Video Stitch is an interesting program because it offers Nvidia acceleration. It "wants" two single spherical videos, instead of what the Gear 360 offers, which is a side by side dual spherical video. So there would have to be an extra step in post production to split the dual spheres into two separate files, then stitch those, and there was a guy who showed how to do this on a Youtube video, but I lost the link and lost interest in finding it again, since it seemed like a lot of extra work in Adobe Premiere. I experimented with writing a script in AVISynth to do the same thing, but lost interest after I could only open the audio of an mp4. In addition, my version of Video Stitch barfed when fed Gear 360 video and I tried downloading the latest version, etc.
I think these programs were designed for real estate photographers wanting to put 360 panos on their listings.
Adobe Premiere Pro has a 360 viewer but no editing tools. They have this irritating licensing scheme now that costs $20 a month, but this means you can try out the software for a month with only a $20 investment, better than spending $600 just to find it doesn't do what you want it to do.
I bought a MAGIX license on the promise of 360 tools but there are none, at least in the version I downloaded.
Samsung was kind enough to upgrade ActionDirector to stitch 360 video from the Gear device. Here's a link to download the latest version.
The stitching is extremely slow even on an i7 with no video card. I added a GTX 970 card and got stitching that was slow but not ridiculous.
On ActionDirector, YOU CANNOT FIX HORIZON ISSUES IN POST, at least as far as I can see. The stitching software is set up to assume the camera is perfectly level at all times. You cannot adjust for the horizon that I can tell.
Video Stitch offers horizon fix but the demo craps out after loading Gear 360 video at least on my rig, with the latest version.
ActionDirector for Gear 360 isn't "bad" because it offers the three basic functions you need to work with 360 video: stitch, render, and upload, all within one program. Postproduction is therefore pretty simple. Just be sure the camera is level!
Actually the workflow is pretty simple, drag raw mp4s and then wait for stitching. Come back and cut video, then produce.
AD offers automatic upload to Youtube within the program, but you don't really want to do this because it doesn't leave a local finished video product on your PC, so if any step of the process dies, you have to start all over again.
The final step before you can upload rendered video to Youtube is to "inject" metadata telling Youtube it's a 360 video. Just giving it a cool filename like "my 360 vid" isn't enough!
Everyone seems to use a program called Spatial Metadata Injector (creative!). I've linked it here. It's pretty self explanatory.
So here's the official workflow:
Shoot video->transfer video to PC->Open 360 ActionDirector->Import video files into 360 AD program->wait for stitching->drag imported clips to final video timeline->cut out bad video clips->"Produce" final mp4 video->Inject metadata->Upload
It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not that bad. The steps all take a while because the files are really big, but otherwise there's not a lot of human intervention needed.
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