A Final Cut Pro X plugin that changes the orientation of a 360° clip which has already had effects applied.

Part of Alex4D 360° Effects for Final Cut Pro 10.4: Essential VR video tools for 360° stories.

Final Cut Pro 10.4 and later applies a Reorient panel to 360° spherical footage in the video inspector. This changes the orientation of the video sphere – its tilt, pan and roll angles – before effects are applied. There are times when it is useful to be able to reorient a clip after effects have been applied. That is what the 360° Reorient 4D effect is for: for reorienting the video after effects have been applied.

Orientation?

Although 360° spherical video viewers can look in any direction and any angle up or down, they will be most comfortable looking straight ahead. The centre of the 360° shot in the Final Cut Pro 10.4 viewer corresponds to what viewers will see if they look straight ahead.

360° video makers also might want to make consecutive shots line up.

For example, imagine a shot of a door opening in a room followed by a shot in the corridor beyond.

The camera rig in the room may have been set up so that the camera facing forward is facing a window. That would result in a sphere of video where the centre of the footage (what viewers will see if they look ahead) – is the window. It is useful to change the ‘direction’ of the sphere so that the centre of the shot is the door.

The camera rig that shot the corridor could also have been set up to point in any direction – the camera facing forwards could have been facing the corridor wall. The resulting footage from that setup will be centred on the wall, not centred looking further down the corridor. 360° Direction and Tilt 4D and 360° Reorient 4D can be used to change the orientation of the video sphere so that the centre of the shot is looking further down the corridor, so that when the door opens and we transition to the corridor shot, the shots feel like they align.

360° Reorient 4D

360° Reorient 4D is in the Basics category of Alex4D 360° Effects:

Here is what the Final Cut Pro 10.4 360° viewer and the viewer look like when the 360° Reorient 4D effect is applied to a full-screen 360° media (including a 360° compound clip):

Controls

Tilt (X) rotates the sphere around the X axis. An value of 90° rotates the sphere so that if the viewer looks ahead, they see what was directly below the camera (down 90°).

Pan (Y)  rotates the sphere around the Y axis. An value of 90° rotates the sphere so that if the viewer looks ahead, they she what was to the right of the camera (right 90°).

Roll (Z)  rotates the sphere around the Z axis. An value of 45° rotates the sphere so that if the viewer looks ahead, they see what was in front of the camera, but rotated by 45° anticlockwise.

Opposite reverses the actions of the effect. Sometimes it is useful to apply 360° Reorient 4D at the end of a chain of effects – to reorient using the built-in Reorient panel in the video inspector, then apply another effect and then orient the clip back to where it started before the built-in Reorient using  360° Reorient 4D. In this case, to move the clip back, you would copy the Tilt, Pan and Roll values from Reorient to 360° Reorient 4D the same and check Opposite.

More about the rest of the Alex4D 360° Effects.