Direction of Rotation

Can somebody give a quick “How to” when it comes to selecting the direction of rotation when using the “Size, Position & Rotate” filter on an image in the timeline? I cannot see how to do it. It seems completely arbitrary, which makes it kinda useless when I want to use it. OR I am missing something really obvious which one of you experts will be able to point me to!

Thanks in advance.

A positive number rotates clockwise. (From Center/Middle in this example)

A negative number rotates counterclockwise.

You can also change the position of where the image or clip is to rotate by selecting the Horizontal and Vertical fit options.

Hope this helps. If it didn’t, could you explain a bit further, perhaps with a screenshot of your project (or a sample project) and what you’re wanting to accomplish?

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Yeah, I get that (and thanks for your reply), but when you reach the end of 360° you have nowhere else to go. If you want something to rotate more than 360° what do you do? Like a spinning ball? Have I missed something in repeating a filter?

Thanks in advance.

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You simply repeat a 0 to 360 rotations.
Here’s one way to do it, supposing you want the clip to do a full rotation in 4 seconds:

  • Trim you clip to 4 seconds.
  • Apply a Size, Position & Rotation filter
  • At position 0 of the clip, enable keyframes on the Rotation setting.
  • In the keyframes panel, click the Seek forwards button.
  • At that position, add a second keyframe and set its value to 360°
  • Copy the clip and append it as many times as needed.

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This is what I needed. Thank you!

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Another way is with keyframes on the same clip.

There is a bit of math involved here.
This example is with a 30FPS Video Mode.

360 degrees with 30 FPS requires 12 degrees of rotation for each frame.
In this example, I have the following keyframes (Linear) on Rotation:
00:00 = 0
01:00 = 348
01:01 = 0
02:00 = 348
02:01= 0

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Thank you for this solution. It’s a lot of math but this would mean you don’t have to repeat the clip ad infinitum. You would of course have to repeat the keyframe setting ad infinitum. It strikes me that it would be easier to have a new “Repeat” function on a timeline clip with keyframes so that you could repeat the keyframes selected once, a set number of times or indefinitely. Just a thought.

If you want to use @Hudson555x’s method, you can replace the value 0 with -360.
This halves the number of keyframes by generating two rotations each time (-360 → 0 → +348), giving:

00:00 = -360
02:00 = 348
02:01 = -360
04:00 = 348
04:01 = -360

I agree, but it might be difficult to implement; otherwise, it would have been done already.