how do you get the best video quality from the Insta360 One X? in this video I'm
gonna show you nine techniques that you can use to get the best video quality
from the Insta360 One X and even if you don't use the Insta360 One X these
techniques many of them can apply to other 360 cameras as well. so
before you got your Insta360 One X you probably saw those sample videos from
Insta360 and maybe some reviewers and you saw how amazing they looked and then
when you got one well it didn't look as amazing as those sample videos that you
saw. why is that? well the good news is that there's probably nothing wrong with
your camera and it's usually a matter of technique so that's what I'm going to
show you in this video I'm going to show you 9 techniques from shooting all the
way to exporting to get the best video quality from the Insta360 One X by the
way if you're new to this channel my name is Mic and this channel is all
about 360 and 3PV (third person view) cameras so if you want to learn how to shoot without
aiming or how to get a third-person view then go ahead and hit subscribe and
don't forget to hit the notification bell so technique number 1 this is
probably one of the most fundamental shooting techniques and it's a question
I still get asked a lot about. how do you get the best stitching quality from the
Insta360 One X how come there's this line below my video and how come or how
come there are these double images on parts of my video now the reason is that
the stitching of the One X is not perfect see when you're using photos
with the Insta360 One X you can get great stitching that's because the
Insta360 One X is using optical flow stitching which can stitch at multiple
distances but when you're shooting with video it does not use optical flow
stitching and can only stitch at one distance anything closer or farther than
that distance will not have a perfect stitch so the solution is to be aware of
the stitch line so you know the stitch line right? it's
that area between the lenses where the two lenses
meet that's kind of like a blind spot for the Insta360 One X and you want to be aware
of that specifically you want to make sure that you're not crossing the stitch
line or there's nothing important at the stitch line especially close to the
camera one thing that I do to help visualize is to imagine that Insta360 One X
is a giant fan now if the fan is going to hit you or
one of your subjects then you're in a stitch line and you need to reposition
the camera to get to avoid putting them in the stitch line technique number two
is lighting so you want to be aware of light around you around the 360 video to
get make sure that your subjects are in the best light so for example the Sun is
over there so I positioned myself so that the Sun is lighting up my face if
possible try to plan your path to avoid getting backlit so for example when I
did this video I started out at the opposite end of the park and I saw that
I was gonna be backlit most of the time so I moved to the other end of the park
so that by then I would be walking I would be facing the Sun most of the time
another thing to be aware of when shooting with 360 is that we want to
avoid glare and what the easiest way to do that is to place the Sun or the
primary light source along the stitch line so let me share with you a secret
trick for making sure that the stitch line is facing the Sun we look at the
shadow so check this out if we look at the shadow here we can see
that the camera is basically facing the Sun like only one side of the cameras
facing Sun this is this is gonna maximize glare so to minimize glare you
want to turn the camera so that shadow is at its thinnest
now we can't always get great lighting when we're shooting in 360 but the good
news is that the inset receive one hex has an awesome feature that's great for
dealing with the situations like that difficult lighting situations and it
also happens to be one of the most underutilized features of the Insta360 One X
and I'm talking about HDR video so the Insta360 One X is unique because
it has this feature the HDR video it's the only 360 camera right now
for consumers it has this feature attack it uses a special Sony sensor that can
capture two different exposures at the same time thanks to this double exposure
you can capture an amazing dynamic range like here for example can see the
dynamic range you can see the highlights have been captured on the floor on the
ground in the sky everything pretty much except the solar disk now I'm gonna
switch to standard mode so now this is standard mode and you can see that less
of the sky that's captured here's another tip when you use HDR video the
colors are going to look a little bit flat don't worry just apply a lot or
increase the contrast now the reason this feature is so underutilized is
because insta 360 walk itself warns you against using it the first time you use
it in the app you'll get this warning that says that the stabilization will be
compromised so a lot of people thought that you can only use HDR video when the
camera is stationary but let's try it out so here I'm going to be jogging
and you can see there's nothing wrong with the stabilization
there's no ghosting no artifacts it's perfectly fine so the takeaway is that
you shouldn't be afraid of using HDR video even when you're moving now the
one situation where you should be careful of using HDR video is in low
light if you're in low light and you're using HDR video then there's gonna be a
mismatch between the stabilization the brightest highlights and the rest of the
scene then it's going to look weird speaking of low light that's another
technique Insta360 One X will default to a slow shutter speed when you're in low
light in order to minimize noise and with a slow shutter speed there's a very
high risk of blur and even though the Insta360 One X has great image
stabilization that's not gonna stop any blur from camera shake when you're using
a slow shutter speed so the best way to deal with this is to put the One X on a
tripod that way the camera shake is just God and they won't there will be minimal
blur you'll still get motion blur from moving subjects but it's natural now
what if you do want to move and it's in low light then what should you do in
that case you should use a higher shutter speed and there are two ways to
do that the automatic way is to go through the
in-camera menu and then select a shutter fast instead of shutter Auto the other
way is to use manual exposure in the app you simply go to video mode tap on the
bottom right there'll be these these settings and you can choose the exposure
and then choose a higher shutter speed such as at at the very minimum 1/60
but closer to 1/125 or faster so so far we've been talking about shooting
techniques now let's talk about export settings to get the best video quality
from the Insta360 One X so when you're using the desktop
software in Insta360 Studio 2019 to stitch the One X you'll have a choice of
bitrates that you can use for exporting does it matter which between use should
you just use original well I found out that there is a difference if you use
superb setting so the difference is very subtle and if you don't edit your video
there's practically no difference but if you're gonna push the exposure let's say
gonna lift the shadows then there is a benefit to using superb setting check it
out so you'll see that in this comparison the superb video has less
compression artifacts compared to the original bit ring speaking of editing
here's another technique for improving the video quality if you have Adobe
Premiere then you can get the best video quality when you use the No stitch
workflow Adobe Premiere will be able to import your unstitched videos from the
One X directly this is better for video quality because you're gonna be avoiding
one level of compression I've also noticed that you can get a better
dynamic range when you use the no stitch workflow so if you want to learn more
about the no stitch workflow then check out this video
now here's another technique when you're editing your video you want to render at
the sufficiently high bit rate so what is that bit rate
well it depends if you are you shooting in 360 or it's gonna be an overcapture
video and it also matter matters what codec you use whether it's h.264 or
h.265 so if you're gonna be shooting in 360 in h.264 then the bitrate is you
need to use is around 48 to 60 Mbps and if you're rendering in h.264 but it's
gonna be an over capture video in 1080p then you can use 15 to 20 Mbps if you're
going to be using h.265 then you can use around half of those bit rates
my friend Ben Claremont has a video where he compared
the differences between these bitrates so you can check out that video here and
finally we come to one of the most essential techniques for getting great
video and that is to get at least good audio you can't get good video without
good audio it's not so much that good audio will make your video exceptional
it won't but bad audio can make even a great video suck now a lot of people
complain about the insert 361 excess microphone you're saying oh it's not
good it's terrible etc etc the truth is that the Insta360 One X microphone is
pretty good it's decent but the problem is that when we use the One X it's usually
at the end of a long monopod like this so when the camera is far away then the
sound that's from the microphone is not gonna be very good no matter what kind
of camera or microphone you're using so how do you get the good audio from the
Insta360 One X the secret is to use an external recorder now if you've never
used one before it sounds like it's too much effort but check out this
comparison now here's an external microphone check it out can you hear the
difference now you can use your smartphone or a dedicated recorder like
the zoom h1n. the h1n can record up to 10 hours of audio on a pair of
AAA batteries and an 8GB microSD card with such high capacity I can start
recording and just slip it into my pocket more than enough memory to bet
your whole day of recording so besides the external recorder you also need the
microphone so in this case I'm using a lav mic this one is an inexpensive
one called the powerdewise. I'll included in the link in the description
below but I like it because it's been reliable I've been using it for several
months and a lot of people recommend the rode smartlav I used to have those I
have a couple of them but they've both failed on me
and I didn't even know that a microphone could fail like I didn't like bend the
wires or anything they were in a case but somehow they just stopped working
one day and I you know when I looked at my video I saw there's no uh no audio
and I had to like rerecord everything so that's why I can't really recommend this
road smart lab besides the fact that it's really pricey compared to this
powered device anyway so I just put it on hold and there slip it in my pocket
in the tip and you know you could you're good to go now to sync your audio it's
really easy most video editors have a feature for syncing audio if you want to
see a video tutorial for that my friend GABA VR has done a great tutorial in it
check it out now in my next video we're gonna talk about which camera you should
get in 2019 so don't miss it hit subscribe don't forget to hit the
notification bell now see you in 360