VRSCAT

How to record in VR

A VR scene is not a flat scene with a wider lens on it. The camera stops being a window and becomes a place to stand, and most of what you know about framing stops applying — while three or four things you have never had to think about start deciding whether the scene works at all. None of them are difficult. All of them are decided before you press record, and none of them can be fixed afterwards. Here is the whole thing, from what to buy to what to upload.

One option for different budgets

One purchase, at three budgets.

  • VR.cam 02

    The cheapest stereo pair there is, and the one entry on this page that is NOT a camcorder: it is a dual-lens USB-C camera built for live VR180, with no card and no battery, so it only records while it is plugged into a computer that is doing the capturing. Plan the set around that before you buy one. It gives 3840×1920 side-by-side at 30fps — about 1920×1920 per eye, well under what the rest of this page assumes — across roughly 165° rather than a full 180°, with the lenses a standard 63 mm apart. What comes out is ordinary side-by-side that any editor opens.

    Specs, on VR.cam

  • Insta360 EVO

    Discontinued — Insta360 stopped selling it, so this is the second-hand market and nothing else. It folds open to shoot 180° 3D and shut to shoot 360°, and it records 5.7K. Buying used means no warranty and no support, and the hinge is the part that wears, so check that it opens flat and locks before you pay for one.

What is not a VR camera

A 360 action camera
It records everything around it, and it records all of it flat — one lens per direction, no pair, no depth anywhere. In a headset that is a wraparound poster. Coverage and stereo are different features, and only the second one is why anyone buys VR.
A phone
Spatial video is genuinely stereoscopic, but the lenses are centimetres apart and see an ordinary field of view. It gives you a 3D window a metre wide, not a place to be — which is a real format, and not this one.

Getting a proper tripod

Those budgets are for the camera alone, and this is the second thing you have to buy. In flat video a tripod is a convenience. Here it is the format: the camera is standing in for a body, and a body that drifts while the person wearing the headset is sitting perfectly still is what makes people take the headset off. The stand is what holds that body at one height, dead level, for the whole take — so it is doing more work in VR than any other piece of gear you own.

It also cannot hide. Lights, the recorder, a monitor, the towels, even a second flat camera all live behind the lens line where the camera cannot see them. The stand is the one exception: it holds the camera up from underneath, inside the half-circle you are filming, so it is on screen every single take — at the bottom of the frame, which is exactly where a viewer looks when they are working out where they are standing. Three splayed legs there read as equipment and break the room. A single thin pole directly under the camera is a sliver, and the camera body itself hides part of it.

So buy the thinnest one you can: the slim monopods sold as invisible sticks are the right shape, and they are cheap. One honest caveat about the name — a stick goes properly invisible on a 360° camera, where it hides in the blind spot between two back-to-back lenses. A VR180 camera points both lenses the same way and has no such seam, so yours will not vanish outright. It goes from a tripod in the shot to a line you have to look for, which is the whole difference that matters.

One slim vertical line rising to the camera instead of three legs spread across the floor — a monopod on a small base, or one of the thin poles sold for 360 cameras as invisible sticks. The thinner the shaft the less there is to notice, and the camera body sitting on top of it hides the top of it anyway. Get one that reaches 1.6 m and locks there.

What any of them has to do

It has to reach eye height, steadily
1.6 m for a standing viewer, 1.2 m for a seated one. Plenty of tripods stop short of that, and one that only just reaches is one that wobbles at full extension — which turns into a horizon that has drifted by the third take.
The less of it in frame, the better
Three splayed legs cover the floor immediately in front of the viewer. A single slim column on a small base shows far less of itself. Whatever you use is going to be seen, so choose something you are content to have in the shot, or dress it so it reads as part of the room.
A head that locks, not one that pans
You want to level it once and then have it refuse to move. A fluid head built for panning is the wrong tool here — there are no pans in VR, and a head that invites a nudge between takes is a horizon you will be fixing later.
Weigh it down
Someone catching a leg mid-scene moves the entire room out from under the viewer. Hang a bag off the centre column, or use a stand heavy enough that a knock does not shift it. This is the cheapest insurance on the whole set.

The scene — Roughly 40 cm to 1.5 m out. Close enough to have real depth, far enough to fuse comfortably. This is where the work happens.

Too close — Inside about 30 cm the two eyes cannot merge into one image. It does not look dramatic, it looks broken, and it gives people headaches.

Background — Past 3 m or so there is no separation left between the eyes, so it reads flat. Fine for a wall, wasted on anything you want felt.

Behind the line — Not filmed, at all. Lights, cables, crew, towels, monitors, you — everything you do not want in the scene lives back here.

The set from above. Distances are from the lenses, and they are the same on every camera — they come from how human eyes work, not from what you shoot on.

Get the camera right

Buying it was the easy half. What comes after costs nothing, takes half a minute, and ruins more footage than any equipment decision ever will.

Then: where it stands

  1. 1. Set the camera at eye level

    • The camera sits exactly where a real person’s eyes would be.
    • Standing: 1.6 m (5.2 ft). Seated: 1.2 m (3.9 ft).
    • The danger: Too low and the viewer feels tiny, like a toddler. Too high and they feel like they are floating.

  2. 2. Keep the horizon perfectly flat

    • The camera stays completely level at all times, never tilted left or right.
    • The danger: Tilted even slightly, people feel dizzy and sick within a minute. Always double-check with a level.

  3. 3. Never rotate the camera sideways

    • The two lenses act exactly like human eyes. They must always stay side by side, horizontally.
    • The danger: Turning the camera sideways for a vertical shot kills the 3D completely and ruins the video.

  4. 4. No zooming — move the camera

    • There is no zoom in VR. To get closer to something, you move the camera physically.
    • The sweet spot: Keep performers and objects between 40 cm and 1.5 m (1.3 to 5 ft) from the camera.
    • The danger: Closer than 30 cm crosses the viewer’s eyes and causes headaches. Past 3 m the 3D is gone and it looks like flat video.

  5. 5. Keep the camera still

    • Never handheld while walking, and no fast pans left or right.
    • The viewer is sitting still. Moving the camera unsteadily triggers severe motion sickness.
    • The rule: Lock it down on a sturdy tripod. If it truly has to move, it moves very slowly, in a perfectly straight line, on smooth wheels or track.

  6. 6. Treat the lens like a real person

    • When a performer looks into the lens, the viewer feels direct eye contact. It is the most powerful thing this format does.
    • The rule: Mark the floor with tape so performers know exactly where to look. You cannot direct attention after the fact in VR, so they have to engage the viewer themselves.

Build the set

The line through the lenses cuts the room in half. Everything in front of it is on screen — floor, ceiling, and the corner where you were going to put the bag. Everything behind it does not exist. Once you see the room that way a VR set is easier to build than a flat one, because there is only one rule and it is geometric.

Light
There is no off-camera in front of the lenses, so every source either sits behind the lens line, high above it aimed forward, or is part of the scene on purpose. Keep it soft: a hard light off to one side bounces into the near lens and blows out one eye while the other stays clean, which reads as a smear in the headset and as nothing at all on your monitor. Bouncing off a wall or ceiling behind the camera lights the whole hemisphere evenly and leaves nothing in frame to give it away.
Sound
Presence comes from sound far more than from resolution, and the microphone on the camera is a metre away from the action and sounds exactly like it. Put a recorder close — hidden in the bedding, or just behind the near edge of the shot — and record thirty seconds of the empty room before you start, because you will want it under the joins. Skip music: it comes from outside the space, and everything else you are doing is trying to put someone inside it.

Shooting the mess

The part a general VR guide will not cover, because a general VR guide does not have your set. All of it is logistics, and all of it is cheaper to plan than to discover.

The floor is in frame
Flat video crops the floor out and nobody ever thinks about it. A 180° camera sees the whole half-circle in front of it, floor to ceiling, so whatever is protecting the room is on screen unless it is behind the lens line. Cover the full arc with something you are happy to have in the shot, not whatever was nearest.
Protect the front of the lenses
It is the one surface you cannot clean mid-take without stopping the take, and a mark on it sits in the middle of what the viewer is looking at for the rest of the scene. If your rig takes a clear protector, use one. If it does not, keep a distance band where nothing reaches it, and accept that the closest shots are the ones you plan around.
Shoot clean to dirty
Order the setups so the session survives itself: everything clean first, the messiest last. There is no way back to clean without a full reset of the set, the wardrobe and usually you, and discovering that halfway through a shot list costs a day. Write the order down before anyone undresses.
Keep the reset kit behind the line
Towels, wipes, gloves, a second sheet, a bucket of warm water, the spare card. All of it belongs behind the camera, where it is invisible and still within reach. That is the practical payoff of the geometry: the half of the room the camera cannot see is your working area, and it can look like anything.
Clean hands before the camera
Handling the body or the controls between takes is how a lens gets marked, and a marked lens is not visible on the little screen you are checking it with. It is enormous in a headset. Wash, then touch the camera — in that order, every time.

Shoot the POVs

POV in flat video means a camera held roughly where a face would be. In VR it means something stricter: the camera is not standing in for a person, it is the person. Whoever puts the headset on gets its height, its position and nothing else, for as long as the take runs — so who they are is the first decision, and every technical one follows from it.

  • Lying down

    You are
    On your back, being straddled or leaned over.
    Camera
    Flat on the bed or the floor at pillow height, lenses pointing at the ceiling.

    The one people get wrong. Turning the camera on its side to "frame it better" rotates the lens pair out of line with the eyes of the person watching, and the 3D collapses — the picture stays sharp, the depth just quietly leaves. The lenses stay level with a pair of eyes no matter which way the body of the camera is pointing.

  • Floor

    You are
    Sitting or kneeling on the ground, looking up.
    Camera
    30 to 50 cm off the floor, still dead level, 40 to 80 cm back.

    Height is what makes this one land: from down here everything above reads at full scale, which is the effect a flat camera cannot fake at any focal length. Watch the horizon — a camera this low shows tilt more than any other position, and a low tripod holds it better than propping the body on something.

  • Seated

    You are
    Sitting on a chair, a couch or the edge of a bed.
    Camera
    Around 1.2 m, which is eye height for someone seated. 50 cm to 1 m back.

    The most comfortable position to watch for a long time, and the easiest to shoot: it is the one height where a normal tripod, a normal room and a performer standing or kneeling all agree with each other. Good default for long takes.

  • Eye-line

    You are
    The partner standing right in front of her.
    Camera
    At the eye height of that partner — about 1.6 m for a standing adult. 40 cm to 1 m away.

    The default of the format and the one that sells. She works to the lens the way she would work to a face, and the distance does the rest: inside a metre a headset reads a person as present in a way no flat close-up does. Do not creep closer than about 30 cm to intensify it — that is where it breaks instead.

  • Voyeur

    You are
    Nobody. You are in the room, not in the scene.
    Camera
    Standing height, 1.5 to 3 m back, nothing between the lens and the action.

    The only setup where two or more performers read clearly, because everyone fits in the frame without anybody being inside the near limit. Nobody looks at the lens. Works as a breather between the close positions, and as the establishing shot a scene made entirely of intimate takes never gets.

One identity per take
Moving the camera between positions inside a single shot teleports whoever is watching, and it is the most reliable way to end a scene early. If you want a different height, that is a different take. Write down the height and the distance when you shoot it: matching them later is what makes two takes cut together.
Long takes
Flat video is cut every few seconds and nobody notices. In a headset every cut relocates a body that believes it is somewhere, so five to fifteen minutes on one setup reads as natural and a fast sequence reads as an assault. The format rewards exactly the thing flat editing spends its life avoiding.

Finish the file

This is the easy part, and there is less of it than you are used to. Most of what eats an evening on flat video — reframing, punching in, cutting on the beat — simply is not part of this format, so the list is six steps long and most of them are quick.

  1. 1.Process it with the app your camera came with. One automated pass that turns what is on the card into a file a headset can read. Every camera ships one, the manual is right about it, and it is the only step that differs between models
  2. 2.Level the horizon once, then leave the geometry alone. Straighten it at the start and that part is finished. After that, skip the rotate, crop and scale tools — leaving them alone is what keeps the two eyes lined up, and it is less work rather than more
  3. 3.Go easy on stabilisation. Shot on a tripod? Nothing to do here, move on. If a take does need steadying, a light touch is all it wants: gentle is what keeps the room feeling solid around the viewer
  4. 4.Grade it, and lift the shadows a little. Colour and style it like any other project. Headset screens run dimmer than your monitor, so raising the dark end slightly is what keeps the detail you worked on from disappearing
  5. 5.Keep the cuts simple. Cut between takes filmed at a similar camera height, or fade to black. Both feel natural in a headset, neither takes any longer than an ordinary cut, and there is no reframing or cutting to the beat to do
  6. 6.Watch it through in the headset before you export. Put it on and play the whole thing. It is the quickest way to confirm the colour looks right and the pacing feels good — and it is the only place you can actually see what your buyer will see

What the file has to be

Projection
180°, side-by-side, left eye on the left. Not 360, not fisheye, not over-under. This is a requirement rather than a preference: anything else uploads happily and plays wrong, distorted, with no error message to warn you or the buyer.
Resolution
The best master you have. Up to 6K goes straight through. 8K is accepted too, but it needs an extra processing pass on our side, so expect longer before it is ready to submit.
Frame rate and codec
Whatever your camera gave you — we re-encode for streaming, so there is nothing to match and nothing gets rejected for its frame rate. Shoot as high a frame rate as you comfortably can: in a headset, smoothness is felt more than resolution is.
The two files that come with it
A teaser and a thumbnail, and neither is optional. Upload your own teaser up to 120 seconds or let us cut one from the first 30 seconds; upload a thumbnail as JPEG, PNG or WebP up to 20 MB, or pick the frame we grab. The teaser plays with no login and no purchase, so it is the most public thing you will put on the site.

Every number above is answered in full, with the rest of what happens after you press upload, in the Creator FAQ. Every title is reviewed by a person before it goes live.

The three you cannot fix in post

The wrong projection
A 360, fisheye or over-under file uploads without complaint and then plays wrong for everyone who buys it, with nothing anywhere to say why. We do not convert between projections, so there is no repair on our side and no re-export that gets the second eye back if it was never a pair. Confirm the camera is set to 180 side-by-side before the first take, not after the last one.
The wrong height, or a tilt
Both are decided in the thirty seconds before you press record and neither survives an edit. A camera 40 cm too low makes every viewer a child for the length of the scene; a horizon two degrees off makes a share of them ill within a minute. A tape measure and the level built into the camera close both, every time you move it.
Never having watched it in a headset
A monitor cannot show you a stereo break, a marked lens, a stitch line, or a subject who is simply too close to fuse. Every one of those is obvious in ten seconds in a headset and invisible across an entire edit. Watch your own scene where your buyer will watch it, before you upload it — it is the single highest-value habit on this page.

The basics

How long should a VR scene be

Longer than the flat equivalent. Presence takes a minute or two to settle before anything you shot starts working, and once it has, people stay somewhere far longer than they watch something. Fifteen to forty minutes is ordinary here, and long unbroken takes are a feature of the format rather than something to apologise for.

Do I need someone else on set

No. The camera is locked off, so there is nothing to operate: most solo shoots start the recording, walk into the scene, and cut it afterwards. A remote or the camera phone app saves you walking in and out of frame on every take, and a monitor behind the lens line lets you check a setup without stopping.

How much storage does this take

More than you expect. Stereo at 6K or 8K is many times the size of flat 1080p for the same minute, and VR takes run long, so a session fills cards that would have covered a week of flat shooting. Buy the fast card your camera specifies plus a spare, and keep the masters on a disk you are not also editing from.

Can I shoot 2D at the same time

Yes, and it is nearly free. Anything behind the lens line is out of frame by definition, so a second camera back there is invisible to the VR one and gives you a flat cut of the same session. Both sell here — every upload is either VR or 2D, they live in their own sections of the catalogue, and there is no projection rule on the flat one.

Can I sell VR footage I already have

Only if it is already 180° side-by-side stereo. Nothing converts a flat video into a VR one: the second eye is information that was never recorded, and no software invents it convincingly. Older 360 material has the same problem in reverse — it has the coverage but not the pair.

Not selling here yet? Become a creator. And before your first upload, watch something in the headset your buyers use — it is the fastest way to learn what your own footage should feel like. How to watch VR