I wanted to share some tips I've learned how to fix the most common playback problems, something I wish someone told me when I was just starting, as I was running into lots of videos that were unwatchable and I thought they were just broken. These days I can fix most of them, they might be not perfect but at least watchable. If you got any more tips please share them too.
Problem: Everything is too big or too small
This is the most common problem probably. It could be either a wrong FOV, wrong projection, or wrong distance between left and right cameras. First, look to the sides. Are side walls/trees at the edges of the view appear straight or curved?
If the side walls are straight try adjusting "Right" inside "Camera Stereo Alignment" - if everything is too large decrease the Right from 6.5 to 6, if small - increase to 7. If you have to change it outside of 5-8 range it likely means there is something else going on (likely wrong FOV).
If the side walls all curved, could be either "True FOV" or "Projection" settings. If everything looks really stretched and messed up try switching projection to/from fisheye. If side walls are only slightly bended try True FOV (usually it's within 160-220, if it's outside of this range it's probably something else or a combination of things). Usually with only these 3 settings you can fix most of the common scaling issues.
Problem: Everything is too tall or too wide
Look to the sides, if walls are curved try Fisheye projection on/off. If walls are straight try adjusting the aspect ratio (for example if everything is too tall try changing the aspect ratio from 1.7 to 2)
Problem: Everything is out of focus, double vision
Does this happen nonstop or at certain moments?
If this happens nonstop try slowly leaning your head to the left and to the right (as if you are trying to touch your shoulders with your ears). Is there a point where it looks sharp? If yes, try making adjustments to the "Pitch" setting under "Camera Stereo Alignment" and see if it gets better or worse, (if it gets worse it means you are adjusting it to the wrong side), final values could be something like +1 or -1.
If the double vision happens randomly pay attention to what happens during this time. Is it when you move your head or the object you are looking at moves on the screen? If yes, likely it's autofocus messing it up, try disabling it (I have it permanently disabled). If this happens during the scene switch it means the operator messed the camera up while they were moving it to the new location, sadly there is no good solution here, you can fix an individual scene using some approaches listed above but it would only work for that one scene and could make other scenes worse.
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This is all I can think of for now, hopefully this can help you fix some of those clips you thought were broken.
What I would like to know myself is:
- What is a solution for getting out of focus during extreme close ups? Autofocus doesn't help much at very close distances it seems (under 10). Some videos look nice and sharp at close ups, some look out of focus, what determines that? I wish autofocus was handling close ups better, this is usually the only time when you need to refocus, when you are just looking around it's all in focus already.
- Some videos are extremely sensitive to pitch (if you lean your head to the side it gets blurry right away), some stay sharp for much longer. What causes this and can sensitive videos be made not so sensitive?
- Anyone got some tips for custom camera lens settings, so I can make some educated adjustments and not just randomly tweak it and see what happens? This is probably where the secret to a perfect picture scaling lies, but those curvature settings are very unintuitive and hard to tweak.
Wanted to thank the author of this great player again, that recent update where the fps was improved made such a huge difference, it now runs silky smooth.