Can you force viewers to look in a specific direction using VR – Video360?

[Noah Kadner]

Well yes and no- there are many reasons you’d want to set the starting POV for 360°- like a critical plot point or just some key aspect of a shot that you wish to direct attention to. Just leaving it random can lessen the impact or just look plain weird or unfortunate like a closeup of someone’s posterior or looking down a dirty alley etc. I saw the ability to set starting POV in action at Adobe’s booth at IBC but to be honest I am not sure if it’s implemented in the shipping version of Premiere.

Noah

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[Tero Ahlfors]

You can use the VR projection effect to move the video sphere around, but instead of forcing certain position one should try to direct the view using audiovisual cues.

[Anders Møller-nielsen]

Thank you for your answers.

I have tried to use VR-Projection. But as I see it, I’m not able to reset the viewer’s POV. For example, I can set a value for Pan – but POV will always be relative to this value. If the viewer looks 90 degrees to the left in clip 1 – he/she will also look 90 degrees to the left (relative to my PAN-settings) in clip 2.

I would like to reset the viewer’s POV to 0 degrees and thus have full control over the viewer’s starting point. And I can not figure out how I do it?

When that said, I totally agree that the 360 degree video is all about freedom to choose POV.

Nevertheless, I also think that good storytelling is a balance between control and freedom – especially if you use 360-degree clips for longer pieces like documentaries.

I also agree, using cues in pictures and sound is a very beautiful and sophisticated way of “controlling” the viewers POV.

[Jim Watt]

In Adobe Premier you can use the Skybox pluggin “Rotate Sphere” to position a specific cut where you want the viewer to focus.

Granted the idea of 360 video is to have a viewer look around, however when you’re telling a story it is sometimes/often necessary to take them to a specific angle since they’re likely to miss the action if you depend on them to find it.

Specific case in point that we ran into filming a fly fishing promo. We have the VR camera mounted on an arm above the oars in a drift boat looking at both anglers the rower and the boat. Front angler hooks a nice rainbow trout, during the fight at about 180 degrees from the boat/angler the fish makes a couple of cool jumps. Without the cut, most would only see the fish jumps if they replay the movie several times. I simply did a dissolve to the jumping angle after adjusting the frame in “rotate sphere”.

The other situation I find for adjusting the angle is for a cutaway when you want to shorten a scene. Make a cut, reposition the angle and you have a cutaway with no one the wiser. There’s a very practical use for this tool when telling a story in my opinion.

Jim Watt

[Anders Møller-nielsen]

Thank you very much for your help – I’m looking forward to try it 🙂