The latest version of Final Cut Pro X has the multi-track timeline needed for editing but brings in the future of video and pro features. It supports 360-degree video, graphics, and effects. If you really just want to get started editing videos on your Mac, or even on your iPhone or iPad, then the easiest way is to get Apple iMovie.

I’d been looking for an excuse to play with 360-degree video, and a short trip to Iceland provided the perfect opportunity. In just three days, we got to visit a geyser, do some horse-riding and – most fun of all – go snowmobiling on a glacier. I was using the Insta360 ONE camera. This really impressed me. Shooting footage is not even point-and-click: since it offers complete 360-degree coverage, and uses a 6-axis gyro to know how it is aligned, the ‘pointing’ bit doesn’t matter. Stick it on a selfie-stick, hold it up high and all is good. You can check out my review of the camera.

Quicken for mac 2020. Editing actual 360-degree footage is no different to editing any other footage, other than the fact that you have to get used to looking at the weird flattened view of spherical footage. That ability was added in version 10.4. But there’s one other trick you can perform with 360-degree video: simulating multi-camera footage. FCP X lets you choose a viewpoint from spherical footage, and then work with that as a flat, wide-angle clip.

Chop up your 360-degree footage into sections, choose a different angle for each, and you have an extremely convincing simulation of footage shot with a whole array of cameras. As I mentioned on my camera review, there is one big problem with doing this with today’s consumer 360-degree cameras: In this way, you could, in theory, shoot with a single camera and then choose your angles afterwards: front-facing, rear-facing, straight down and so on. I say ‘in theory’ because even 4K is limited resolution to work with when you’re selecting what is a relatively small crop from the 360-degree image. This means you can’t get 1080p crops out of the 4K file, so the final result is rather low resolution.

You can see this in my sample video (best viewed on desktop, as it remains a 360 video, so you can easily change all my angles when viewing on mobile): But what you can also see is the massive potential the approach has. Once we have cameras with enough resolution to allow 1080p flat crops, creating multi-viewpoint videos will become massively simpler – not least because you won’t be locked into fixed viewpoints. If you’ve ever shot a clip and later wished you’d angled it slightly differently, that’s a problem you’ll never have with a 360-degree camera: you can choose the exact angle you want in post.

Of course, the resolution issue won’t ever go away. Right now, 1080p is still the default resolution for most video, with 4K output still seen as something noteworthy. Once people come to expect 4K output, then we’ll need much higher resolution in a 360-camera to provide 4K crops.

Creating a multi-angle video like this turned out to be very simple. Simulating multi-camera video with 360-degree footage When creating a new project, change the video format from your normal 1080p or 4K to 360°. Set the resolution and frame-rate as usual, then make sure the Projection Type is set to Monoscopic not Stereoscopic: When you import your 360-degree footage, click the clip display icon (to the right of All Clips) to toggle it to List View, then scroll across to the right. Make sure your clip property is Equirectangular and Monoscopic: Make sure that the View option, top right, is set to 360° Viewer: Once you’ve done that, you’ll have two different views: the left-hand one showing the actual viewpoint selected, the right-hand one showing a flattened version of the whole spherical view: You can then drag your clips into the timeline in the usual way, cut them up as desired and then choose the viewpoint for each clip. You do this by selecting from the tool menu bottom-left of the viewer. Because FCP X recognizes it as 360-degree footage, an extra option will appear. In addition to the usual Transform, Crop and Distort, there’s another option at the top: Reorient.