I have recently spent a fair amount of time using PD 16 for various types of 360 video projects on my new iMac Pro (10-core, 64 Gb RAM, Radeon 64 Pro Vega GPU with 16 GB VRAM) while running Windows 10 natively on the iMac Pro using Bootcamp. I thought the results might be of interest to anyone thinking of using PD 16 on a Mac as well as for those who are working with 360 video clips.

There are basically two quite different methods of working with 360 video in PD 16. One can create a 360 video PD16 project at startup by simply dragging a 360 video clip into the timeline. If conventional non-360 video assets are used in the timeline then it is important to right click on those assets and select convert to 360 video to avoid distortion. Using this method one can control the view angle at startup of the clip in the itmeline, but I have not found a way through key frames to change the angle of view for 360 clips after startup of the clip. The second method is to use 360 video clips in the timeline of PD 16 but then use the View Designer to key frame angles of view throughout the clip. This works beautifully to give very smooth pans from one angle to the next since PD 16 sets up ease in and ease out interpolation of the key frames by default. It is quite important if one uses this method to make certain that at the begnning of the project one allows PD16 to create Shadow Files of your 360 video clips. Otherwise, even my quite powerful iMac Pro could not smoothly play through the 360 video clips on the timeline after key frames were created in View Designer.

I have found that 360 video projects require very long render times even on this iMac Pro. For example, I found that a 22 minute conventional video created from a mix of 360 video clips (processed in Video Designer), high resolution still images form a Canon 5D Mark IV, and 4K 60p video taken with an iPhone X required nearly 10 hours to render (Produce) using the HEVC (h.265 codec). I should note that h.265 requires significantly longer rendering times (about 30%) than h.264, but the quality of the produced footage with h. 265 is better than that from h.264 with fewer artifacts and noticeably less noise in low light areas of a scene. Finally I noticed that even though I had hardware rendering and Open CL selected in PD 16 Preferences, and Fast Rendering and Hardware encoding slecting in the Produce window, my CPU was never being used by more than 11% and my GPU was never being used more than 14%. In the case of my iMac Pro it is clear that PD 16 is not making efficient uses of either the CPU or GPU rsources of this machine.

The bottom line is that PD16 does afford a straightforward approach to two different types of 360 video ediitng projects on my Mac. The program almost never crashed and rendering, while slower than I expected, was trouble free.

If you are interested in seeing an example of a conventional video prepared from mostly 360 video clips here is a link to my YouTube production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnrqRXQ8EZ0&t=128s

Tom Mac Pro 8-Core 2.8 GHz
Windows 7 64-bit with Boot Camp
nVidia GTX285