I think it’s fair to say the most frustrating bottleneck in VR video production is the mess that is ambisonic audio. For those unfamiliar, it’s a spatial audio format that is currently the dominant approach for encoding directional audio in VR video.

Over the last decade, regular video post-production has come on leaps and bounds for one-stop-shop creators, meaning those without a background in audio can use in-built tools to get things sounding half decent for publishing video content.

I came to video production from a music and audio production background. I feel I understood audio pretty well — I’d been manipulating it in some form for well over a decade, including releasing music, writing for TV, and becoming a Pro Tools Certified Instructor. I considered myself reasonably well placed to tackle spatial audio for our VR180 productions. I love the experience of well-produced immersive audio enhancing the visuals.

When Meta (then Facebook) bought into VR, they invested heavily, acquiring Oculus and other companies — including Edinburgh firm Two Big Ears, who made a spatial audio suite called ‘Spatial Workstation’. Released in 2015, it gave VR creators a way to mix ambisonics in DAWs and render in the correct format for headset playback. Facebook rebranded it as the Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation and made it free. Progress was heading in the right direction.

Only it didn’t continue.

Beware Abandonware

It’s now 2024 and the Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation is no longer supported and largely broken for new installations. There are some kind folks supplying working versions for Windows and Mac — though MacOS Sonoma has broken even those, due to the root folder lockdown.

So we are pretty much left with FFMPEG. The audio and video engineer’s best friend — but definitely not mine. The fact you have to use a Terminal window, typing code with no GUI, to get your ambisonic audio onto your video feels very 1980s. There’s always a typo somewhere in my commands, and I find it nothing short of infuriating. FFMPEG remains the only way to ‘mux’ (multiplex — combining more than one input into a single output) ambisonic and headlocked stereo audio together. Amusingly, ‘mux’ also means to make a mess of something. Someone fire up the irony engine.

Premiere In. Then Out.

Premiere Pro allows editors to export VR video with ambisonics — or did. As of Premiere Pro 2023 and subsequent releases, Adobe has given considerably less love to VR support. The Adobe Immersive Environment has been removed, and the workflow for ambisonic audio has become increasingly unreliable.

DaVinci Resolve: The Current Best Option

DaVinci Resolve has become our go-to, and for good reason. Its Fairlight audio page has mature ambisonic support, the immersive video tools are actively developed, and Blackmagic take the format seriously. It’s not without its own quirks, but it’s far more stable and capable than the alternatives.

The landscape remains frustrating — but Resolve gives us a fighting chance of getting great spatial audio into our VR180 films without wrestling the Terminal every time.

If you’re starting out in VR video and wondering about audio: budget time for it, expect to be confused by it, and know that you are not alone.