The way to shoot a car exterior VR video or how many sticks and hooks needed for high quality VR.

Who is this crazy guy and what is he doing, you will ask?

His name’s Pavel and he is preparing for a new project – a shooting an advertising video for Porsche Panamera Turbo. Learn more about the reason he is running with a stick around the car in our article.

Recently, we have completed our work on the VR Test-Drive for Jaguar and wrote several articles with step-by-step instructions of how we did it.

In addition to the issues and the various estimates of VR professionals, this project has aroused great interest among the public, which has nothing to do with VR. But the main thing to us came a few proposals from representatives of car brands to produce  VR video experience. And one of them was Auto24.

“Guys, great work! Let’s do it with the Porsche Panamera Turbo! Shooting in a week. Krasnodar city! But there is one thing – we need a copter and exterior views of the car, “- said the client.

“Ok,” we said and turn off the phone, started.

Shooting POV no longer caused any questions

As well as the copter

But the exterior – it was a challenge. Why, you will ask? Because the Client wanted a “high quality picture” from the hood and trunk.

We needed a serious situation analysis.

Analyzing the situation, we’ve found a lot of exterior solutions, but nothing suited us.

There were drawbacks everywhere – Camera angle was not enough long for a needed view, A lot of ‘bad’ stitches at omni-like rigs, low exposure quality and sharpness on BackToBack rigs and a lot of others for example the unreliability, shaking and a huge number of occlusions on the car.

Besides the situation was complicated by the fact we had to do everything for three days at a remote location without screwing bolts in car!

We needed a steady mount, as in dynamic shooting any shaking greatly complicates the work. It was also necessary to improve the quality of the video, which means that more cameras need to be attached, but the more cameras, the greater the burden on the flu, and the strengthening of the mount increases the number of occlusions on the car. This is such a vicious circle.

We were not going to despair and continued to work. We assembled a rig from several customized GoPro 4 Black with Entaniya lenses. This rig has the optimal weight for the suspended structure and gives a shooting angle of almost 220 °.

The first tests were for 3 cameras. But then we decided to rig a 4 cameras, which greatly simplifies our work on postproduction, but later on this.

With this camera position, the car is in the highest quality part of the lens – in the center, and not along the edge of the prone distortion.

However, now the grip is not “cleaned” automatically when Stitch doing.

Well, we cut off the pipe mount even in the theoretical part of the study, because it created a large area of ​​occlusion (1), had a large takeaway, so the pendulum effect (2) was obtained, and the last, he was extremely uncomfortable when transported by plane.

Time was running low! We decided to move from theory to practice, so we went to a friend to the film studio to come up grip on the ground, using cinema equipment – are extensions, and grip head, matthellini.

After several hours of testing, we came up with the best option for fixing. We wanted to secure grip head on the towing hook of the car to create a foundation for the entire structure. But first it was necessary to cut off the ring from the hook.

What could be easier? But we did not guess what a real harsh German marketing is.

 

Joyful we went to the official Porsche dealer to buy a hook. However, the dealer stock proved to be just one car Porsche Panamera Turbo 2017 with a hook. Separately, they refused to sell us the hook, only together with the car. On order to bring the hook they could only from Germany for a month. It was Thursday, it was necessary to fly out on Monday, and what to do? The salon manager told us that hooks from Audi, WV, Skoda could be suitable, it’s one concern. With hope, we went to the car dealership, having previously borrowed the Porsche hook. After visiting all the dealers, it turned out that all the hooks are similar, but the carving was slightly different. And then we were visited by an idea, because in the cabin there are many other Porsche models, for sure they all have the same hooks. Why we did not immediately guess. Joyful we returned to the salon and together with the manager collected all the hooks from all models of cars – Makan, Cayenne, 911 and others. And we began to take turns to try and compare with the original hook from Panamera. And what do you think?
None, none of them did come up.

All different. Here he is German marketing!

In general, there was only one option – to make. But how? The carving on it is left, the step is unknown, the time is Thursday evening, flying out on Monday. It only remained to look super master turner that in a short time manually, on the machine did that. The master were called Serpent, so it was written on his business card. For two days he made us an ideal copy.

Sunday evening. We collected all the construction, installed cameras, made tests. The result was very promising. We were inspired to collect all the things, drank a mug of beer, discussed the future shootings and the happy ones went home, not knowing what awaits us in the morning.

This you will know in the next part.

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