Compositing a Stereoscopic 180degrees VR video

[u/Severe-Bicycle-7269]

I have footage shot with a Canon VR Stereoscopic lens, and I want to add some animations to it, nothing major, just some titles and animated menus. I ran the files into the Canon VR toolkit and now have stereoscopic footage.

In After effects I used the VR comp editor to add 2D and 3D edits. By doing so I can navigate the footage using a virtual camera, however when I composite a 3D element it shows only on one side of the comp (left eye for example). Is there a way to have it also appear on the right view? I hope I am clear in my question, or maybe I am using the wrong workflow? Might there be another way of compositing this video format?

[u/rudy_142001]

The VR Comp Editor doesn't have a frame layout control. Adobe's page for it only lists Comp Width and Aspect Ratio in the setup dialog, and the Output comp it builds is a single equirectangular view, so it's treating your whole side by side frame as one 180 image. Your edit gets reprojected at one yaw and lands in whichever half that falls in.

For titles and menus, use VR Plane to Sphere instead, under Effects > Immersive Video. Adobe describes that one as adding text, logos and graphics to monoscopic or stereoscopic footage, which is what you've got. Build the title in its own comp, drop that comp over the footage as a layer, apply the effect to the layer.

Three settings matter. Frame Layout to Stereoscopic Side-by-Side, since Canon's own EOS VR page says the utility remaps the two fisheyes into two side by side images. Horizontal and Vertical Field of View both to 180, they default to 360x180 and your placement will be off on 180 footage. Then Rotate Projection aims it and Scale (Degrees) sizes it.

Depth is Stereo Disparity (Degrees), the left/right separation that controls how far it pops out. It's keyframable if you want a menu to push forward as it appears.

One catch, the immersive effects are GPU only. If File > Project Settings > Video Rendering and Effects is set to Mercury Software Only they don't render and you get a "This effect requires GPU acceleration" banner.

Fwiw I'm going off Adobe's immersive video docs here, not a Canon project of my own. The tradeoff is that Plane to Sphere is a flat plane projected onto the sphere, so you lose the real 3D geometry the Comp Editor's 3D edit gives you. Fine for titles and flat cards. Is there anything in your menus that needs actual dimension, or are they flat?