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USER REVIEW APPLE FCP X V10.4
Another handy filter is the 360º Patch filter. It’s often the case, when filming 360º footage, that the camera rig is in frame – that camera films everything around it, of course! The 360º Patch filter allows you to clone another part of the image to patch over the camera support and its shadow. This is much simpler than having to rotoscope it out in another effects package. The filter allows for the camera support to be below the camera (Nadir), above (Zenith), Front, Back, Left and Right. Of course, once your VR masterpiece is complete, you can output it though FCP X or Compressor with the appropriate projection type – there are even presets to go to platforms like Vimeo that support VR. Vimeo’s iPhone/iPad app uses the sensors in those devices to allow the viewing of VR films as if the iPad is a ‘window’ onto the 360º world. You can move the iPad around to look behind you or above you – it’s 360º film with none of the slightly nauseating side-effects of a VR headset. MOTION Motion (v5.4) has also been updated to produce motion graphics for 360º VR. There is a new 360º 4k project setting, which presents all tools in Motion in a 360º 3D space. The viewer provides 360º overview and
movement, you can easily tweak tilt, pan and roll so that your ‘audience’ is facing forwards. This can be done numerically, in the Inspector – and that’s easiest for simple reorientations, like the example above – but you can also right click in the Viewer and select Reorient to do the job interactively, by clicking and dragging in the Viewer. This is great for levelling horizons, for instance, which is a bit of a mare to do numerically. There is a very handy ‘Show Horizon’ option in the View menu to aid this process. Once your VR clips are set up to your liking, Apple have added a dedicated 360º section to the Effects Browser. If you apply any conventional blur filters (from simply gaussian blurs to blooms or unsharp masks) to 360º footage, you get a seam at the ‘back’ of the image. FCP X v10.4 adds 360º aware blurs, blooms, glows, sharpening and so on, that don’t suffer from this problem. THE FILTER ALLOWS FOR THE CAMERA SUPPORT TO BE BELOW THE CAMERA
IMAGES 360˚ viewer and various 360˚ effects.
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