Fix Screen Direction and Eyelines With Flip Horizontally

When two people talk on screen, they look toward each other. The person on the left of the frame looks right, and the person on the right looks left. A walker keeps one direction across cuts too. If your clips break that pattern, viewers sense the mismatch before they can name it. Flip fixes it in one click.

Read the direction of each shot

1. Play the exchange once and press the Down arrow to hop from clip to clip.
2. At each clip, note which side of the frame the person sits on and which way they face.
3. Compare neighbors. Two clips in a row that show the person on the left, looking right, are the ones to fix.

These patterns are the ones to check:

• In a two-person exchange, one person sits left and looks right. The other sits right and looks left.
• A person who walks left to right keeps walking left to right in the next shot.
• The empty space in front of a face, often called looking room, sits on the side the person faces.

Flip the shot that breaks the pattern

1. Click the clip on the timeline.
2. Open Framing in the right panel.
3. Find the Flip row and press Flip horizontally, the first of its two small icon buttons. The picture mirrors left to right. Press the button again to restore it.
4. Play across the cut and watch the eyelines meet.

If speaker A and speaker B both sit on the left looking right, flip B. B moves to the right of the frame and looks left, and the two now face each other.

The same move fixes a walk. If a person crosses the frame left to right in one clip and right to left in the next, flip the second clip and they keep travelling in one direction.

What a flip changes

• It mirrors everything inside the clip. Writing on shirts, signs and screens reads backwards, and a parting or a watch swaps sides. Look for those details before you flip.
• Titles, stickers and captions are separate elements, so they keep reading the right way.
• The flip belongs to that clip alone. Other clips from the same camera keep their original direction.

Recheck the looking room

A flip moves the empty space along with the face. If a person now has too little room in front of them, raise Zoom above 100% in the same Framing tab and drag the picture in the preview to open some space. The Center button resets a picture you moved too far.

Check the pair at speed

Play from two seconds before the cut with the sound on. A direction problem usually shows up in the first moment after the cut, when the eye expects the person to be somewhere. If the eyelines still miss, step across the cut with the Left and Right arrows and adjust the framing of the second clip until the faces sit at a similar height.

Mirror your next conversation

Open the last dialogue scene you cut in DepCut and run the three checks above. One flip often settles the whole scene.