Ever wanted to see the view from an airport runway? Josh gives us a quick look at how we used 360º video to take viewers on a super unique tour of the Akron-Canton Airport.

Video Transcript:

Hey everyone, and welcome to another PEG: How It's Made video.

In this one, we're actually taking a look at a 360 video that we did for Akron-Canton Airport. This was a cool video—the concept was that we were kind of doing a tour of the actual airfield while planes were landing, taking off, and being moved from runway to runway—things like that.

It was something that you don't typically get to experience. As a person, you can't really ever be out on the airfield unless you work there. So this was kind of a fun concept and a very cool shoot.

Let me show you guys the actual final product first, and then I’ll talk through some of the effects we used. Now, keep in mind, this is a 360 video, so you’re able to actually move your view around. I’ll be doing that throughout the playback. Here we go.

So, pretty standard logo animation—just like anything else—except it can be moved around, which is interesting. We have a really cool flyover logo up top, and the stats were all provided by Akron-Canton Airport, which is really cool.

As it flies by, the text kind of follows, just trying to keep the viewer looking at the action. Now, there’s nothing to stop me from looking away, and I’ll show you that in this next shot—there’s a lot of fun in the next shot to look around and see.

So, this is a cool one. We actually stuck the rig to a tug, and the tug is moving the plane out. We have our driver here, you can see our mounting device, and you can really look anywhere you want.

But you do try to guide the user—or the viewer—in the 360 space so they still see the graphics you intend for them to see. Then, they can maybe go back through it and watch whatever they want.

So that was the actual finished video, and you see we have the outro there. Let’s take a look at the project itself and how that all came together.

I'm really only going to look at the takeoff scene, which is that final scene we just watched, and I’ll kind of talk through my actual process for these.

For each scene, they had their own After Effects compositions. Those were exported and put into Premiere, where transitions and music were added. So just the takeoff scene itself was worked on individually, then it was all put together afterward.

To start it off, I used something called the VR Comp Editor, which is what you use in After Effects if you need to work on 360 footage. I always follow a pretty similar workflow: I'll do my color correction first, then paint out anything that needs to be removed, then add the graphics, and finally export it.

After doing color correction, I loaded it into the VR Comp Editor. So our very first output is just color-corrected. You can see this is actually the first version of it being painted, and I’ll show you what I mean by that.

If we go into the original color correction comp, we actually have a tripod at the bottom of the screen—that's what's holding the rig. My goal was to make that invisible.

How I did that was I took it into the VR Comp Editor, went into the edit itself, looked down at the ground, and used the clone brush tool to paint pieces of grass over where the tripod used to be.

We can twirl this down and check the effect "Paint." If we turn it off, you can see that the tripod is there. Now I’m going to turn that back on, because we don’t want the tripod there.

Then we’ll move on to our next step—actually another painting. After we painted out the tripod, I decided that the car in the scene was distracting. It was very large because it was so close to the camera, so I decided to paint it out.

If we take a look at that edit, you’ll see it was just facing where the car was. Again, we clone-stamped everything around it to make it look more like a field. Very simple stuff, but it works really well.

In the VR Editor, you do all your editing in this nice 16x9 space. Then you open the output and it makes everything look correct for you.

The final thing we do after everything is painted and color corrected the way we want is take it into a 3D edit. In that 3D edit, we place all of our graphics.

Let’s take a look at that output real quick. In this output, we have logos at the top and bottom, which are really distorted—they look crazy—and that’s because the footage is wrapped around in a 360 circle. When it gets wrapped around, this VR Comp Editor effect makes everything look perfect again.

Let’s look at the edit. In this one, if you look around, you can actually see our graphics are set in place. This was all done in this one edit. All three logos and graphics were placed here, and they all look correct.

You can see—it’s actually kind of unfortunate—you can’t make the logo orient with the camera as the viewer looks around. You have to pick a single orientation. So, I chose one of them facing the graphic, and one of them facing the start of the scene—where the plane actually starts, which is down this runway.

That way, really, no matter where you’re looking—straight up, straight down—one of them is going to be correct for you.

We have those two logos as caps, which look nice, and then we have the stat itself. To show you guys these—they’re very simple. These were just facts placed into a rectangular comp and animated.

Let’s go to—let’s see—this is our "Nonstop to Your Favorite Destinations" one. Let’s actually just look at "12 Nonstop Destinations." In here, you can see the text comes up—nice and simple—in a rectangle.

Then all we do is place that composition into our edit, and that’s it. It’s done.

That’s all that was done here. I grabbed one of those rectangles, put it where I liked it—which was right where the viewer would end the scene. They follow the plane across the runway, it’s taking off, and I wanted them to see that last before it goes to the outro.

You just have to plan where they’re looking. That’s a very big part of 360.

But yeah—not a lot of crazy effects. It’s actually just a really cool workflow, and it’s a lot of fun trying to think through how the viewer is going to look at it.

And that’s all for this episode. Thank you guys for watching, and check out the next one!