360 footage
Also known as: spherical footage, immersive footage
Video that records every direction at once, from which an ordinary rectangular shot is chosen afterwards rather than aimed while filming.
Updated
What it means
A 360 camera records the whole sphere around itself, so framing stops being a shooting decision and becomes an editing one. Nothing has to be pointed at anything, because every direction was captured at the same time.
What a viewer eventually sees is still an ordinary flat shot, carved out of that sphere afterwards. The carving is what 360 reframing does, and the aim is chosen with the benefit of knowing how the moment turned out.
The trade is resolution. A 360 camera spreads its pixels across every direction, so the window actually delivered comes from a fraction of them and looks softer than a conventional camera quoting the same number.
How it works in practice
Mounting matters more than aiming. Since direction is irrelevant, the real decisions are how close the camera sits to the subject and whether the mount disappears through the Invisible selfie stick effect.
Capturing at the largest available size is worth it for the same reason. The reframed window is a crop, so every pixel spent on the sphere is one available to the finished shot.
Planning a single reframing pass per shot saves a great deal of work, because deciding the aim once is editing while adjusting it continuously is closer to animation.
What to watch out for
The seam between lenses is always somewhere, and anything crossing it distorts. Keeping the subject away from the Stitch line is the one framing rule that still applies while filming.
File sizes and processing demands are both far higher than conventional footage, and the reframing pass has to finish before anything else can use the material at all.
Over reframing is the editorial trap. Because the camera can point anywhere, it is tempting to keep moving the window, and a shot that pans continuously is harder to watch than one that simply holds.
How RawClip handles it
Spherical files need a reframing decision before they can be cut, so they are handled as a separate step rather than treated like ordinary clips on the card. A reframed export in a normal aspect ratio is what the analysis actually works from.