Visitors at NAB will get a sneak peak of a new approach to creating interactive cinematic VR experiences using the Liquid Cinema VR authoring tool and suite of intelligent players. The company will also preview its Liquid Cinema Extension for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC that will allow Premiere users to import their 360 videos into Liquid Cinema and leverage the platform’s unique features that are helping to define the emerging language of cinematic VR.
Telling a story in Virtual Reality poses some real challenges, especially in 360 video. The narrative and audience experience are harder to control; with so many possible viewpoints, it is hard to ensure that the audience is looking in the right place for a key detail in the story. Liquid Cinema solves this fundamental flaw of the medium.
“What has plagued cinematic VR is it does not have a frame. A filmmaker does not have the ability to direct attention like they do in traditional film. We have developed a patent pending system that allows you to reframe the shot on a cut at the time of playback when the viewer is watching the video,” explains Wallner, CEO and founder of Liquid Cinema Inc.
Liquid Cinema’s Forced Perspective feature perfectly reframes every cut in a 360° film for the viewer, regardless of what the viewer was looking at right before the cut. The technique creates a narrative experience, just like in traditional film, while allowing the viewer to look around and live an immersive experience.
“In essence we have brought the frame back into this medium, and have eradicated one of the fundamental showstoppers that made experienced filmmakers reluctant to embrace this medium,” adds Irene Vandertop, co-founder of Liquid Cinema.
Liquid Cinema’s Windows based authoring tool allows filmmakers to create interactive cinematic VR experiences intuitively and easily using a familiar timeline based metaphor. It imports 360 videos cut in non linear editing systems like Adobe Premiere Pro CC, part of Adobe Creative Cloud®, and creates a metadata layer of interactivity and control synchronized to the video timeline allowing the films perspective, titles, texts and sound adapt to the viewer’s gaze in real time during playback.
Since Liquid Cinema creates metadata based events over the video without ever touching the video file created in Premiere Pro, creators can use Liquid Cinema to easily create gaze-triggered graphics and text in multiple languages customized perfectly for each device and platform that audiences are using to access 360 content. The timing of these interactive elements is linked to the timing of key events such as cuts in the Premiere timeline. The Liquid Cinema Extension for Adobe Premiere Pro CC allows the easy export of relevant events in the Premiere timeline into Liquid Cinema.
“Integrating into Adobe Premiere was a key goal for Liquid Cinema,” says Wallner, “Adobe has done a great job in extending their non linear editing system to meet the challenge of 360 video editing. In fact, the majority of the 360 videos we are seeing being imported into Liquid Cinema are edited in Premiere, so creating a more seamless workflow between the two software suites really makes the lives of creators easier.”
Liquid Cinema supports VR content on iOS, Android, Web, Gear VR, Oculus Go, Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality and Apple TV 4. The next major release of the software is scheduled for release in Q2, 2018.
Liquid Cinema will be presenting a preview of their latest suite of tools at NAB. Their booth (N2806VR) is located in the Immersive Storytelling Pavilion located in the North Hall.
Adobe at NAB 2018
Adobe will showcase powerful new updates to Adobe Creative Cloud, giving video pros the world’s best tools for video editing and motion graphics. The latest release brings amazing new features and faster workflows for color, graphics, audio, animation, collaboration and VR. Highlights include shot comparison, automatic color matching, and intelligent audio and easy rotate view controls for VR content in Adobe Premiere Pro CC; streamlined graphics workflows with master properties to rapidly edit layer properties across compositions in After Effects CC; added efficiency in Audition CC; integration with Adobe Stock for sourcing video footage and Motion Graphics templates; trigger improvements in Adobe Character Animator CC; and easily invite anyone with refined collaboration workflows in Team Projects. Adobe Creative Cloud offers an unparalleled creative ecosystem of interconnected apps and services. NAB attendees can see the latest product demos at the Adobe booth (#SL4610, South Hall in the Las Vegas Convention Center). For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
About Liquid Cinema www.liquidcinemavr.com
Liquid Cinema Inc. is Toronto based company, dedicated to empowering filmmakers around the world to explore and define the new language of cinematic VR. Liquid Cinema is currently being used as a VR distribution platform by major European and US Networks including Dow Jones Corporation, The Wall Street Journal, ZDF, BBC and ARTE. Recently, in cooperation with Microsoft and Google, Liquid Cinema has been extended to the Daydream and Windows Mixed Reality platforms.