How to Create a Virtual Tour with Any 360 Camera: Full Guide

hey guys how's it going I hope you're staying well hope you're healthy today in this video I'm going to explain to you how to create a virtual tour using any kind of 360 camera now the reason I'm doing this is because I've had a lot of people sending in questions asking me how do I create virtual tours how do I create virtual tours for my business I've had people from museums people who own real estate companies people who sell houses virtual tours are now becoming very popular as a way of showing people who are stuck at home who can't go out who can't go to these businesses that are closed anyway showing them the inside don't you know of houses of museums of all kinds of different industries I'm gonna show you step-by-step how to easily create a full virtual tour using any kind of 360 camera like these for this tutorial I'm going to be using the all-in-one 360 cameras so the ones that are like this usually have two lenses or maybe multiple lenses and they can shoot full of 360 photos in just one shot the first thing we're going to go through is the equipment that you'll need to create your virtual tour first and foremost you're going to need a 360 camera now there are many 360 cameras available right now so you may be a bit confused as to which one to buy which one is best for virtual tours I'm going to do a whole different video explaining that and going into detail doing some comparisons for the sake of this video I'm going to be using the Ricoh theta z1 which for me is probably the best all-round virtual tour camera right now however it is out of stock in many places I can't really see it available anywhere at the moment because a lot of people are you know getting onto this virtual tour craze another camera that's available and is probably my second choice is the insta 360 1r this is also a decent camera for shooting virtual tours if you use the right settings and I'll go into that a little bit later quite significantly cheaper than the Z one as well so either of these cameras will do but to be honest this tutorial will apply to basically any 360 camera so you don't need to worry too much the only other thing you'll need is some kind of tripod or monopod to hold the camera so it needs to be tall enough that it reaches the height of an average human so probably roughly my highlight I'm 5 for 9 175 centimeters if the camera roughly that tour then it's going to be fine because you want to mimic the height of a person when you shoot your virtual tours you also need to make sure that the tripod or monopod you choose is specifically works well with 360 cameras now and now an example of that is something like this this is a monopod however it has an attachment here that obviously works as a tripod so you just pull the legs out attach this to this and it works as a tripod now the reason this is great for 360 cameras is because it has nothing here at the top that would interfere with the camera so if we attach it here so every 360 camera has a blind spot underneath it where the tripod goes so that means the tripod is invisible to the camera it means far less editing means less interference you don't want anything that has any protruding parts at the top already anywhere throughout the whole throughout the whole tripod ideally but this is actually quite an expensive setup it's one of the more expensive specific 360 camera and monopod setups you can get if you want something a bit cheaper you can also buy a light stand which works in much the same way however it does have a wider base so it will be slightly more visible in your 360 images I'll also post a link to where you can get one of those as well in terms of software make sure you download the app and the desktop software for whichever 360 camera you get for example the insta 360 1r has its own app where you can manage stitch and edits your photos however it also has a desktop app and I prefer to use that as it's much easier to manage your images on a desktop if you want to get the absolute best out of your 360 images then I suggest you also subscribe to the adobe suite even if you just need to do it for a little while for just a few weeks or a month download Photoshop and Lightroom because those programs will allow you to get the maximum quality out of your images and I'll explain why later specifically if you go for the Ricoh theta z1 Adobe Lightroom is an absolute must to get with this camera so that's basically all you're going to need to start to create your virtual tour now let's say the in the environment that you're going to shoot so you're in a flat that you're selling or a house or you're in a museum or a construction site wherever you want to shoot your virtual tour to set up you literally just attach your camera to your tripod you place the tripod at roughly the height of an average human like I said and you put it in a central position where it's not too close to any specific object you want to make sure that there's no Wars or no objects within about a meter of the camera now you're going to want to go into the camera settings and choose which kind of photos you want to take this is where it gets a little bit complex if you're not really into photography if you've never really dealt with cameras before now there are basically two options that I go for and that most other 360 photographers go for all of the 360 cameras that I suggest have a HDR mode and raw mode so I'm going to explain what those two are and what the difference between them is and why you should shoot in these modes you're going to want to choose either one of these do not just go with a standard image because it won't look good enough you can get much higher quality images if you shoot in either HDR or raw let's start with HDR shooting an HDR will allow the camera to shoot much higher quality images than if you just shot with the normal mode basically when the camera shoots in the HDR it shoots three individual images one light one normal one dark and then combines them together that creates a much higher quality image the cameras do this automatically so you don't have to do any editing it all combines those three images itself and spits out to the final image so it's ready to go you don't need to do anything to it you don't need to do any editing if you don't want to I mean you obviously could if you wanted to slightly adjust things but it's a great way of getting a high quality image automatically without doing any editing but most virtual tours are going to be shot inside and you're going to want to shoot them in daylight you're going to want to shoot them with lots of artificial lights all the lights on as much light as possible when you do this you may see it's somewhat overexposure in the windows you may not be able to see outside it may be too bright there may be light beams shooting out of artificial light sources now HDR really helps to get rid of those and it really makes a virtual tour much more realistic and much more attractive so that's the kind of look that going for an HDR helps us to achieve that the other shooting option is DNG RAW now this allows the camera to shoot the maximum best quality image that it possibly can however it does require editing in a program like Premiere Pro or Photoshop so it is harder to achieve the final effect however the image quality that you can get is the highest possible when you're shooting raw you'll shoot your image then when you take it and put it into the program it won't look anything special it won't look better but what raw allows you to do is to edit your photo without any loss of quality so you can bring out so much more detail you can bring up so many more colors vibrance you can gather effect where you can see outside of a window get rid of all of the overexposure under exposure increase dynamic range basically it just is the best way to get the best quality image out of these cameras definitely worth learning how to edit RAW images in Photoshop or Lightroom with your 360 camera it's not difficult guys I'm not going to go into it now but it is literally a case of just putting it in the program selecting some different options and then you're done as well as choosing HDR and raw there are also some other camera settings you can play with to get the best quality image out of these cameras most cameras will have a manual mode which will allow you to change things such as shutter speed ISO exposure if you don't really understand what these things are or you're not that familiar with camera don't be too afraid essentially if the room is dark if there's not that much lighting and if you see on the preview that the image is dark then you can lower the shutter speed so that it takes in more light and therefore the image is brighter and if the image is very bright and the outside of the windows are overexposed if there's too much overexposure you can raise the shutter speed so that the camera doesn't take in as much light and you will have less of the overexposure try and keep the ISO to a minimum around about 100 and that reduces noise as much as possible basically those are the only settings you should worry about just have a few practice goes and see which settings work best for the environment that you're in and high quality virtual tours are worth the effort because they look better and people react to them better and you're much more likely to you know get the results you want from a higher quality virtual tour than if you just shot lower quality so you set up your camera you've selected the right settings and now we're gonna go on to shooting now this is actually really easy all of these 360 cameras are one-shot cameras so you literally just have to press one button and it will shoot the 360 image straight away but it's literally just like using a phone or like using any other digital camera the difference is is that the 360 camera will shoot the entire room at once it will shoot the 360 full 360 image at the same time so you need to not be in the room you need to not be in the image so you need to give enough time to get out to go into a different room while the camera takes the photo to do that you can either connect the camera to your phone each camera has its own phone app and you can remotely activate the shutter from there by in a different room so you're not in the shot or you can select a timer to give yourself enough time to get out the way so choose one of those get out of the way of the camera go into a different room and then shoot your photo and it should be done pretty quickly or if you're in a large room or a large space you're probably gonna want to shoot more than one image my rule is to move the tripod in the camera every meter and a half or so but if the room is quite small say it's a very small bedroom or a small bathroom you may only need one or two images but for a very large room say a large living room a living area you may need four or five when you're shooting your virtual tour make sure it's daylight to make sure that the light is fairly even usually you want to have all of the curtains open you want to have all of the lights on you want to have the room looking as best as it can let's move on to the editing process because this is pretty probably pretty much the hardest part of the whole thing but still it's not too difficult the only thing you need to consider is that 360 cameras and 360 photos require one extra editing point or editing process than normal images and that's the stitching process what you need to do is get your camera plug it into your PC open up the desktop software that came with your camera it's always free so you don't need to buy it you'll be able to look in the 360 image and see what it looks like and if you're happy with it then you can export and then when you export to a folder in your desktop it will then stitch them together in the final 360 format which you can then upload to wherever we need to upload it to we'll go into that in a minute the editing process is actually slightly different depending on which camera you use for example if you did go for the Ricoh theta one and you shot an HDR mode then you don't need to do any stitching the stitching is done automatically in the camera you can literally just go into the camera take the images out and they're ready to go straight away however for the insta 360 one are if you were to shoot in HDR mode for that you Dinu to drag those images in to the insta 360 one our desktop app and thence do the exporting process that I just described however if you wanted to do some editing or you shot in that raw mode then we need there's a few extra steps we need to do the process of editing raw 360 photos is again different depending on which camera you get if you were to get the Ricoh theta z1 then you need to drag the unstitched DNG image into Adobe Lightroom there you can also download a plug-in the Ricoh theta stitcher plugin which is free once you've installed that into library you'll be able to edit your DNG file in lightroom so you just color correct you do all the editing that you need to do then you right-click on the image and select edit in Ricoh theta stitcher this will then Stitch the DNG RAW image together into its final 360 form then you can export that as a JPEG and then you are ready to go with the insta 361 art you need to drag the DNG raw image into the insta 360 studio stitch it then take that image into either Lightroom or Photoshop and do the editing there the DNG RAW process is definitely easier and more efficient when using the Ricoh theta set 1 which is part of the reason why I think it's the better 360 camera for virtual tours so now we're going to go on to creating your virtual tour there are many different programs and software's available that allow you to create virtual tours and host them and then host them on your website or however you want to share it I personally really like a website called Kula K u ula I think that's how you pronounce it I've used that quite a lot I'm a premium member of that set of that service it's not so expensive you will probably need to pay for whatever one you choose if you want to get the a decent quality virtual 12 Kula allows you to create virtual tours straightaway very simply drag and drop your images into the website then it will upload all of the images you can then connect them with points with hotspots so when the viewer clicks on a hotspot it will take them to the next image you can put information tabs on there you can even have music you can have maps you can have so many different things add to add to your image if you want to provide information to your viewer punch you so once you've uploaded your virtual tour once you have added all the hotspots or the labels or the titles everything you want to add to your images you're ready to share it so in the premium version of Kula it allows you to embed the virtual tour onto your website it allows you to have that with your own branding without cooler's branding it allows you to choose different options so you basically just need to go into the share tab share options choose the embed copy the code choose your options and then put that into whichever webpage you want in your website now your viewers can view your full virtual tour on your website it can also it can be viewed on a phone it can be viewed up desktop and on a virtual reality headset which for me is the best way to view something but it still looks great if you view on a phone or on a desktop I've used cooler as the example for creating the virtual tour in this instance but there are many available so of course Google what one is best for you their different price points different capabilities but yeah it's basically a similar setup for every kind of virtual tour service that I've ever seen okay guys so that is basically it that is basically how you create a virtual tour I know this is a very quickfire guide but I mean there isn't really not too much more to it you may need to practice a few times I would suggest doing a tour of your house or your business place on your own just do a practice one but to be honest after doing one or two you're pretty much near that the hardest part is the editing process but you know it takes roughly half an hour to work out how to do it so yeah that's it if you have any questions feel free to ask hopefully this will help a lot of people create virtual tours now during this time of lockdown time that many people are not able to experience and go out and see things and a time where businesses are really struggling you'll find links to where you can get all of the cameras all of the products and software's that you'll need to check out the description below there are many more guides and videos on this channel that should be able to help you if you're worried about how to use the cameras or how to edit or how to create the VR tours I've done a few other videos about this subject before so check those out and subscribe if you find it useful that's it I will see you around stay healthy and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: The 360 Guy

Views: 195,443

Keywords: how to create a virtual tour for real estate, how to create a virtual tour, how to shoot a virtual tour, virtual tour guide, how to shoot virtual tours, how to shoot vr tour, virtual tour for real estate, virtual tour for real estate agents, virtual tour for realtors

Id: TOd_VYOKMm0

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020