080p to 720p. This will improve performance at the cost of a reduction in final quality.