How to Stitch Better Footage from Basic 360° Cameras With Autopano Video Pro

In this tutorial you will learn how to get better results with starter 360° cameras.

Starter 360° cameras often only have two lenses, which record dual 180° views. They produce decent results out of the box, but with a little extra work you can make better videos than the default. We'll use Autopano Video Pro to get better 360° to do exactly that. Some camera file formats may require a bit of editing and we'll go over that as well.

What You Need

In order to follow along with this lesson you will need the software Kolor Autopano Video Pro. A free-trial version is available to download as well, so you can easily follow along with this tutorial and experiment using Autopano Video Pro on your own footage. You can also follow along with this tutorial using your own footage or you can download two un-stitched 360 sample clips that I have included with the project file.

1. Prepare the Footage

The example clips included in the project file were originally shot on a Samsung Gear 360. Some 360 cameras combine both 180° views onto the same file, so we will cover how to separate them into two clips first using After Effects first. (Note that not all dual-lens 360 cameras will require this step. If your 360 camera records each 180° view as it's own file, you can skip ahead to 7:24 on the tutorial. Footage shot on a Samsung Gear 360 will require separating the 180° views prior to importing into Autopano Video Pro.)

2. Stitch the Footage

Once you have imported your footage into Autopano Video Pro, you will first need to sync up your clips under the Synchronization tab, then you can jump over to the Stitching tab and click Stitch. After the automatic stitching process has completed, use your mouse cursor to even up the horizon lines on your video. You can also refine any color correction needed for your video before rendering. Finally we will inject our video with some 360 metadata using the 360 Video Metadata app by Google.