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Newton’s Cannon is a place for planetarium production tips, tricks, tutorials, and discussion. Most of the focus is on fulldome production, but traditional planetariums are welcome here too. If you have something you’d like to share with the planetarium community here, drop a line to drew@newtonscannon.com.
Hello friends of Newton´s Cannon. I’m Rodrigo, from Chile. I am beginning in this work of Planetarist. I have a planetarium 6 meters in diameter and I am exhibiting some shows in fulldome format with a spherical mirror.
I would like to transform a video, equirectangular format, in fulldome format. I have seen that it can be done using Adobe Afterefects.
I must buy a laptop to use this software since my laptop is very slow and does not allow this effect.
Could you teach me how to transform videos in normal format to fulldome?
Thank you very much
Hello Rodrigo,
Buying a new laptop, and After Effects (and a plugin) to do this one task is too much money!
I’m assuming by equirectangular you mean a 360° spherical video. There are some ways to do this without AE but I don’t have a lot of experience with them.
Some people use Blender. Personally the user interface annoys me, but it’s free. Here’s one tutorial, there are probably many others out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmDwF5WPet0
If you’re able to convert your video into a sequence of still images you could try Paul Bourke’s command-line utility to convert between formats: http://paulbourke.net/dome/2fish/
You could use the ffmpeg utility to convert the video into frames.
Hope that helps!
Hi dear Drew. Thanks for answering. I was wrong to describe what I want to do. I want to transform a normal video (I mean flat, like a movie for example) and transform it into a fulldome format.
Thank you.
Ah OK :)
I bet Blender would still be an option, but I’m not finding a tutorial right away. I’ll keep looking around.
What software do you use in your dome? If you have software to simulate the night sky, it might also let you play a rectangular video on the dome without any pre-rendering.
I am using Amateras Player. So far it has helped me a lot.
Today I found another: Shira Universe, but my laptop is very slow.
Thanks for the help.
I try to play video without software, but deformations of the planets are seen, they look like eggs. Ha,ha.