How Two Left Wheels 360 works

A 360 camera records what each of its two lenses sees. Before an editor can use a recording, the two halves have to be stitched into one 360° picture. Usually that means exporting every recording from the camera maker's app as a full-resolution file first.

Two Left Wheels 360 stitches while you edit instead. It is not a video editor: you keep editing in the editor you prefer. Each recording you add to an editing pack appears as a stitched MOV file in a folder on your computer, ready to import, although nothing has been exported and no full-resolution stitched file has been written to your disk. Your original recordings stay where they are and are never changed.

Files that are there without being stored

The folder your editor imports from is a virtual drive. To Windows and to your editor it looks like any folder of video files: you can open it in File Explorer, see each clip with its name and size, and import it. The difference is where the content comes from. The content of a normal file is stored on a disk. The content of these files is made by Two Left Wheels 360 at the moment a program reads it.

When your editor asks for a part of a file, Windows passes the request to Two Left Wheels 360. It works out which frame that part belongs to, reads that frame from the original camera recording, stitches it on the graphics card and answers as if the data had come from a disk. Your editor cannot tell the difference. It is the same idea as a cloud storage folder that lists files it fetches only when you open them, except that here the content is made on your own computer, from your own recordings.

This is why there is nothing to export and nothing to wait for. It also explains three things you will notice:

• The files show a very large size, yet the full-resolution video takes no disk space. The size is that of the uncompressed video each file stands for. Only small proxy files are kept on your disk.
• The files are there only while Two Left Wheels 360 is running, because it is what answers when they are read.
• Copying them to another disk is not useful: the copy would be the whole uncompressed video. To get a stitched file of your own, export it. See Preview and export.

The workflow

1. Add your recordings. Create an editing pack and add the camera files, together with the proxy files the camera recorded beside them. See Create an editing pack and add recordings.
2. Import into your editor. Import the MOV files from the editing pack's folder into your editor's project. Each one has a small proxy in the editing pack's Proxy folder. See Import into DaVinci Resolve.
3. Edit on the proxies. Your editor plays the proxies, which are available at once and play in real time. Reframe with the plugin you already use. See Reframe 360° footage.
4. Render the final video. For the render, your editor reads the frames of your edit at full resolution, and they are stitched then. See Render your final video.

What to expect

You edit on proxies. Your editor can show any frame at full resolution, for example to check focus or detail. But an 8K frame takes a quarter of a second or more to stitch, so full resolution does not play smoothly. You edit on the small proxies, and full resolution is for checking frames and for the final render. If you want to edit directly on full-resolution footage, Two Left Wheels 360 is not the right tool for you.

Keep the camera's proxy files. Copy the LRV or LRF files from the camera along with your recordings. When one is missing, Two Left Wheels 360 makes it in the background, which takes about as long as the recording plays. See Proxies and audio.

The final render takes longer than a render from exported files, because the stitching happens then. In exchange there is no export before editing, and footage you do not use is never stitched at full resolution.

Quality and settings

The frames your editor receives are uncompressed, in 10 bits when the camera recorded 10 bits, so your final render is the only compression step. See Do I lose quality compared with exporting from Insta360 Studio?

Stabilization, horizon levelling, rolling-shutter correction and the other stitching choices are settings of the editing pack and apply to every recording in it. They are not baked into a file, so you can change them at any time. See Editing pack settings.

Keep Two Left Wheels 360 running while your editor uses the files. Closing its window keeps the drive running in the background. See The virtual drive and the tray.

Want to know what happens underneath? See How it works, in detail.

Next: System requirements and Create an editing pack and add recordings.