Last week I helped with the preparation and production of the VR and 360 video experiences at the SU Syria event.

The night before, Jason and I loaded up the Samsung Gear VR's with the proper videos. There were 3 that Professor Harper asked to have on each device, short film experiences about the civil war in Syria. We used three different video portals to download these films. One of the challenges we ran into, surprisingly, was the lack of a search function on any of them. Once we had that up and running, we made sure that the devices, along with the phones attached to them, were being charged overnight. We also deleted just about everything else off the phone and Professor Harper asked.

Once we made our way to the Herg auditorium, we made careful note of the placement of each of the three 360 rigs that we used, along with the settings on all of the individual cameras. The next day, I spent much of my time at the event doing data wrangling/file management of an enormous amount of footage. For each camera, I had a folder. Inside that folder were six others correlating to each GoPro on the rig. Within those folders, I would attempt to match the file names from each GoPro. On the actual cards I made sure that I wasn't copying over a 5 or 10 second video test for no reason. This would allow for easier editing in post, instead of dealing with a bunch of useless files that might not match up with anything else.

I also made some notes for Jason along the way, and saved them in text form on each of the rigs. Explanations of what file names to look for and such. On average, I would offload around 11 gigabytes from each card. Since I emptied all of the cameras once, that's 11 gigs per GoPro, 66 per rig, and about 198 overall. I believe there was over 600 from the entire day, which at the settings we used is a tremendous amount of time in footage. Hopefully, most of it will see the light of day.