Project CloverVR
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| Project CloverVR | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Type | Video editing |
| Industry | Video production |
| Developer | Adobe (Adobe Research) |
| Supported Devices | Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch (2016 demonstration) |
| Release Date | November 2016 (Adobe MAX Sneaks demonstration); October 2017 (integrated into Premiere Pro as the Adobe Immersive Environment) |
Project CloverVR (also shown as Project Clover) is an experimental tool from Adobe for editing 360-degree video inside a VR headset. Adobe Research scientist Stephen DiVerdi demonstrated it at Adobe MAX 2016 in San Diego as one of the conference's "Sneaks", a session that previews technologies being developed in Adobe's labs.[1][2][3] The prototype let an editor browse, edit, preview, rotate and align spherical footage without taking the headset off.[2]
The work grew out of a research collaboration between Adobe Research and Portland State University, published at ACM CHI 2017 as the in-headset editor Vremiere.[4] In October 2017 Adobe added the CloverVR interface to Premiere Pro as part of its Immersive Environment, which let editors watch and scrub a timeline through an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive while continuing to edit with the keyboard.[3][5]
History
Research and the 2016 Sneak
Editors of 360-degree video in 2016 normally worked in desktop tools that show the footage as a flat equirectangular image, then put on a headset to check how a cut actually looked. The Vremiere paper describes this as an "onerous workflow, alternating between editing on the desktop and then putting on a headset to review changes."[6] Adobe's announcement of the Sneak put the problem the same way: editing VR footage was "tedious and clumsy, requiring ad-hoc workflows and desktop plugins," and CloverVR aimed to give editors "dedicated tools to view and edit directly in VR."[7]
Adobe MAX 2016 took place in San Diego, with its keynotes on 2 and 3 November 2016.[1] CloverVR was one of 11 experimental technologies shown in the Sneaks session, which was co-hosted by Jordan Peele and Kim Chambers. Adobe said at the time that these technologies were "not yet part of Creative Cloud."[7] Adobe credited DiVerdi as the presenter, Adobe Research intern Cuong Nguyen as a core contributor, and quoted principal research scientist Aaron Hertzmann, who called 360-degree video "a new artistic medium."[2]
On stage, DiVerdi used an Oculus Rift and two Oculus Touch controllers.[8] He said that repeatedly removing the headset to make changes "gets pretty tiring."[9] Press reports described the demo as an early build. Road to VR wrote that the interface had a long way to go before it matched the range of options in standard Premiere, and Newsshooter noted that it showed only a simple timeline over the video with a handful of editing options. Neither outlet was given a release date.[8][9]
Productization in Premiere Pro (2017-2018)
Adobe previewed headset support for the next version of Premiere Pro at IBC 2017 in September. AV Watch reported that the Rift and HTC Vive would be added as video devices for 360-degree editing, with a timeline window and virtual controller shown over the footage and jog and shuttle controls for stepping and scrubbing, and that not every editing function would be available in the headset.[10]
On 18 October 2017, during Adobe MAX in Las Vegas, Road to VR reported that Project CloverVR was now part of the "Immersive Environments" feature set in that week's Creative Cloud release of Premiere Pro, available to any Creative Cloud subscriber. It described the shipped interface as one that lets editors use familiar Premiere tools and the timeline inside VR, with controls designed for motion controllers.[3] Adobe's immersive video overview page said the Adobe Immersive Environment let editors watch "via a headmount display, and scrub and playback content freely," navigating the timeline on an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive while using the keyboard for trimming and adding markers.[5]
Adobe also integrated all of the Mettle SkyBox plug-ins for 360-degree video and VR, which it had acquired in June 2017, into the October 2017 release of Creative Cloud.[11][5] In the April 2018 release (version 12.1), Premiere Pro added Windows Mixed Reality headsets to the Immersive Environment, with Microsoft's motion controllers able to open the Timeline and Navigator panels and control playback, and gained handset controls for rotating the view without turning the head.[12]
Features
The 2016 prototype
Adobe described several tools in the CloverVR demonstration:[2]
| Tool | Function |
|---|---|
| Little Planet view | Shows the footage as a spherical, globe-like projection so the editor can find scenes quickly |
| Adaptive vignette | Narrows the field of view while scrubbing to reduce eyestrain and nausea |
| Rotational alignment | Matches the action in two shots across a cut to keep visual continuity |
| Notation and captioning | Tools for adding notes and captions |
Newsshooter wrote that the rotational alignment tool set the starting orientation of each shot by placing the desired view inside a yellow band, so that a viewer's focus carried over a cut.[9] Road to VR also showed a preview overlay that let the editor switch between two adjoining scenes to check continuity.[8] Adobe said the team built the tools with working editors and was looking at social, collaborative editing so that teams and clients could review work together in VR.[2]
Vremiere research system
The CHI 2017 paper by Nguyen, DiVerdi, Hertzmann and Feng Liu describes the research system behind the demo. It started from interviews with four professional VR video editors and then built an editor that runs on an Oculus Rift CV1 with rotational tracking, on a Windows 10 PC with a GeForce GTX 970, supporting only monoscopic video. Unlike the stage demo with Touch controllers, Vremiere used a mouse and keyboard, with a view-stabilized timeline holding graphics, video and audio tracks overlaid on the spherical video.[6]
Its widgets correspond to the tools Adobe described for the stage demo. The Little Planet is a stereographic projection used as a minimap and compass. The adaptive vignettes contract according to motion in the footage, measured with optical flow, to reduce simulator sickness while scrubbing; they start at 120 degrees (no vignetting) and stop at 60 degrees. The Rotation Alignment tool stacks the frames before and after a cut as two panoramas, and a "Ripple Rotation" mode carries a rotation change on to later clips. The system also placed titles and logos directly on the sphere and added spatial bookmarks that the editor could jump between.[6]
In the expert review, six professional editors with VR video experience each produced a short travelogue edit entirely in the headset, taking 16.12 minutes on average. Simulator sickness questionnaire scores rose slightly from before to after the session, but the change was not statistically significant. Compared with their own desktop workflows, participants strongly favored in-headset previewing, rotation alignment and titling.[6] The paper received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI 2017.[4] A follow-up paper by the same four authors at UIST 2017, CollaVR, studied networked tools for several people reviewing a VR video together in headsets.[13][14]
Adobe Immersive Environment
Adobe's help documentation for the shipped feature (as archived in November 2023) described it as a way to "view, review and scrub through your timeline in a Head Mount Display (HMD)" while keeping keyboard-driven editing for tasks such as dynamic trimming and adding markers.[15] The documented setup and tools were:
| Item | Documented behavior |
|---|---|
| Headsets | HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality headsets on Windows, all through SteamVR |
| macOS | Not supported, because Steam had ended macOS support for SteamVR |
| Activation | Enabled by default as a video device under Preferences, Playback; switched on per project from the wrench menu in the Program or Source Monitor |
| Footage | Only 360 mono or stereo footage is viewable in the headset |
| Timeline panel | Called up from the controller; can be shown, hidden and moved |
| Marker Mode | Places spatial markers on the frame, with color, name and duration; these markers can only be created in the headset |
| Navigator panel | Shows the whole current frame as an equirectangular view and lets the editor rotate the footage in yaw without changing the output |
| Docking | The Timeline or Navigator panel can be docked to a controller |
Recognition
Adobe Research reported in March 2026 that its researchers had received a Technology and Engineering Emmy for "significant contributions to the development of 360-degree consumer video capture, editing, and presentation technologies." The article lists DiVerdi's 2016 Project Clover Sneak, the 2017 CHI paper, the Adobe Immersive Environment in Premiere and the related Theater Mode in After Effects among the work behind the award, alongside the Mettle acquisition and the 2017 Sneak Project SonicScape for visualizing sound in VR video. DiVerdi, Nguyen and senior experience designer Seth Walker were among the Adobe staff who accepted the award.[16]
Current status
Project CloverVR did not ship as a standalone application; it reached users through the Immersive Environment in Premiere Pro.[3] By September 2025 the address of Adobe's dedicated Immersive Environment help page redirected to Adobe's general VR editing documentation.[17] The current page is titled "VR editing in Premiere". As captured in October 2026, that page (last updated 5 March 2026) says Premiere can show 360-degree and 180-degree VR video in its monitor panels and tells users who want to edit with a headset to "use a supported VR headset and install the necessary software," but no longer describes the Immersive Environment or lists headsets.[18]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "5 reasons to get excited about Adobe MAX". Adobe Blog. Adobe. 2016-10-28. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2016/10/28/5-reasons-to-get-excited-about-adobe-max-2. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Peek Behind the Sneaks: Total Immersion in Video Editing". Adobe Blog. Adobe. 2016-12-20. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2016/12/20/peek-behind-the-sneaks-total-immersion-in-video-editing. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Dominic Brennan (2017-10-18). "Adobe Premiere Pro Now Includes VR Editing Interface 'Project CloverVR'". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/adobe-premiere-pro-now-includes-vr-editing-interface-project-clovervr/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Cuong Nguyen, Stephen DiVerdi, Aaron Hertzmann, Feng Liu. "Vremiere: In-headset Virtual Reality Video Editing". Portland State University. https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~fliu/project/vremiere. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 "Immersive Video". Adobe Express. Adobe. https://express.adobe.com/page/wEaIMwDv3v8Hv/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Cuong Nguyen, Stephen DiVerdi, Aaron Hertzmann, Feng Liu (2017-05). "Vremiere: In-Headset Virtual Reality Video Editing". Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 5428-5438. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025675. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Let's Get Experimental: Behind the Adobe MAX Sneaks". Adobe Blog. Adobe. 2016-11-04. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2016/11/04/lets-get-experimental-behind-the-adobe-max-sneaks. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Paul James (2016-11-06). "Watch: Adobe Shows Off In-VR Premiere Video Editor 'Project CloverVR'". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/watch-adobe-shows-off-in-vr-premiere-video-editor-project-clover/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Sarah Redohl (2016-11-09). "VR video editing goes meta with Adobe's Project Clover". Newsshooter. https://www.newsshooter.com/2016/11/09/vr-video-editing-goes-meta-with-adobes-project-clover/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Ryoichi Shoji (2017-09-14). "Premiere ProがVR強化、Oculus RiftやHTC VIVE装着して編集も。「Adobe CC」新機能". AV Watch. Impress. https://av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1080248.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "Adobe Acquires Mettle's Skybox Plug-ins for 360-video and VR". Adobe Blog. Adobe. 2017-06-21. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2017/06/21/adobe-acquires-mettles-skybox-plug-ins. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "New and enhanced features - 2018 releases of Premiere Pro CC". Adobe Help Center. Adobe. https://web.archive.org/web/20190403105723/https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/whats-new/2018.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Cuong Nguyen, Stephen DiVerdi, Aaron Hertzmann, Feng Liu (2017-10). "CollaVR: Collaborative In-Headset Review for VR Video". Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 267-277. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3126594.3126659. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "CollaVR: Collaborative In-Headset Review for VR Video". Portland State University. https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~fliu/project/collavr/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 "Set up and use Head Mounted Display for immersive video". Adobe Help Center. Adobe. https://web.archive.org/web/20231127100036/https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/immersive-video.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "Adobe takes home an Emmy for pioneering work in VR editing tools". Adobe Research. Adobe. 2026-03-17. https://research.adobe.com/news/adobe-takes-home-an-emmy-for-pioneering-work-in-vr-editing-tools. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "Set up and use Head Mounted Display for immersive video (archived redirect)". Adobe Help Center. Adobe. https://web.archive.org/web/20250919221547/https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/immersive-video.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "VR editing in Premiere". Adobe Help Center. Adobe. 2026-03-05. https://web.archive.org/web/20261001054145/https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere/desktop/edit-projects/edit-vr-content/vr-editing-in-premiere.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.