Equirectangular projection help

[defaultasiusthl25hx]

Hi! I'm trying to convert my fisheye 180 degree footage from my 3d camera into equirectangular projection so it won't be pinched at the top and bottom. In the proprietary software, it's one button. In after effects I can't seem tl get the right shape no matter what I do. Much less for projecting 2d video into 180 degree view. Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you! 

[Mylenium]

Screenshots? Actual info on what you did? You need to be much more specific.

Mylenium

[defaultasiusthl25hx]

I figured it out. To project fisheye footage into equirectangular projection (from a sphere to a flat plane) I used CC Lens and VR converter (sphere to 2:1 equirectangular projection). After tweaking some settings I finally got a shape that at least for 180 degrees showed little to no deformation of the image in VR. The other side of the image squished into infinity but I didn't need it so I just masked it out. This is the process I found to convert a video from a fisheye lens into an equirectangular projection that doesn't look warped in VR. It only worked for 180 of the FOV, but then again my original footage only covered 180 degrees so I got what I wanted. 

It seems when anyone asks aviut projecting raw footage into equirectangular the forums make it sound way more complicated than it is, and often people come on here saying it's impossible. I hope this helps someone else! 

If it's too complicated to understand, I'll try it again. When I looked at my footage from my 180 degree VR camera, it was actually a vesica psicis shape so that the top and bottom of the image was pinched. To make it work for VR, I had to stretch the edges to cover the whole frame so that my VR headset would calculate it properly. There are no tutorials available on how to do this so I don't have excact values on an accurate projection from a fisheye lens to equirectangular, but I came pretty close. The next task is to see if standard widescreen footage from a regular camera can be projected onto an equirectangular map so that it wraps properly around the VR space. 

[defaultasiusthl25hx]

I'm not going to show you my personal footage, but the first is the fisheye like I got from my camera, and the second is an equirectangular projection. I was able to figure out how to convert one to the other, provided you only need 180 degrees of FOV available to the audience. 

The space where the two circles meet in the last image is the 'vesica piscis' shape (I don't know a better name for it) that is what fisheye footage looks like in VR without post-processing. I hope that clears it up for you!