00:02 John Daub: Hello everybody, I thought I would make a quick tutorial on what not to do when watching 360 virtual reality videos, or what to do—how to take advantage of the platform and get the most out of watching 360-degree videos. I've got this camera tilted down because on the other side of it, I'm going to show you how I do it on my smartphone. 360 video is a really exciting new way to look at videos because it's immersive. It takes you into the environment and allows you to look around at your own pace, almost like a video game. The problem is that some people just have no clue. If you're one of those people, that's okay because in this tutorial I'm going to help you. And if you do have an idea, maybe you can pitch in and write in the comments or in the chat to help other people understand what they're doing wrong, and maybe you can even give me some tips because I'm always learning new things.

00:57 John Daub: I'm at a park full of lots of little kids, so they could cry at any time. We're good. What I have here is an iPhone 6 Plus and a Google Cardboard. What you need when you watch 360 virtual reality videos is Wi-Fi—it's really helpful to have Wi-Fi because I'm uploading these in 4K, meaning I want you to take advantage of this world in the highest possible resolution. The reason why I made the 360 videos to begin with is because I want you to enter into Japan just like I did. If I did a 360 video, you would see all of these kids that are like under the age of 2 crying all the time—it's kind of annoying, maybe somewhat like this video. Anyway, here we go. We've got the iPhone 6 Plus and a Google Cardboard. You need Wi-Fi. Next, the thing that you probably need is a device with a touchscreen. I like the goggles actually, but if you had to ask me, I would prefer the smartphone with a touchscreen, and I'm gonna show you why.

02:08 John Daub: Alright, we're gonna get to this next. This is actually from the YouTube Space that I got from YouTube—these are really useful. You could probably find these for about a couple of dollars in some places. There's version 1.0 and version 2.0—get the 2.0 because that's what I'm talking about, because there's a little button on the top. I'll show you all that in a second. Now we've got the smartphone here. I'm going to turn the phone around. Two things that you need to know. The first thing is, if you're going to use the goggles, you need to download a Google app called Cardboard—C-A-R-D-B-O-A-R-D. It's available in the App Store, in the Android Store. Without this, you can't take advantage of the app's ability to make two eye holes for the cardboard. If you don't want to do that, that's okay—I'm going to show you this.

03:02 John Daub: Alright, show you a pile of dirt. Now right here is my smartphone. Let's turn the screen up a little bit so you can get a better view of it. There we go. This is the iPhone 6 Plus. I'm going to go into the video that I just uploaded. Here we go. I have the Only in Japan page. This is the one that I just uploaded—you see? It's right there. This is the amazing Japanese hot spring and bath hotel stay 360 video. Very cool. So I'm going to play this. Turn the screen sideways. Now you see there's a gyroscope that's allowing you to move with me. Use your finger, and you can do both at the same time. You see what I'm doing here? This is really cool. If you want to lean up, I go up and down, and I go side to side with my finger.

04:16 John Daub: What's down there? Oh, that's cool. The highlight of this part was those autumn colors up there—you see the red tree? Really stunning. And you can see me in the reflection to see how I'm watching this—I'm going up and down with it. Use your finger. Now, if you tap the screen, the pause button and the skip button will come for a couple of seconds, and then they melt away. So if you push it, you can't navigate the screen. When it melts away, touch the screen, you can navigate. One more time—you can't move the screen when it's like this. When it melts away, touch it again, you can move and navigate around. This is what I want everybody to do. And if you don't do that, it's really hard—you're just like, why isn't it moving? Probably update to the newest version of YouTube also helps. YouTube is always improving the platform.

05:27 John Daub: So this is the first way—how to watch with a smartphone. If you're watching on a TV, on Apple TV, on Chromecast, if you're watching on a flip phone, you're probably not getting the 360 view. What you're getting is just all screen—it's all stretched out and it leaves some very wacky pictures. The 360 format was specifically made for tablets and goggles and virtual reality gear. So if you're watching on TV or a computer screen, it's going to be not the ideal viewing experience. But it's okay—it's better on a smartphone. By the way, you can also do this with a tablet like an iPad, iPad Mini, or the Fire. You can also do this on the new Dell computers or any laptop with a touchscreen—it's even bigger. My Dell from last year, an XPS 15, and I'm able to touch it and then scroll around on the Dell monitor, which is so cool as well.

06:41 John Daub: What I do again one more time is that when this melts away, I'm able to use my thumb. I like to pan up and down. Let's play—I like to pan up and down and move with my thumb. It stands out like this. Regular would just give off a reflection. Very cool. That's how I watch 360 videos with my thumb.

07:25 John Daub: Now it's time to do it with the Google Cardboard. The Google Cardboard is something that I got for free from the YouTube Space because they're trying to promote more people to use this. Problem is, I don't know if YouTube's doing the best job—they're not doing a bad job, but I think they could do a better job of promoting how to use the 360 videos. So what I'm going to do is take this Google Cardboard and show you how easy this is. This is basically just a cube—it's like a box. It fits in your hand—it's about the size of the new DJI Mavic Air, the new drone. It's quite small, very light. Comes with a cover. It's got two lenses on it—they're basically plastic reflectors. They're not really expensively made, which is probably better that way—it keeps the price down. The version 2.0 has a button on the top.

08:26 John Daub: And what this does is you're going to see on the smartphone here. First, let me just open this up—so it's like this. Flip it like this—you see? Hold on. There you go. Alright, that's what it looks like. You have goggles—you hold it up to your face like this, you just put it to your head. Your nose goes here—it looks like Darth Vader. On the top is a button. And if you put your smartphone in right, you can see here that inside, there's actually a little message. There's a little magnetic tab in here that touches the screen of your smartphone at a certain spot, and it allows you to have some control—meaning there's a little teeny dot in the middle. If you rotate it around, you can pull it down to the play button and you can push play and stop by using this button on the top. You can also scroll through the video, which is pretty cool.

09:31 John Daub: In order to use the Google Cardboard, you have to go into—you need this app called Cardboard. I have it here installed. Cardboard is the Google app and it allows you to take advantage of the Cardboard because it'll make two. If I go back into the YouTube app, here's the video. Do you see on the screen here, right at the bottom, there's this little Google icon or goggle icon? See it right there? By the 16:10? That's because you have the Google Cardboard app installed on your smartphone, and you can take advantage of it. If you push that, see what it does? It creates a left and a right lens for these goggles. Now, if you put the smartphone into the Google Cardboard like this, you can now see inside of it. Well, you can't literally see because you're not a human—you're actually through the phone, through my smartphone at home right now. But you're able to take advantage of this button on the top, which touches your smartphone screen. You can hear through the speakers, and you can enjoy the experience.

11:20 John Daub: These Google Cardboards, I think I saw them online for about $3 now, plus shipping and handling, so maybe about $5. You can get them at convenience stores in Japan, I've seen them at Don Quixote (Donki) department stores, I've seen them at super stores—all the places have Google Cardboard. Those are the two best ways to watch 360 videos. You don't have to buy the cardboard in order to really enjoy the 360 experience, but you can't expect to enjoy it using a mouse. Get onto your smartphone, get your Wi-Fi going, make sure that the setting is on 4K.

12:18 John Daub: I purposely usually don't upload in 4K, but if you look on the screen here, let's get out of the cardboard—you can change the settings here. On the corner, it says quality—can you see that? Captions, quality, auto. I want it on 2160p. Boom, we are in 4K—I settle for nothing less. And then you can take advantage of it. I've also made four other 360 videos that you can enjoy. One of them was my Q&A—I don't know if you guys know this, but I have a question and answer about why I came to Japan. So I hope you guys enjoy that.

13:17 John Daub: I'm going to take some questions. If you have any questions about using Google Cardboard or using 360 video or some problems that you might have, go ahead—right now is your chance. Ask away, and I will respond to your questions. If you already know how to use it, you can turn off this video and go to one of the 360 videos to enjoy it right now.

14:11 John Daub: What is your favorite thing about the Samsung Gear 360? I use the Samsung Gear 360 to make the videos, but quite often I get the audio separately, and I insert videos from the GH4, GH5 into the video to add more interactivity. I like the Samsung 360 because it's simple—I know it. The best thing about making the 360 videos is that everything is in focus and everything is in the picture, so you don't have to worry about the framing. You don't have to worry about the angles—just the height of where the camera is and boom, push play. You can edit it—I edit it in Premiere Pro. First, I use the Samsung Gear 360 software to stitch the two lenses together. Then I take that stitched video and I edit it in Premiere Pro—I have the new one, 2018. But since two years ago, you can edit 360 virtual reality video in Premiere Pro pretty seamlessly—it's quite simple, and it's a lot of fun to edit, actually. The reason why I add 360 into it is because not everybody likes it, but enough people like it and feel like they're there, immersed into Japan, that I keep making these videos because I want to bring you with me. 360 video is just one tool that I can use to share Japan with you.

15:44 John Daub: John, can you show us how to edit 360 someday? You know what? There's a lot of tutorials on YouTube already—that's how I sort of learned. Editing a 360 video is not too different from editing 2D video. The thing you have to keep in mind is that you have to make sure that the specs in your timeline are correct, meaning they are 4K, stretched to a 2-to-1 aspect ratio. And other than that, the sky's the limit. If you put assets, which are inserts, above and below the middle of it, it gets distorted. So I try to keep all inserts a little bit higher or lower on the line or right in the middle of the equator—and that's right in the middle of it.

16:30 John Daub: It seems like a lot of you know how to use it, so I'm hoping that this tutorial will help those who don't. Do the videos work in VR headsets? Yes—this is Scratchy Panda. Somebody who uses the Oculus goggles wrote in and made a comment that he was able to enjoy it in HD. Unfortunately, his goggles don't do 4K video yet. But again, the difference in quality between HD and 4K to me is big—it goes from being okay video to whoa, like I'm inside of this thing. Because the 360 world is so big compared to just a 4K monitor—this 360 world is in front of you and behind you and to the side and below and top. So 4K is probably not even enough resolution to really get involved into this world—you probably want 8K. And maybe that's why the technology to 8K is going to be so important—I think it's important to the virtual reality world. I want the resolution as clear and sharp as possible.

17:46 John Daub: You need 8K minimum, I think, and you need cameras with a higher sensor—like a better sensor. The ones right now on the market, they all have really like 1- and 2-thirds-inch sensors—really small sensors. You don't get a lot of dynamic range, you don't get a lot of detail. But it's good enough—there's no reason to buy a $5,000 or $20,000 virtual reality 360 camera. You can get a 360 camera at this point. The newer 360 cameras, the Ricoh Theta from about 4 years ago when they first came out, the quality was awful. But it was just cool to be in that world—people were just amazed by that world. When the Samsung Gear 360 came out, it kind of opened the door to the prosumer market. It's still a consumer tool, but it's good enough that it can be considered prosumer because it's at 4K resolution. The bitrate could be higher, but it's not bad. And nobody can afford a $20,000 unless you're a professional and you're doing this for a living. Even the rigs where you have to put like 8 GoPro cameras on it—the GoPro camera does not have an amazing dynamic range. And for the price it costs to buy all those GoPros, the cameras with two lenses are enough. If you see in these videos that I make, there is a seam around it—that's sort of annoying, but it's okay because the experience that you get for the other 99% of the screen is pretty darn good.

19:56 John Daub: You know, 5G is just around the corner—it should be hitting Japan next year, and it'll be definitely mainstream before the Olympics. So the reason why these live streams, the reason why these 360 videos, the reason why live streaming like I'm doing right now is going to explode is because of 5G—the next generation of mobile signal, Wi-Fi, wireless telephone signals. It's going to be able to handle so much bandwidth. I'm going to have 4K coming at you through this phone, and this is coming probably either at the end of this year or early next year here in Japan.

20:35 John Daub: I'm going to be able to do live streaming with 360 video. So I have to have this channel to build an audience so when that time happens, we're going to be right here. This already does decent 720p streaming—it's decent because if you think about it, it wasn't too long ago that TV news crews were doing like 480p or grainy videos with a van. They would have a van parked in the back with a satellite dish and a big camera plugged in with a guy and machinery. We can do this all with one device, the iPhone or an Android phone—it is amazing. You can't really take advantage of those specs using live streaming. The best phone for live streaming right now is an iPhone 7 Plus, in my opinion, because you have the two lenses which allows you to zoom. It has an f-stop of 1.7, which allows you to get decent low light and pretty good bokeh. If you look at my hand, you see the background? Here's my phone—you see the background gets blurred? See that? That's pretty cool—it's because the lens is not bad on the iPhone 7 Plus.

22:17 John Daub: If you don't know how to use the arrow keys to pan around in 360 video, press those arrow icons on the left and right. Yeah, you know, you can do that. But on your smartphone using your thumb, you don't have to deal with the arrows and look down at the keys. To me, the easiest thing to do is to use your thumb—just use your thumb on your smartphone on the screen and to pan around. This is an iPhone 7 Plus—this is the phone that I had before this phone. I bought this from Apple—I didn't get a contract, I don't have any contract. I kind of do it by the month—I'm a rebel. The iPhone 6 Plus is okay for streaming—the iPhone 7 Plus is a beast with live streaming. You really want to have that because it also picks up more 4G LTE signals, which is essential when you're live streaming—you want a good, strong signal.

23:22 John Daub: What would be the successor to 360? You know what I would love to do? Like hologram video—if I can get the data and the right cameras, you need a lot of them around you. But to hologram into your house and bring you here, I think in the future TVs might be just that hologram in the center of the room. And you'd be able to sit around the hologram or somebody could be sitting there and you can use your thumb to rotate around like this, and the hologram would rotate while you're sitting in place or you could sit around the room. I think that might be the future. I remember in the 2008 election, CNN had a correspondent on location hologrammed into the studio and it was pretty cool—you could probably see it on YouTube if you do CNN election night hologram. AR is the future—AR means augmented reality. It's the ability to insert things into your vision of view to add to your experience. And these are things I'm going to be experimenting with on the channel.

24:52 John Daub: Not a lot of people are using 360 video—not a lot of people are uploading it on YouTube. In fact, of all the Japan YouTubers, I think maybe there's only one or two other YouTubers who've done it, and even those don't do it very often. And I like to try new things—I like to be disruptive. And that means that it could be to my detriment—meaning I could lose subscribers, I could lose viewers. But if you're not cutting edge, if you're not pushing the envelope, if you're not trying to go to new levels with your content, people are going to pass you—you're going to become irrelevant. YouTube is a sport—it's a competitive sport. And I'm friends with a lot of YouTubers here in Japan, but if they do something before me or if I give them an idea and they do it, they're the first ones to get there. 360 is a tool, this live streaming is a tool—these are things that I use to enhance the experience for you, the viewer. Not everybody likes the 360s, not everybody likes the live streaming—that's why I have a dedicated channel for both of them. The 360 channel does not do well, so I don't have a lot of videos—just one that's getting demonetized by YouTube this month.

26:36 John Daub: Have you thought about getting an iPhone 8 or an iPhone X? The iPhone X is not worth it to me because I'm a live streamer—I don't need it. The iPhone 8, maybe if I break this, I would get the iPhone 8. But the iPhone 7, I've seen reviews, and the camera on the iPhone 7 is pretty darn good. In fact, many people have said that the iPhone 7 Plus camera is better than the iPhone 8. So I think if you have an iPhone 7 Plus, you're probably good for another year or more—there's nothing wrong with having an older phone, it's just a tool.

27:23 John Daub: Right now in Tokyo it's 2 p.m. YouTube, and this is the last thing I want to stress that's not related to this stream, every YouTuber who has over 10,000 subscribers has access to a partner manager at YouTube. And I have a really awesome partner manager—he helps me a lot finding ways. I have a really awesome partner manager at YouTube who helps me with the analytics and finding ways to make better content for you. I can either do Google Hangouts with him or I can go to the YouTube Space in Tokyo in Roppongi and meet with him at the office. And I like to go see him face to face because I think meeting people face to face is the best way, even though we can do it through live streaming like this. And every time I go to meet him, he's so encouraging and so helpful and gives me ideas that I didn't know were possible and things with the technology that are evolving that I didn't know were out there. This came from YouTube Space, and that's where my skills for 360 editing and video production has really increased—he gave me a lot of tips.

28:52 John Daub: That's what really impresses me with YouTube as this platform. There are lots of platforms, but one reason why I stick with YouTube for now is because there are so many wonderful people there that are changing the platform, that are really helping me evolve with the content. I care about the monetization—all the videos, including this one, probably will become demonetized for the next 12 hours, which hurts my bottom line, which hurts my ability to finance the videos because everything I do now is through the Super Chats, through Patreon, through the ads that I put in the videos. All of the travel, all of my living costs now come through YouTube, through these videos. And YouTube, for now, is still an amazing platform.

29:46 John Daub: Between 2006, I was one of the first people to put videos on the internet actually. In 2006, that's when I started—I started making videos for the internet before YouTube. There was iTunes and the iPod video. And the thing with iTunes and Apple is that you, the consumer-generated media producer, CGM producer, you have to pay for your own bandwidth. I had my own server—I'd upload the videos to my server and I would pay for people to download my videos on iTunes. iTunes is an awful platform for consumer-generated media—that's why Apple doesn't invest anything in podcasting. Apple doesn't invest in improving it or promoting podcasts on their platform—it's an awful platform. And what YouTube is, all consumer-generated media—it's us making video content for you, and that is awesome. I can't tell you how much this has evolved to where I was on an Apple platform and I moved to the YouTube platform. I would have still been on Apple if they had a way to monetize and made it simpler for creators to make content. But they didn't do that, and they don't care about consumer-generated media—you do, YouTube does. So for that, I thank YouTube—Apple did lose, and they are losing big.

31:13 John Daub: More people watch YouTube than TV—more people watch YouTube than anything else right now. It's just everywhere, anytime—it's amazing. It's an app on every platform, and you can't get better than that. It gives you tools like 360 video, live streaming—there's so many ways to connect with you. I'm blown away. Maybe because I'm 43 years old and when I grew up, we didn't have the internet—we had like Atari 2600. That was it—and even then, there was a time before we didn't even have that. We had like blocks, and our parents would make toys for us—that's how old I am. They would make like things out of wood and screws and stuff. But nowadays, we have so many tools and toys and electronics and things are disposable and things move really fast. We have Netflix, we have live streaming, we have ways for a guy like me to be able to connect with people like you on the other side of the world, all over the world—it's just exciting, isn't it? This is an exciting time we live in, and it's changing so fast. That's why I make the 360 videos—I make it to bring you with me and take advantage of the moment that we're in right now.

32:26 John Daub: What are your plans for upcoming videos? I'm going to Hokkaido this week—I just got permission from the place I'm going to film yesterday. So now I have to book the ticket and I have to leave, I'm thinking, on Wednesday or if I miss that, the next week. But I'm going there to film in Hokkaido—it's a secret theme. As I said, YouTube is a sport—I'm not giving any other YouTubers any ideas. But I'll be in Hokkaido, and it's like minus 20 where I'm going—minus 10, minus 20. It's pretty cold—I'll be live streaming there too. Yeah, it's going to be pretty fun—I'm sort of looking forward to it because I've been in the cold before.

33:12 John Daub: Why are they demonetizing the videos? They're demonetizing the videos mostly to protect—this is what I talked to with my partner manager, but I'm not going to quote him, I'm going to paraphrase what I think I heard, so I could be wrong. There's a lot of the sponsors or people who buy the ads were concerned about some of the content that was being put on YouTube. And in order to keep the sponsors, to keep the videos monetized, they had to concede certain restrictions on videos that would make the sponsors happy and keep them monetizing. YouTube is in a tough spot, but I think that they're a little bit too generous in demonetizing—they demonetize too much. If this is a learning machine, they should know that I would never put up a video that's embarrassing. With 630,000 subscribers, 640,000 on the main channel, I'm never going to put up anything that's embarrassing. Every single content that I put up there is either family-friendly or has a warning like the Kanamara Matsuri. I'm very conservative in the sense I don't like to use bad words or show something that's inappropriate—and if I do, I'm very quick to apologize.

34:46 John Daub: But there's been situations where that's not the case, and when somebody like a certain YouTuber who came to Japan a few weeks ago does what he does, it hurts us all as a community—it hurts us all as viewers of content, it hurts creators who make content for you to watch because it takes money away from them. If it wasn't for Patreon, I can't tell you how thankful I am to Patreon—there's about 250 people who support me on Patreon, and it's the most amazing community of people because I'm starting to get to know their names, who they are, where they're from. A lot of them are signed up for the Postcard Club, which I send an original postcard I make from the thumbnails of the videos and a little message on the back every month. That makes up for the demonetization—it's enough for me to get back and travel. It'd be nice if YouTube didn't demonetize the videos, but with Patreon and other forums like Super Chats, this is a big percentage of my income in order to keep traveling, in order to keep making high-quality videos and not worry about the demonetization of YouTube videos.

36:01 John Daub: Patreon is a wonderful place—I don't think the Patreon team works hard at improving the platform. I think they need to hire staff and improve the platform. I think if YouTube had a Patreon-like system, I would probably leave Patreon and go to YouTube, but it's hard for me to trust YouTube with the money. With the Super Chats, they take 30%—I did the math looking to see how much a Super Chat came in and how much YouTube takes—they take 30% and the creator gets 70%. I think you should know that when you give a Super Chat—I don't get all of it, but if you didn't Super Chat, that would stink. 30% is pretty darn high—I think 15% might be better. But at the end of the month, they do send the money—I am able to use that to pay for my rent, to pay for my bills, and to travel, and to stay out longer, and to say no to projects. I said no to a TV job a couple weeks ago—they asked me if I could do a location shoot for Japanese TV, and I said, I'm sorry, I can't do it—I'm focused on this, I'm focused on making content for YouTube. That felt good—to be able to say no to a job that would take me off of this. I'm still satisfied with YouTube—I'm still satisfied with the quality of the people there, I'm satisfied with how they treat the creators. In general, it's not perfect—I'm not going to cry about it, because I've been in places that were much worse.

38:03 John Daub: John, because of your videos, I met my Japanese fiance—you've changed our lives with your videos. Oh man, that's really nice—I'm so happy. Shout out to Kent—wow, that makes me really happy to hear that. You met your fiance—this? Oh my word, that's really amazing. Wow, I never realized that the show would have such an impact on people's lives—thank you for sharing that.

38:44 John Daub: YouTube has beta tested a subscription with Simon and Martina. Yeah, I talked with Martina about this—Simon and Martina are two of the most awesome people. Whenever I have the chance to hang out with them, I try to do that. I hang out with Peter, Jennifer, and Kevin, but they're pretty darn cool too—I'm happy that they're here in Japan. Wow, Kent, man—thanks for that story, that's awesome. Congratulations.

39:14 John Daub: Alright, everybody—thanks for watching this livestream. The purpose of this was to help you with the 360 video, but we might have gotten off topic a little bit—thanks for watching. I'm going to do more livestreams maybe later today—I actually have to go to the Apple store to fix this iPhone. My AppleCare is still okay, so I made an appointment to go to Omotesando to go to the Apple store. So if you're in Tokyo and go to the Apple store at around 4 p.m., I might see you there—I bet some people show up, and I might do another livestream in Omotesando. Anyway, thanks for watching the 360 video on the main channel, thanks for watching this livestream—congratulations, Kent. Thank you for the livestreams, everybody—I appreciate all of the support. I'm going to turn it around so you can see this crazy playground that these kids have been playing at for the last 30 minutes. Bye-bye—that's where they were. I think we only had two or three people crying—not too bad. See you, everybody.