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This beautiful 8K 360° timelapse shows the Aurora Borealis during a total lunar eclipse

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You guys remember that super blue moon eclipse a couple of months ago, right? Well, while many of us were sitting at home watching it on our computer screens, photographer William Briscoe was out in the Alaskan snow shooting 360° timelapse. And this 8K 360° video captures the beautiful the Aurora Borealis in the middle of it.

Shot on January 31st just near Fairbanks Alaska, William’s film has a fantastic view of the light show as the moon crosses the sky and temporarily disappears into blackness. If you have a VR goggles, or a headset to hold your phone, then just hit play, sit back and relax. It’s only just over a minute long, but it’s a gorgeous sight to see.

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CyberLink’s new VR stabilisation plugin for AE and Premiere keeps your 360 footage rock steady

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CyberLink seem to be going pretty hardcore on the 360° VR lately. After setting the VR binge-watching world record earlier in the year, they’re back with more VR news. This time, a VR stabilisation plugin for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro.

The imaginatively titled CyberLink VR Stabilizer works to clean up that shaky 360° video footage. Such shakiness is often inevitable when using 360° cameras handheld. But if you don’t want your shots to be boring, then handheld is the way to go. It also lets you adjust the pitch, roll and yaw of your camera, too. And you can even keyframe it.

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2017 DIYP Gift Guide – Cameras

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With Black Friday and Christmas on the way, there’s plenty of things out there begging for our money. Whether we’re buying a gift for somebody else or for ourselves, we want to get the best bang for our buck.

So, in this first part of our 2017 Gift Guide series, we’re going to cover cameras. There’s quite a variety here, from instant to medium format, but here are ten of our current favourites.

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YI Technology jump into the 360° market with the new 5.7K YI 360 VR camera

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We knew it was only a matter of time before YI Technology stepped into the world of 360° cameras. Hot on the heels of the GoPro Fusion, YI Technology have now announced their own, new YI 360 VR camera. Housing a pair of 12MP Sony CMOS IMX377 1/2.3″ sensors, each side has a 220° f/2.0 lens.

The YI 360 VR is capable of producing 5.7K (5760×2880) 360° footage at 30fps. Slightly higher resolution than the GoPro Fusion. If you want to speed it up to 60fps, you’ll have to drop down to 2.5K (2560×1280). Stills capture is also at 5760×2880. THiNK Media TV got a chance to check them out in person at NAB and posted a first look video.

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GoPro announces Fusion, spherical camera that captures 5.2K VR videos

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Although GoPro had their difficulties, they don’t give up from staying in the market. They have announced Fusion, a new spherical camera that captures photos, regular video and VR video at 5.2K resolution. GoPro plans to put the camera in sales this fall, but you can already apply for their pilot program which they will introduce this summer. If you’re impatient to see what it provides, they have released the video to show off Fusion’s capabilities.

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Vimeo finally adds support for 360° videos up to 8K and a marketplace to sell your content

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Yes, that’s right. Vimeo now finally supports 360° videos. Although YouTube has supported 360° videos for a while, many have criticised the low quality and high compression often shown. Even when uploading 4K 360° video to YouTube, the already degraded image loses so much more as a result. Facebook’s 360° video suffers from even higher compression rates and lower resolutions.

Vimeo has always been the place to go for hosting video if quality is your highest concern. And that seems to also hold true of 360° video from what I’ve seen of the samples posted so far. That’s probably thanks to its two-pass transcoding, which is almost always going to result in increased quality, even at the same bitrates.

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VLC Media Player goes 360° for both photos and video

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One of the most popular open source, multi-platform media player applications in the world has now added 360° photo and video support. This makes it the first major video player to add such support to the desktop. VLC’s developers, non-profit organisation, VideoLan, teamed up with Giroptic, a 360 HD Camera company to develop the technology.

The software plays 360 degree videos right out of the box, at the moment only for Windows and Mac. VLC 3.0 will merge the functionality onto each of the platforms on which VLC player is available. Which means Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. YouTuber, Epoka e re posted up a sample of the software in action.

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Nikon’s KeyMission360 beaten out by a $199 iPhone addon

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Nikon’s KeyMission 360 camera landed with a fair bit of hype when it was first announced in January. A real camera manufacturer was getting into the 360° market. A company with a hundred years of photographic history. Then after delays in release due to earthquakes, the KeyMission 360 was re-announced, along with two more 80° and 170° cameras.

I got to see the KeyMission 360 in person twice this year, at The Photography Show in March, and at Photokina a couple of months ago, but they wouldn’t let us get our hands on them to try them out for ourselves. With all three cameras now out in the wild, the reviews are starting to come in. After watching this video review from iPhonedo, it’s not looking great for Nikon.

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Want to get into VR but don’t know what rig to buy? Watch this video

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Virtual and augmented reality has become a big deal in the last couple of years. There’s a lot of different options out there now for shooting and streaming 360° content. If you want to get into VR content, though, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Most of the currently available solutions are quite expensive. The ones that aren’t may be inadequate for your needs.

This video from Pixvana walks us through the basic options. It helps us make decisions based on our own requirements. If you just want to stream to Facebook, for example, you don’t need a rig costing tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, if you want to make super detailed high resolution immersive content, you’re probably not going to manage it with a Theta.

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Ricoh’s new Theta SC 360VR isn’t the Theta S upgrade some had been hoping for

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As 360° VR cameras go, the Ricoh Theta S has been up there amongst the most popular. In fact, it may be the single most popular 360° camera out there. It has a very loyal fanbase, and if you’re shooting stills it’s a great little camera. For me, though, it always seemed to fall over when it came to video. It’s what always put me off buying one.

Those, like myself, who were hoping for a meatier version with 4K video might feel a little disappointed at Ricoh’s announcement today for the new Theta SC. It isn’t so much of an upgrade as a slightly crippled version of the Theta S. It does cost $50 less, though, and the changes only really affect the video you’ll never record anyway.

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