Hey bro... which 360 camera settings do you use?
This is a question I get all the time.
So in today's video,
I'm gonna give an ultra extremely
in depth... guide to how I set exposure
with my 360 photos and my 360 videos,
and all the different considerations you should keep in mind
when thinking about settings and exposure
with your 360 photos and videos.
And how good is my new background look turned out way better
than I expected.
This is the ghost of Mr. Ben... oooaaaahhh!
And just like with this new shot with my DSLR,
I deliberately chose the lighting,
the camera settings to all turn into
this specific lighting effect.
And it doesn't matter if it's photo
or video really, setting the exposure
is something you'll have to consider with both of them.
Yes, they do have slight nuances,
but as you evolve beyond the complete beginner,
this is something you're going to have
to get your head around.
So step one, let's start with photos,
and that is never shoot in JPG.
You know the JPG that comes straight out of the camera,
you turn the camera on,
cameras like, "Hey bro, I'm ready to shoot."
But no, you're not,
you're in JPG mode and that's bad.
And the reason plain JPG mode is bad, is
because the quality is at its lowest
and you're capturing the least amount of information
in the smallest file size possible,
which is okay for beginners,
it's okay for happy snaps, but,
if you want a proper looking photo,
most of the time JPG is probably going to let you down.
And for some 360 cameras, this is the only option.
So I'm sorry about that.
Although later on,
you'll see some settings, that can actually help if
this is your only option.
Where JPG is okay, is when the camera has inbuilt HDR mode,
which is a lot of 360 cameras these days,
including the Insta360 ONE R, some of the Theta cameras,
and it does seem to be a common thing being added
to 360 cameras these days.
And as much as I don't wanna give away my best kept secret.
Here it is the vast majority of 360 photos I take
are in inbuilt HDR mode.
Yes, the photo technically does end up at JPG
as do all 360 photos once you've finished editing them,
but with HDR, what it's doing is it's not just capturing
one single JPG photo, it captures three
at three different exposures.
Here is 0EV, which is the proper exposure for your location.
Then you have +2EV, which means it's two stops
of light overexpose,
which means it's gonna be a brighter shot.
And then you have -2EV, which is two stops
of light under what the proper exposure should be.
And the reason that captures those two,
is because it's covering the highlights and the shadows.
So for the brightest shot,
that is two stops overexposed,
what it's doing, is exposing for the really dark
areas of your image.
So those bits of properly exposed.
Likewise with the underexposed image,
it makes everything really dark.
However, the highlight areas,
which are often overblown windows, turn into something,
you can actually look at.
So you can see definition there in those highlights.
And then what inbuilt HDR does
is it takes the middle exposure,
it takes the bright exposure
and it take the dark exposure,
blends them all together into one really well exposed image.
Because, contrast that's too high,
is the enemy of photographers.
360 photographers, DSLR photographers, all photographers.
You don't want that contrast to be high,
because that's when you start losing detail,
and you can really only recognize stuff
in a properly exposed areas of that image.
For example this is underexposed,
but that was a deliberate stylistic effect.
But if this were seen in 360,
let's say I was making a virtual tour of this room,
the exposure is terrible.
So firstly, I'd have to play
with the lighting a bit,
and secondly, I'd have to work
in that exposure and try inbuilt HDR.
So I would say in the vast majority of situations,
I use inbuilt HDR and it does a good job.
Most 360 cameras have a default of two stops, inbuilt HDR,
but with cameras like the One 1R,
you can set to four stops,
which means with these three photos,
instead of there being a two stop difference,
there's a four stop difference.
Meaning it's really bright shot,
it could turn pitch black behind me
into a properly exposed image.
Then on this side,
it could turn a really extremely bright highlight
into a proper exposure.
I mean, every scene is different.
Obviously it has a different level of contrast,
but yeah, you get the idea.
Another downside sometimes
is if you've taken a four stop HDR photo
and you've got someone's face in it suddenly
because HDR basically lowers the contrast
in the scene.
You start losing features from your face,
so it can be an unflattering mode, when used
to the extreme with people in it.
Shooting with Inbuilt HDR is usually done
in auto exposure mode,
which means you don't need
to consider any camera settings at all,
other than just changing it,
literally in the app from regular photo to HDR photo,
which is really handy
because you don't always wanna be thinking about,
oh, what should the shutter speed be in this situation?
Maybe I should change the ISS.
No, you don't want to do that all the time,
in certain situations, yes, but not all.
Next, we'll move into some slightly more advanced territory,
and that's shooting manually and probably shooting in raw.
So let's say you've tried in build HDR in a scene
and it's still doesn't quite look right.
You've still got really bright highlights,
or you've still got really dark shadows,
and you're not satisfied with the exposure.
Or maybe it turned out really noisy,
or there are colour blotches,
you know the blotchy colours that stick together
and don't look very nice.
There are all kinds of imperfections 360 photos can have,
which is why sometimes you gotta take it
into your own hands.
Now, the first setting you consider
when setting your exposure manually
is the white balance.
This is essentially how warm or cool or purple
or green an image can be.
Sometimes the light in a location is really bad
and the camera misinterprets the quality
of the light.
And it might make your photos a bit too purple
or a bit too blue.
This is when you could manually change the white balance
to something else to mitigate that a bit.
But to be perfectly honest with you, 99.9% of the time,
I don't talk to the white balance.
It's usually really easy to change it later,
and I just can't be bothered doing it while I'm shooting.
Especially when you're shooting in raw,
you have the ability to fix problems later
that a JPG couldn't give you.
So if you've got the white balance off,
you can bring it back to what it should be.
And it's not turning, let's say an orange photo,
into an orange photo that has been turned blue,
which is what would happen with a JPG.
Whereas the exact same scene shot in raw,
you could turn the orange
into a more neutral colour.
Now let's say you've got a challenging lighting situation
like I have here in my studio and you need
to set your exposure manually,
to get it properly exposed, here's what I do.
The first place that I always go is to the ISO.
And I make that bad boy as low as I possibly can.
That's normally around ISO 100.
A high ISO is bad news,
and it makes your photos really grainy.
So the main setting, I just, regardless
of the 360 camera I'm using,
is the shutter speed,
because different shutter speed settings
can affect the light greatly.
And you can turn a pitch black room
into a properly lit room.
Likewise, you can turn an extremely bright location
into a dark one by setting the shutter speed.
And the shutter speed refers
to how long the camera actually takes the photo.
So if it's a fast shutter speed,
it'll go like this,
if it's a slow one, it will go like this.
And for slower shutter speeds,
you just need to be careful not
to have any movement at all,
because that will cause blurriness with your shot
and ghosting if there's people walking around your shots.
And ghosting as essentially like there's a ghost.
Like the ghost of Mr. Ben.
This brings me to shooting at night where long exposure
is usually going to be the thing to do.
But before I go for the long exposure,
just like before, during daylight,
I'm going to go to Inbuilt HDR first
to see what that can do.
A lot of the time it gets it right at nighttime
because it's taking those three photos.
It's not only accounting for the darker areas
in the image, but for the highlights,
let's say you've got street lights in your scene that
are really bright, it brings those right down.
So they don't completely overexpose and ruin your image.
Then you just gotta make a call,
did it do a good enough job?
If not, that's when you go into manual mode
and set your shutter speed to a longer one, like one, two,
or even up to ten seconds, sometimes.
Some cameras like the One R also have night mode,
which is essentially optimise for night time shooting to try
and minimise noise at night time.
Because the darker you're scene,
the more noise is likely to show up.
The live preview in your camera's app, will always be a
guide as to how well or badly you've exposed your image.
So check that cause it'll give you live feedback.
And you can normally tell with your own eye,
whether it looks right or not,
you can make your changes and take the shot.
One thing I really like about the One R,
is it has a histogram you can access
as you're shooting.
So, when you open up the app,
you can see live feedback from your scene,
and it essentially shows you
if your shot is over or underexposed,
and this works in exactly the same way,
as we know, histograms with DSLRs
and traditional photography.
By the way, I'd also add that daylight scenes,
let's say the sun is shining bright
and you can see everything very clearly.
Those are always the easiest to expose.
So you won't have much difficulty at all shooting
in Inbuilt HDR or single shot raw, or even JPG,
if that's all your camera has.
It's probably gonna do a really good job
in bright sunlight.
So we've covered daytime, we've covered night time.
What about really, really difficult situations,
where the contrast is so high and inbuilt HDR,
isn't cutting it, single shot raw
still isn't cutting it, even
after you've got the exposure right,
you've edited the photo,
but you're still getting overblown highlights
or crushed shadows.
This is where I use bracketing,
which is essentially manually shooting in HDR,
where you use beyond three shots,
so you go up to five, seven, nine
or even more if you wanted.
And you're basically exposing every quality of light
in your room.
I do have a tutorial about this on my channel.
So do check it out,
it's called "how to get the perfect exposure
for interiors" or something like that.
Because virtual tours are often the hardest scenes
to expose, we've always got that inconsistent light
and it's just something you have to learn,
because, when you're shooting for clients,
it's costly only to make mistakes
and to be learning on the job.
So you need to understand these methods inside and out.
And by the way, I go into my 360 photo workflows
in way more depth, inside my video course "Virtual Tour Pro"
And it covers every kind of situation imaginable
for shooting 360 photo professionally.
So if that's you,
if that's something that you plan on doing,
I would definitely suggest checking it out.
I'll put a link to it down there.
So that's it for photos,
the main lesson being, always shoot in inbuilt HDR,
if you can, and if it looks good.
So now let's quickly go over video,
because there are different considerations
you'll have to make when shooting video.
So whenever I'm shooting 360 video,
regardless of the camera,
the first thing I always do
is set the resolution to be as high as possible.
360 video isn't super sharp when you watch it back
in 360, so you need every last pixel you can get,
even if you only intend
on displaying it at a lower resolution later,
if you plan on reframing it or doing something else,
it's always best to give yourself the most amount
of pixels possible to work with
so you can always downscale from there,
but you can't upscale from a lower quality video.
So for this one, it's going to the 5.7 K.
And here's another embarrassing thing
that I'm embarrassed to admit.
But the vast majority of time
when I'm shooting 360 video,
I just do it in auto mode because cameras are smart,
they know how to expose video.
And very rarely have I shot a 360 video,
where the exposure was completely messed up,
where it was too grainy,
or it chose the wrong settings that ruined the video.
Especially during daylight scenes,
it's likely to get it right,
and you just don't need to over complicate the process.
Interestingly, the One R also has HDR video,
which is an extremely rare thing, to see from a 360 camera.
And to be honest, I've gotten mixed results from it.
I probably wouldn't rely on it.
But that's something you can always play with,
if you own a camera like this.
Now, of course you can set your exposure manually too,
with video.
Let's say you want slow motion.
You're gonna have to change the resolution,
you're gonna have to change the frames per second.
And with basically all cameras, the slower
the slow motion gets the lower the quality also is.
With One R, it's a hundred frames per second at 3K.
And for me, 3K is just too low resolution for it
to be a worthwhile thing.
I think, at the bare minimum right now, 4K 360 video
is the lowest amount of quality you can get away with.
Because there are always those people that say
that 360 video looks like garbage.
Anyway, those people are always gonna be around
so you can't always please them,
but it is good to try and keep your resolution
as high as possible with all work you post.
So where I think the sweet spot for slow motion is,
is around 4K, 50 frames per second,
because you can always slow that down a bit more later.
You could probably go up to about a hundred frames a second.
I look a tiny bit jittery, but at least you've got
that 4K resolution.
So it's going to be sharper slow motion
and make the overall clip more worthwhile.
And of course, all 360 cameras have different specs in terms
of slow motion.
So use that roughly as a guide.
Now there's only a certain amount
of settings you can change
when setting your exposure manually with 360 video.
The main reason is the frame rate.
Anything other than 24, 25, 50, 60,
and everything in between.
Anything other than that is going to look funny.
If the shutter speed was slower,
the video would turn into this.
And if it was faster than about 60 frames per second,
suddenly it's going to be like, like an action movie
and both result in a pretty unnatural feel.
So always be careful with that shutter speed
in different countries as different frame rates.
So use whichever one you feel most comfortable with.
But for me, for the average 360 video,
I'd shoot at 30 frames per second.
The final setting I would consider,
and yes, this only applies to the One R, is night mode.
It has an option on the display for low light stability.
And essentially what this does,
is it changes the internal settings,
so you don't get motion blur at night time.
Because most cameras by default, want
to slow down the shutter speed at night time,
because it's dark and it needs to do that to see.
But unfortunately, a result of that, is motion blur.
So this setting changes other things in the camera
that essentially remove the motion blur.
And yeah, I think that's it!
I can't think of any other settings I would use.
Can you think of any?
Or do you have anything else to add?
If so, let me know down there
and that's it for this video
with my brand new backdrop looks so cool,
so happy with it.
Hit the white button if you liked this video,
hit the dislike button if you didn't and bye