360 stereo video captures are too dark

[Francois-Laberge-Bose]

What happened?

360 Video are always darker than seen in any camera.

Is it reproduceable?

For me I just open or create any scene and use the following settings and it always ends up much darker than what I see when in VR.

Released package version / tag?

Recorder.experimental.v0.2.0027.unitypackage

Unity version, operating system, target platform (standalone windows, mac, iOS, PS4...)?

Unity: 2018.1.0b5, Windows 10, running in the editor

[Roland09]

Same for me. Any idea how to fix it?

Unity: 2018.1.0b6, Windows 10, running in the editor

[Francois-Laberge-Bose]

@Roland09 I moved on and dropped trying to do it. Still hoping for an answer back. :)

[Francois-Laberge-Bose]

Oh, one thing I did try out was Unity's beta of doing 360 video recording:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/01/26/stereo-360-image-and-video-capture/

I had issues where it was way too dark, so I also dropped that. But it seems like the way to go in the future if it's officially supported by Unity. It's still experimental right now.

[dustinkerstein]

Same issue here with the dark output.

[dustinkerstein]

FYI - This can be fixed by going to Edit > Project Settings > Player and make sure Color Space is set to Gamma.

[Francois-Laberge-Bose]

@dustinkerstein Thanks, that fixed it for me!

I think the solution now for this issue should be that it should be detected or documented that you must be using Gamma mode.

[Roland09]

Thanks for the hint about Gamma Color Space. It gets better, but doesn't fix the problem. You don't see the colors in the images the way they are in the game. You have to fiddle around to make it work. And the PostProcessing Stack 2 (beta) doesn't work with it properly.

[frideal]

Does FrameRecorder not support for Linear Color Space?

[DashW]

I've also encountered this issue with another 360 image recorder - eVRydayVR's 360 Panorama Capture. Again, this was working up until Unity 2018, and again, the issue only occurs in Linear color space.

My suspicion is that Unity has changed color management / gamma correction for RenderTextures in Unity 2018, although I have yet to test this with 2D RenderTextures.

I've opened up a thread on the Unity Forum for this issue:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/has-rendertexture-color-management-changed-in-unity-2018.538971/

[MrT3D]

Still super dark on the Asset Store version too! Switching over to Gamma is not a great solution because it borks HDRP and PBR in general. FWIW, this seems to be worse on a PC - OSX is better but still broken.