Guidelines for better 360° projects in Motion

To get the best results when working in 360° projects, consider the following suggestions:

Make sure your 360° media is formatted for equirectangular projection.
Try to use images that match the resolution of your project. Low-resolution media may stretch and scale incorrectly, yielding undesirable results.
You can add clone objects to a 360° environment—however this is only recommended when you’re masking 360° media. Cloning other objects may yield unexpected results.
360° projects with resolutions lower than 2K are not recommended.
Make sure your Mac meets the minimum and recommended system requirements for working with 360º video. See the Motion tech specs.
Converting normal projects or normal Final Cut Pro templates into 360° projects may yield undesirable results. Whenever possible, create your 360° projects from scratch.
To “cut to” different default views during playback, add multiple scene cameras (or Reorient filters) with different rotations and offset them in the Timeline.
To export multiple versions of your 360° video, each with different default views, disable all but one camera, and then export. Next, enable a different camera and export again.
To lock the active camera and prevent the unwanted reorientation of a scene, click the lock icon to the right of the camera name in the Layers list. Click the lock icon again to unlock the camera.
When viewing your project, use the 360° Look Around camera view rather than the actual camera in order to:
- Avoid altering the default orientation of the 360° media
- Avoid unwanted keyframing
- Update your view based on the Active Camera orientation at the current frame
For a fully immersive project-viewing experience, use a VR headset while working with 360° video in Motion. For setup instructions, see Use a VR headset with Final Cut Pro and Motion.
To ensure that viewers see text or images that you add to the project, add those elements to each of quadrant of the sphere. Viewers may not see graphics placed too high or too low in the sphere.
To customize your workspace, you can temporarily change the canvas layout—swapping the viewports, adding additional viewports, displaying one viewport at a time, and so on. See 3D viewport layouts in Motion.
The 360° environment is always centered around the position of the active camera. For this reason, you may want to position the camera at the origin (the point where all three axes—X, Y, and Z—meet in the center of the canvas, where X = 0, Y = 0, and Z = 0). This way, objects with negative Z Position values always appear in front of the camera and objects with positive Z Position values always appear behind the camera. See Intro to 3D coordinates in Motion.
If you move an equirectangular image that has been animated with keyframes or applied behaviors into a 360° environment, the animation is disabled. Once the image is moved back to a standard group, the animation is enabled again.

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Motion User Guide

Guidelines for better 360° projects in Motion