360° Video

Pro

Working with video is an Orbit Pro feature.

New in 1.6.0 (beta)

360° video arrived in the 1.6.0 beta. Everything on this page describes the beta, and details may change before the stable release.

A 360° film is an ordinary video whose frame holds the whole sphere around the camera. Checking its mix comes down to one question: does the sound point the same way as the picture? Orbit plays 360° footage on the Video View with a viewer you can look around in, turns the binaural mix with your view, and marks every object's position on the picture so you can see whether each sound sits on its source.

What Orbit plays

Footage	Status
Mono equirectangular, full sphere (the usual 2:1 360° frame)	✅ Supported
Stereoscopic 360° (top-bottom or left-right)	Detected, not supported yet — shown flat
Cubemap / equi-angular cubemap layouts	Detected, not supported yet — shown flat
Cropped equirectangular (180° / VR180)	Detected, not supported yet — shown flat

A clip that isn't supported yet still plays — as the flat frame, exactly as it's stored in the file — and its clip inspector says why.

Turning 360 on for a clip

When you import a clip, Orbit reads its spherical video metadata — the tags 360° cameras and editors write to say a file is 360° — and marks a mono equirectangular clip as 360° automatically.

Each clip's inspector has a 360° Video section with three choices:

• Auto — follow the file's metadata. The default.
• On — treat the clip as 360° even though the file doesn't say so. Many cameras and editing apps drop the metadata on export, so use this when a clip you know is 360° shows up flat.
• Off — always show the clip flat.

Beneath the choice, Detected: says what Orbit found in the file — for example the projection, or no spherical metadata. If the file declares a layout Orbit can't show yet, the line says so and the clip is shown flat, whichever option you choose. Titles, graphics and shapes are always flat.

Looking around

While the playhead is over a 360° clip, the viewer becomes a window into the sphere and the 360 controls appear in the viewer's toolbar.

• Drag to look around. The picture moves with your hand, the way it does in other 360° players: drag right and the picture slides right (you turn to your left); drag down to look up.
• Scroll or pinch to zoom, from a 30° to a 120° field of view (90° to start).
• Double-click to face front again. Your zoom is kept.
• The compass in the bottom-left corner shows which way you're facing, with a wedge for how much of the sphere is in view, and reads out your heading and how far up or down you're looking.

The view works the same in the pop-out video window, and your heading, zoom and view settings are saved with the session.

Viewport and Flat

The Viewport | Flat switch chooses what the viewer shows:

• Viewport — the view through the sphere, as a viewer would see it in a headset or a 360° player.
• Flat — the whole equirectangular frame at once. Use it to check the seam at the back of the frame, or to see every object marker in one picture.

The transform, crop and mask tools are available in Flat only — they work on the frame itself, so they're hidden while you're looking through the sphere.

Sound follows view

With Sound follows view on (the default), the binaural mix turns with the picture. Look right, and a sound that was in front of you moves to your left ear — just as it would for someone watching the film in a headset.

• It applies to binaural monitoring only. Speakers and stereo never rotate — your room stays where it is.
• Turn it off to hold the sound field still while you look around the picture.
• With head tracking running, turning your head turns the picture too while Sound follows view is on, so you can look around the film with your head. Recenter sets your current head position as straight ahead.
• The setting is a listening preference: it stays as you left it across sessions.

Objects on the picture

Turn on Objects to mark every object's position on the picture as the file plays — a dot in the object's own colour, at the direction the metadata places it. Hover over a dot to see the object's name, or turn on Names to label every marker at once.

• An object that's behind you or off the edge of the view is shown as an arrow at the edge of the picture, pointing the way to turn to find it.
• In Flat, every object is marked on the whole frame.
• Beds and ambisonics have no single direction, so they don't get a marker.
• Markers work for ADM objects and for IAMF object-based elements alike.

This is the heart of 360° QC: play the film, and watch whether each sound sits on the thing that makes it.

The 360° canvas

A 360° picture has to be 2:1. While a 360° clip is on the timeline, Orbit sets the programme canvas to 2:1 automatically, and the Aspect menu reads 2:1 · 360° with a short note under the canvas readout. Your own aspect setting isn't changed — it comes back as soon as no 360° clip is on the timeline, whether you remove the clip, undo the import or set the clip to Off.

On a 360° timeline the Resolution menu offers 360° sizes:

Preset	Canvas
Auto	follows your widest 360° clip
4K 360°	3840 × 1920
5.7K 360°	5760 × 2880
8K 360°	7680 × 3840

See Video Programme Settings for the full list.

See also

• Video Programme Settings — frame rate, resolution and aspect.
• Head Tracking — AirPods and camera tracking.
• Monitoring Modes — binaural, speakers and stereo.
• Playback — how Orbit plays video.