ACADEMY LARRY JORDAN
EDITING IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD The latest version of Apple’s Final Cut Pro X features tools designed tomake VR/360° editing easier than ever
VR and its close cousin 360° imaging are strange beasts. Some think they’re the next big thing in story- telling, while others don’t believe they will last until 2019. I find myself somewhere in the middle: I think these technologies have the opportunity to provide captivating experiences, but I sense that they are ways of filming that will be hard to convert to narrative stories. Whichever side of this discussion you happen to be on, the good news is that both Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Apple Final Cut Pro X now support 360° video, sometimes known as 360°/ VR. With the recent 10.4 update to Final Cut we can now import, edit and export VR files. Additionally, Apple has added titles specifically designed for VR, along with effects to hide the tripod and generators that are 360-aware. Understanding VR The easiest way to appreciate 360° video is to imagine you are standing at the centre of a sphere, as though you were inside a giant globe. As you look around, you see a continuous image projected onto the inside of the globe - up, down, left, right, front and back. Unless the globe itself moves, you can’t see anything from a different perspective, but you can see everything around you in a way you can’t while watching TV. This is because TV is a flat rectangle
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ABOVE Working with 360° gives a choice of resolutions –but it’s worth remembering they both work out at close to 5k.
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ABOVE RIGHT Working in VR is entirely different to working ‘flat’, more like staging theatre-in- the-round.
“Unless the globemoves, you can’t see anything froma different perspective”
directly in front of you, while VR is an environment that totally surrounds you. True 360° VR is recorded by a series of cameras or lenses that point in all directions, and these multiple images are then ‘stitched’ together to form a single image that, when projected properly, looks like video projected onto the inside of a sphere, hence the 360° in the title. 1 When the images from all those cameras are connected, or stitched, the resulting image looks pretty weird because it converts images designed to be seen on a curve into a flat image, as in screen shot 1, left. This image is called an ‘equirectangular projection,’ which is a grand way of describing howwe
fit maps of our round globe onto a sheet of paper. 2 When the image is properly viewed as a sphere, as in image 2, underneath, it looks perfectly normal. What Final Cut Pro X now allows us to do is to import 360° equirectangular images shot by any number of VR cameras, display themon a computer monitor or VR headset, add colour correction and titles and then output them for display on a VR headset, YouTube or the VR site of your choice. How it works Importing VRmedia into FCP X is no different to importing any other clip. 3 When creating a VR project, we can choose from two different
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PRO MOVIEMAKER SPRING 2018
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