[Jesse Brady]

We’ve been in the middle of a big Planetarium Dome project right now actually. We’ve been using several strategies that have been really effective.

There are Stitcher apps that can take 5 images (top, left, right, front, back) and fuse them together into a circular image that can be displayed on the dome correctly. If you set up five cameras in at the same point in space, rotated 90 degrees from each other with a 90 degree view angle, creating a perfect box of camera view, the cameras will record all the information around them in a way that the stitcher can interpret correctly. You would render out 5 image sequences, and stitch the matching frames together…not as bad as it sounds…get yourself a free batch-renaming app to handle renaming lots of files at once to simplify things.

This will be perfect for recording animations that surround the viewer, but if you have a flat, video that you want to wrap around the dome…that could be trickier. Here’s some tips though:

Use the Affter effects “Polar Coordinates” effect to “unwrap” or “Wrap” the video or image in a circular way. This will not be perfect…particularly for the top areas of the dome…but there are planetarium dome templates that show a circular grid which corresponds to locations on the dome screen, download one and use it as a guide to finesse your distortion… We actually have an After Effects comp set up that unfolds circular video from the dome using Polar Coordinates…we can use it to create graphics displayed right in front of the viewer with very little distortion (graphics toward the top of the dome are tougher this way)…in the main comp, the polar coordinates effect is not active, so it just bends the footage back into a circle.

…or you could try projecting your video onto an actual 3D Dome and using the 5 camera method to capture it…this could be a more exact approach, but I haven’t tested it.