VR Movies

Watching movies on VR headset was an experience like none other. Thanks to the organizers from Goethe Institute & IHC for hosting such a unique event for the viewers.

Immersive movies & 360 filmmaking is a rather new development taking place in the world of cinema. International events like the VRHAM Film Festival is exclusively being organized since 2018 for VR movies makers. All the biggies from the tech world are in on it with VR headsets catering to the growing demands. So the action is hotting up on the AR/ VR front.

Going back the movies, there were about ten of them on display. These were short ones of about 15 min each curated by U. Schauth.  I got the opportunity to watch:

• Up in the Air - The Dream of Flying
• Tales of the March
• MLK: Now is the Time
• El Beat

Each movie was remarkable. Distinct stories, providing an immersive experience to our connected pasts. Highly recommend the experience to all.

Ffmpeg - Swiss Army Knife of Video/ Audio Editting

Ffmpeg is a fantastic video and audio converter to edit & create video & audio files. As is typical of *nix command line tools, ffmpeg has several options that need to be correctly configured to be able to use the tool properly to edit videos or audios.

Architecturally, ffmpeg works with streams of video, audio, images or other data files that are passed through various reader/ writer (demuxer/ muxer) and encoder/ decoder layers for the editing and creating video and audio files:

Image Credit: Official Ffmpeg Linux Manual

The command prompt may be a little overwhelming to  start off, but a little playing with the tool shows reveals its immense potential. The official documentation page & Linux manual has a few examples to get you started.

Beyond this there are several online resources, blogs and articles such as this, this, this & this, etc. which have listed down the different ffmpeg commands with options. On the other hand, for those averse to the shell prompt, there are several GUI tools written on top of ffmpeg which can be explored.