360 Video Native Support

With the popularity of 360 Cameras from Insta360 & GoPro i would love to see native support for working with this medium. Every week I edit 360 video from a insta360 camera.

Whilst i would still have to use insta360s studio software to convert their 360 file into a flat video file for import into davinci resolve which currently works very well without any issues, i would love to see native support within davinci resolve where i would drag the flat 360 video clip onto the timeline and then apply an effect that wraps the video into a 360 sphere with easy viewport controls Tiny Planet, Zoom, Rotate, Roll & Pitch etc to move the 360 sphered video clip.

Currently GoPro has an add-on for Premiere Pro that works extremely well in it's simplicity - I would love to have something similar natively within DaVinci Resolve.
LINK: https://community.gopro.com/s/article/G ... uage=en_US

There is a free online plugin for davinci resolve called ReFrame360 that works and that i currently use, but has stopped development

KartaVR has continued a version of ReFrame360 but has no viewport controls and can be quite hard to download initially and get up and running as i had a few issues with davinci resolve crashing with the initial installer

I think this simple effect would be a massive benefit to DaVinci Resolve especially with the rise of AR/ VR Displays, 360 Video Control would streamline the whole process

I just downloaded and installed the KartaVR plugin & it wasn't that bad actually, have played with it a bit doing reframes of 360 video into 16x9 output and although you can't drag & control your video just by clicking on it with the mouse in insta360 studio, it still works pretty good. The only reason I did this was so I could create a compound clip from 2 or more clips then do my reframing in one clip, something insta360 studio won't do.

I have suggested to insta360 that they create/add a plugin for Resolve like they do for Adobe, especially given that people seem to leaving Adobe in droves now.

ps. if you do create compound clip from more than one 360 clip, do it before you apply the kvrReframe360Ultra effect on your footage.

KartaVR has continued a version of ReFrame360 but has no viewport controls and can be quite hard to download initially and get up and running as i had a few issues with davinci resolve crashing with the initial installer

I've been working on significant improvements to the Kartaverse/KartaVR/Karta PT (Panotools) software, over the last 8 months to improve the user experience, speed up installation times, and make onscreen control handles and other functionality happen. The new (ish) DCTL fuses have a lot of really nice QoL (Quality of Life) additions in them.

To make the Reactor installation process easier, over the last few weeks a lot of legacy KartaVR content was pulled out of the "Kartaverse" category in Reactor and placed in a separate Reactor "Legacy" category.

This category hierarchy change was done to reduce the risk of users installing more content than they might strictly need, if they are using only Resolve/Resolve Studio and not the greatly expanded functionality provided by using the Fusion Studio/Fusion Render Node toolset versions of Kartaverse.

Those legacy atom packages are also clearly labeled in their atom description text too just incase someone was browsing Reactor using the "All" category listing mode. This Legacy content reclassification will hopefully help to cut down the average Reactor/Kartaverse installation time by more than half.

* * *

Also the "KartaVR 3rd Party Libraries" atom package now has a description that says:

Note: If you are only using the KartaVR "kvrReframe360Ultra", "kvrWarpStitchUltra", and "kvrViewer" fuses then you can skip installing this package as it is not required for those nodes to function.

* * *

I recently created a full online representation of all the Reactor package manager content, as a new GitHub hosted, online web browsable Reactor experience to make atom package content discovery easier for users on the go.

This "Reactor Docs" documentation resource currently holds info on all 402 Reactor packages. This includes the ability to jump to the exact resource on the Reactor GitLab repo, and to download any atom package as a zipped resource which will facilitate offline "airgapped" Reactor installs in corporate environments.

This Reactor Docs site is still in the process of being added to the Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing search indexes. When it is fully indexed I hope this will make finding things with a quick web search more feasible in the Fusion community, and people can send a direct URL link, in a conversation, to a specific atom package.

Reactor Docs 1.jpg (301.27 KiB) Viewed 7540 times

Reactor Docs 2.png (535.64 KiB) Viewed 7540 times

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If you look in the Reactor Package Manager today at the Kartaverse "kvrViewer" atom package you will see a humble listing of a tool that actually represents the next generation update to the kvrReframe360Ultra toolset's reframing capabilities that is quite powerful and flexible when combined with the new Kartaverse kvrCropStereo, kvrLensStereo, and kvrCreateStereo tools.

Additionally, there is a new "still-in-beta" DCTL fuse node (with macOS Metal GPU support only right now) called "kvrPlane" that I think people moving from the Adobe VR ecosystem to a Resolve/Fusion workflow will like for faster graphic element insertion into 360VR/180VR.

The kvrViewer node has onscreen "Center X/Y" controls to allow you to more visually reframe a 180VR/360VR video by dragging a locator in the viewer window. You also have an extra "Angle" rotation onscreen control, and a "Zoom" control that is a "circular" expanding radius onscreen control handle too. Fun stuff that the fuse API allows but Edit/Color page native .dctl files do not (AFAIK). You can see a demo of the kvrViewer's onscreen interface being used in this YouTube video that has closed captions:

* * *

My big KartaVR v5.73 overhaul effort is something that was done to enable artists to more effectively work with mega resolution dual fisheye camera footage from systems like Dual Fisheye equipped Red V-Raptors, or a (yet to be released) BMD URSA Cine Immersive dual lens camera.

And Kartaverse even has new "Spatial Metadata" MV-HEVC video encoding tools to deliver the content today to AVP (Apple Vision Pro) and Meta Quest 3 HMDs as optimized spatial video.

That means if BMD decided to ship demo units of their immersive camera out to filmmakers, soon, before the next major Resolve Studio (v19.5?) release happens months from now, then those Resolve users have the base capabilities required to be productive TODAY instead of waiting for something that might exist natively in Resolve from BMD and Apple in Sept, Oct... or maybe even as far away as at NAB 2025 for a stable non-beta release?

* * *

Here are two fresh YouTube videos made in collaboration with the one and only Hugh Hou (An Emmy award winning VR filmmaker), and Mike Swanson (the Spatial CLI dev) that show what Kartaverse can do today with the right skills and knowledge:

Emmy Award Winning Filmmakers.jpg (586.77 KiB) Viewed 7540 times

KartaLink Spatial Metadata GUI
Learn how to encode next-gen MV-HEVC spatial video for playback on Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest HMDs. This video covers the Spatial Metadata GUI as a standalone tool, and as a media command/trigger script that works inside of BMD Resolve (Free)/Resolve Studio:

kvrViewer and kvrCropStereo
This video covers the usage of the kvrViewer and kvrCropStereo nodes. The presentation covers how to edit Canon R7 and Canon R5C VR180 footage using DaVinci Resolve 19:

* * *

Usability wise, the kvrViewer node can be added to media living on the Edit page via an "Adjustment" effect that lives on top of all your video tracks.

This Adjustment effect should be positioned at the top most track in the Edit page timeline. This adjustment based workflow can be used to either "ride" the same reframing process across many clips in the timeline, or the adjustment effect can be sliced into chunks, as wanted, for easier management of reframing of individual sequences.

When the Adjustment effect is pulled from the Edit page into the Fusion page for editing of the kvrViewer node's parameters, you can also use Fusion's keyframe controls and the Spline editor view to get much better keyframe editing than a native OFX plugin provides if the OFX plugin is used natively on the Edit page on a clip.

The kvrViewer node can work at reframing and converting fisheye, 180VR, and 360VR content in both mono, stereo 3D, and as a spatial video deliverable. Also you can customize the output resolution of the kvrViewer node to allow for rendering of content in custom aspect ratios, at 100% full source image quality, with your output generated in a few clicks as 1:1 square and 16:9 (vertical format) output on the Fusion page.

* * *

Kartaverse now offers modular tools to support IMU data driven gyroscopic video stabilization in 180VR and 360VR. One could think of it as an "indie dev "effort to bring to market a camera hardware-agnostic "flowstate-like" smoothing approach that is 100% free open-source technology, and it has data access that remains user-editable if more flexibility is needed.

This process was pulled off using the Vonk Ultra data nodes in Kartaverse, along with a long-term development collaboration with Jacob Danell of EmberlightVFX (Gyroflow-to-CSV) and Adrian Eddy the creator of the amazing Gyroflow toolset.

Kartaverse allows one to drive Fusion page nodal attributes using CSV (Comma separated value spreadsheet) or JSON exported motion data saved directly from the Gyroflow Standalone app. This high speed motion data can be connected to drive the stabilization of any XYZ rotation control you can access on nodes inside the Fusion node graph.

* * *

Overall I feel this Kartaverse v5.73 release provides a larger box of tools, and deeper XR capabilities then ever before.

Yeah, I'm very clearly biased as the KartaVR tool's developer... but I would like to think that it (Karta) has the capacity to allow a skilled, talented, power-user VFX artist or XR filmmaker to (likely) exceed the depth of features and power that Insta360's mobile or desktop app offers, or what one can do in other popular "industry used" VR equipped NLEs out there.

The upcoming Kartaverse v6 release will extend what is possible in Resolve Studio v19 by taking things to the next level with the most accessible and affordable suite of tools that exist for true 6DoF Lightfield and volumetric video post-production on a shoe string budget.

This is already too much of a TL;DR; reply. Sorry about that. I'm clearly very passionate about this topic of community driven plugin development.

Andrew: Thank you very much for your great effort of Kartaverse/KartaVR/Karta PT (Panotools) software. I'm sure community value this.
I'm only a really home user of DRS and I am looking for a solution to work with my Insta 360 X3 camera files (so called .insta format). So I'd like to avoid exporting insta360 to mp4 then edit that file instead of directly editing insta360 like Adobe Premier is able to do.
That is why I noticed your comment.

I guess DRS is extremely far from handling .insta file directly, right?
Another issue for me my old 360 camera which is a Garmin Virb360. The original software is able to merge the two half of pictures if the raw files are on the camera itself. So it checks the USB mass storage name and if it is the virb360 then offer to merge the two lenses otherwise not. Unfortunately whoever want to merge the lenses should know the parameter of the record (distorsion, lens physical parameters, record type etc.)
I haven't found so far these settings to merge them.

Hi all,

Has something changed with how the free version of Davinci works? I am trying to install the plug-in for the KartaVR tool but it's not letting me. I get error that there is a limitation with the free version and they are prompting me to buy the paid studio Davinci version instead.

Is there a fix for this and can we continue to reframe 360 videos for free on Davinci version 19?

Many thanks for the help and support on this

Hi all,

Has something changed with how the free version of Davinci works? I am trying to install the plug-in for the KartaVR tool but it's not letting me. I get error that there is a limitation with the free version and they are prompting me to buy the paid studio Davinci version instead.

Is there a fix for this and can we continue to reframe 360 videos for free on Davinci version 19?

Many thanks for the help and support on this

When searching for my problem with KartaVR today, I read that this should only work with the Studio version.

Solid setup—definitely leaving room for growth, which is smart. For the 960GB SAS SSDs, splitting into two mirrored pools (one for VMs, one for SQL) makes sense if you want more control and can tune recordsize for SQL. I noticed better performance that way in a similar setup. As for ARC, with SQL already hogging RAM, ZFS caching the same data didn’t help much—disabling read cache on that dataset made things smoother. Caught some of that build on my Insta360 camera www.insta360.com—super handy for tight server racks.