Hey Ed.. that only pushes into the image without changing the way it looks otherwise

In contrast, when I open this at a site which accepts 360 image and manipulates them for virtual tours, for instance, it looks proper.

Here's how it looks in the virtual tour.

https://kuula.co/post/h4zWM/collection/7ZkHH

I'd want/hope/expect in Vegas, it could display it similar to what we get with that site's viewer, and we could animate/keyframe the point we're looking at in the 360 image within Vegas.

This would allow editing of 360 photos and videos fully within Vegas, choosing what the viewer is looking at just like we would when pan/cropping standard non-360 media.

Changing my project settings to 8000x4000, I see an option in the PREVIEW window to put it in "360" mode.



In 360 Mode, adding "Scene Rotation" VFX *before* the pan/crop gets me 90% of the way there... can fully move around in 360 view and it looks *almost* proper.

The curve at the edges still doesn't look right.

I'll keep digging... but if anyone has any other obvious tips would be much appreciated.

Under File - Properties on the Advanced tab, there's also a 360 Output checkbox. That will turn on the "360 mode" option above the preview screen without changing the project size.

I don't think this ought to be an output change, since in many projects 360 content will be mixed with non-360 content and we still want to be able to edit that content and have it look "proper"

360 images/video are saved in an equirectangular projection. I don't believe Vegas has a way of converting that to a stereographic projection.

I have used the reorient fx to center the image to the area I like and pan/crop to fit that into a 1080p area, but that doesn't change the projection.

The ffmpeg v360 filter can be used to convert image formats. I use ffmpeg to create cubemaps from 360 footage. Here is the command to create the "front" cube face for 4K footage from a Ricoh Theta V camera:

ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -vf v360=e:sg:h_fov=90:v_fov=90:yaw=0:pitch=90:w=960:h=960  "output.mp4"

To convert your footage to 1080p something like this might work:

ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -vf v360=e:sg:h_fov=90:v_fov=50.625:yaw=0:pitch=90:w=1920:h=1080  "output.mp4"

If what you want isn't centered you could try playing with the yaw, pitch, and rotation parameters, but these can be a bit unintuitive.

Personally, I'd use Affinity Photo to reorient. It might be able to do the equirectangular to stereographic projection change too...I've never tried.

ffmpeg works for images too, just substitute the appropriate file extension for .mp4 in the examples above.

 

Oh-- I love ffmpeg.. use it frequently.

AND -- sounds like an opportunity to enhance Vegas to add support to edit 360 images natively within the tool. Ideas:

1. Media Properties -- be able to identify the image as a 360 image and handle it differently. Essentially, be able to unfold the 3D image so the projection into our 2D window looks properly, with pan/crop using the Vegas output cropping/ratio.
   
   Knowing it's a 3D image would allow pan-crop to move around it and still have it look proper in the output.
    
2. Video FX -- add to an event to have it project onto the 2D plane from a source which is 360. Problem with this one is that pan/crop wouldn't likely give the ability to pan around the image properly once it's been already mapped that way.

I may not have all the technical points right above, but being able to natively edit 360 content in Vegas sounds like a "we should have this feature", ya?

@VEGASDerek​​​​​​​ Thoughts?

@RedRob-CandlelightProdctns

I you just want to crop a 1080p portion from your UHD frame, I recommend using Track Motion, and not Event Pan/Crop. Far more intuitive, and it's nondestructive.

@RedRob-CandlelightProdctns

I you just want to crop a 1080p portion from your UHD frame, I recommend using Track Motion, and not Event Pan/Crop. Far more intuitive, and it's nondestructive.

 

While I appreciate all tips, I think this one misses the mark on what my question and thread is about, which is handling 360 content in a standard Vegas project which is outputting 1080p.

That said -- not sure why you'd say event pan/crop is any more or less "destructive" than track motion. Neither one messes with the source footage, so to that extent, nothing in Vegas is actually destructive.

I you just want to crop a 1080p portion from your UHD frame, I recommend using Track Motion, and not Event Pan/Crop. Far more intuitive, and it's nondestructive.

Apart from being irrelevant to Rob's problem I don't necessarily agree. My understanding, from posts on this forum, is that Pan/Crop works on the events source resolution whereas Track Motion works on the Project resolution, which may be smaller than the source resolution. Maybe this has changed recently?

Also VP nowadays has a Crop Video FX which is probably easier to use and more effective for cropping than Track Motion. Track Motion does have its uses but using it for cropping is for me something in the past.

While I appreciate all tips, I think this one misses the mark on what my question and thread is about, which is handling 360 content in a standard Vegas project which is outputting 1080p.

Thanks for that, @RedRob-CandlelightProdctns. I skipped over a part of the discussion, and I thoroughly appreciate your issues with 360. I tried and tried on a project, and finally decided it wasn't worth the effort for me.

Now a moot point for this thread, there are some lingering impressions resulting from general statements made years ago regarding Project Resolution and Track Motion, which don't apply to my technique and usage of Track Motion for doing a simple cutout of a 1920x1080 closeup from UHD source.

If it comes up again, I'll be pleased to share a demo; again, I should have read the question in its entirety.

Best for the upcoming Holiday Season!

Insert Scene Rotation & Tiny Planet OFX before Pan&Crop chain to 'convert' '360 view' to 'normal view'.

If you want the perspective NOT-being Curved, but straight line Perspective, you will have to do it with 'Insta360 Studio' application:

@set I did note above it looked like "scene rotation" and then Pan&Crop appeared to get me 90% of the way there, but it still didn't look proper.. too curved.

Doing it inside a 3rd party application replaces the use of Vegas as our editing tool for 360 footage, which is essentially the point of my post.

We're BC we choose to use Vegas as our NLE. 360 content is now a thing. The question was how can we best use it in Vegas, and if we can't, then it should be on a feature request list.