So you just bought yourself an insta360 X3. In this video, Mr Ben is not only going
to show you all of the best shooting modes with the X3, but he's going to show you every
single setting of this camera and what everything does in order for you to get
the best results possible with your 360 photo and video content. Now let's get started, in three, two
one. Let's start with the camera body, because this is the first place that settings can be changed
press the bottom left button to record a 360 video or take a photo. Bottom right is the lens button
where you can change quickly between the 360 view, single lens mode facing towards you and single
lens mode facing away from you. On the side next to the power button is the quick settings button
which gives us quick access to all of our favorite settings just FYI this hole is the speaker so when
the camera makes a noise it comes out here and the camera's microphones are here, here, here and here.
Now on the preview screen there are a few ways to change perspective. First is by pressing the
button down the bottom right which switches from forward view to back view. This is different to
the lens button because it changes the preview of the 360 as opposed to the lens button which
changes the actual shooting mode. Next if you press and hold suddenly the screen turns from a fixed
perspective to a 360 perspective, if you want to take a look around and preview your shot. Now let's
take a look at the first menu of settings. So if you swipe down from the top of the screen, we have
the general operational settings of the camera. Up the top left is volume, so do you want it to make
a noise while you use it. I prefer keeping it down or even off so you don't draw too much attention
to yourself while you're in public. Next to that is the indicator light this refers to This Light
down here if the camera is active or recording and you may want to consider turning that off if
you're shooting at night time and you don't want to draw attention to the camera, but otherwise it's
handy to keep this one on so you can look for the red light to confirm your recording. Next is
vibration which enables or disables vibration of the camera as you're changing the settings and I
like this feature a lot so I'm going to keep it on the little rocket icon is quick capture and this
essentially means if your camera is off and you press the record button the camera will turn on
automatically and start recording which is good in situations where you want to capture spur at
the moment shots, but it's also bad in situations where you might accidentally press that button
while the camera's in your pocket and you end up recording 30 min of nothing. So I'd recommend
turning that off unless you want the quick capture feature. Next to that is audio settings and there
are three options, Direction Focus, Wind Noise Reduction and Stereo. Use Direction Focus if
you plan on keeping your 360 video as a 360 video and you want the sound to be spatial, meaning as
you move around the frame, the sound gets louder and quieter depending on where people are looking
You'll want to use wind noise reduction in overly windy scenes, but in general I just use stereo for
best quality. Below that is the airpods button where you can wirelessly connect airpods to
your X3 if you want to record sound or use voice control commands through them. Next, is Dive Case
Mode and if you are using a dive case you will want to use that. Then here we have screen brightness
and it's up to you how bright you want to make your screen, you can make it really bright if
you're out in the bright sun. In general I keep it at about medium so you can still see it but
it isn't overly bright, I found in general the screen doesn't drain that much of the battery
so if you feel like you want to be brighter I wouldn't worry too much because it's not going
to drain that much more battery. Next is Bluetooth remote, if you have one of those, this one here is
for lens guards, if you're using them and finally we've got other settings down here. If you tap that
we're really getting into the nitty-gritty of this camera, here it shows the camera firmware
always check to make sure you're using the latest firmware. You can find this by opening up the
insta360 mobile app and if there's a new one it will automatically prompt you to update. Next is
USB mode, so if you're connecting the camera to the computer by cable, you will want to choose
udisk mode, if you're using a quick reader to use quick reader and if it's neither of those things
just keep it on Android. Next is Bluetooth wake up and this allows us to turn the camera on through
our phone, which I think for sure is a good feature to have on. Next is voice control if you want to
use your voice to activate the camera, I probably wouldn't bother with that. Anti-flicker, so this is
for low light situations where you've got overhead lights that are flickering, by default it's set to
auto. If lights are still flickering you may want to come in here and change to either 50 or 60 or
change your shutter speed by one or two stops. Next is video bitrate, by default it's set to high. I'd
probably keep it on high unless you're trying to save on space for which standard would be the
better option for lower file sizes. Next is video sharpness and this is a big one that most people
overlook, but it actually has a massive effect on the final look of your shots. Here I tested
the X3 in low medium high and highest sharpness and there really is a very big difference between
the four, because with high and highest you have that over sharpened look especially when you look
at the blades of grass and the general outline of my body, it just has that sharpened look. Which is
why I'd recommend medium for a bit of sharpness but not too much. Next is external mic gain so if
you're connecting an external mic choose this to adjust the gain level. Auto sleep, so how long until
your camera goes to sleep after inactivity. I'm going to set mine to three minutes. Auto
power off, you'll definitely want to have this set, because sometimes you forget to turn your
camera off and you don't want the entire battery to drain while it's in your backpack going between
locations. Next you can change language, if you want to do that. Then there's SD card and before
you get started shooting with your X3 I would recommend formatting your SD card in camera. This
helps optimise it for performance with the X3 and it only takes a couple of seconds. I'll link the SD
card I'm using with the X3 in the description if you're curious. Next is customise button and this
essentially changes the purpose of this button here, so if you want it to also be a recording
button you can do that but I don't recommend it. Next is gyro calibration and this is something
I would recommend doing before you start using your camera because when the camera gets sent
in the post the gyroscope probably goes a little bit out of whack and therefore the camera can't
always tell if the horizon is perfectly level. With this all you have to do is place it upright
on a table follow the prompts and the camera will automatically calibrate the Horizon. Okay
now that the boring settings are out of the way it's time for the fun stuff. Let's take a look at
some of the shooting modes and there are modes for both 360 shooting and single lens shooting.
For 360 the first two are video and active HDR. I'd recommend using active HDR if you're outside
and you've got plenty of light, this will produce better looking shots with better dynamic range. The
downside is, they can be a bit noisier and lack contrast, even in slightly low light conditions
like this overcast day. However these can be added in colour correction, so it really is a trade-off.
But I prefer more dynamic range I'm happy to do a bit of colour correction on my shots, therefore
I'd recommend using active HDR in most outdoor situations whenever your lighting's tricky or
if you're in low light I'd switch to regular 360 video mode so you can set your exposure manually.
Next is Time Lapse and this mode allows you to shoot an 8K time lapse in a couple of minutes
where it automatically puts all the files together and exports the time lapse as a two by One 360
video file. This is different to the interval setting which does the same thing, however it
exports your shots as individual photos. Next is time shift mode and I wouldn't really recommend
using this when you can just reframe time shift videos in post later on. Then we have bullet
time. If you like the bullet time effect this is the mode you'll want to choose, since it gives
you access to much higher frame rates. However these will be automatically reframed in post.
So unfortunately you can't use these for regular 360 video. Then there's Loop recording if you're
waiting for a moment to strike but you don't know when it's going to be, this mode allows you to
capture only the last amount of time that you set. So if you want to be one minute, three minutes, five
minutes, all the way up to 30 minutes, everything that is recorded before that gets automatically
deleted and the last length of this time gets kept. Starlapse is for the starlapse effect which
is kind of like a time lapse but optimised for low light. First this is a much underrated setting and
a great one for any kind of action based 360 photos, so if you're jumping in the air like I
am here, it's usually impossible to get the timing exactly right while you're shooting and you end up
doing the shot 100 times over whereas the burst fires off nine shots simultaneously over nine
frames capturing nine snapshots in time for you to choose the best one, albeit only at 18 megapixels,
Finally we have photo and HDR photo and I've done a bunch of tests of these two side by side and I
found the results really interesting, so I found that the 72 megapixel pure shot photos were
indeed four times sharper than the 18 megapixel HDR photos, however the file sizes were also four
times bigger. I'm talking around half a gigabyte. So if you have a 64 gigabyte card, that's 128
photos and your card is full, so that's really high. Which is why I'd only recommend shooting in pure
shot mode if you need the quality such as virtual tour situations or any other kind of photo where
you really are focusing on quality. Otherwise for everyday happy snaps HDR photo is a great option
and even though it's only 18 megapixels the shots do use the HDR technique capturing anywhere from
three to nine shots and I've tested multiple and my recommended settings are shooting three shots
two stops apart. Now if we go into the single lens menu, we now have a slightly different range of
modes we can choose from. Again, we've got standard video and standard photo, we've got loop recording
just like before. so if you want to keep only the last portion of the clip then choose that, then
finally there's me mode, which needs to be done on a selfie stick by holding and out in front of you
and the camera automatically points backwards and while the concept is really basic, this effect is
fun and unique and I think a lot of you are going to get value out of it. If you want a walk and talk
vlog that is fully stabilised you can see your entire body and your environment in the same shot
without having to worry too much about framing, but it only reframes towards the selfie stick so you
will need to be careful not to point the selfie stick too far away from you. Next let's talk about
exposure settings and you can access the exposure menu by swiping from the right hand side of screen
and I do want to point out that depending on the mode you chose, the settings available to you are
going to be slightly different. Since all the different modes are essentially optimised for
different shooting situations, which is why they only allow the optimal settings needed to perform
that specific shot and while this isn't a video about how to set your exposure, I do want to point
out some things that you want to set up front so you can have them set up whenever you go out and
shoot your photos or videos. Firstly you want to make sure you're always shooting at maximum
quality, you can do that by tapping the menu at the bottom of the home screen to bring up your
resolution and frame rate. Same thing applies for both video and photos, for photos I'd recommend
setting a self timer of three seconds, to allow you enough time to get your camera in position so you
can strike your pose. For time lapse make sure you manually set it to 8K as well as whichever frame
rate you prefer the final video to have. In bullet time mode you can pick 3K 180 or 4K 120, so again
pick whatever you prefer. All other shooting modes use the same settings I just mentioned, so repeat
the process with whichever mode you're going to be using. Now to get full manual control of
your exposure, switch into manual mode and here you'll have a lot more control over things like
your shutter speed and your ISO. In most daylight situations however, auto exposure usually does a
good enough job. Now let's take a look at some of the best presets to use, to get the most out of
auto exposure. First one is the colour profile you use, you can choose between standard, log and vivid
and they all produce slightly different looks out of the camera, with vivid being the best by far if
you were to do no colour correction. Personally I prefer the brighter coloyrs that Vivid brings.
If you were to colour correct these shots, I still think Vivid is the best choice, the shots are nice
and colourful and it doesn't come with some of the ugly stuff you're seeing with the other two, so I
would recommend choosing the vivid colour profile and you won't really need to change your white
balance or exposure unless there's any glaringly obvious mistakes that the automatic settings are
making. Now there is an isolated exposure mode and what this does, is it chooses different exposures
for different lenses. So if one side of your scene is really bright and one's really dark it gauges
the exposure of each slightly differently and tries to expose your shot in a way that blends
the two together a bit better. Which brings me to Quick Settings, remember our friend from before the
Q button. If we click that, up comes our exposure presets, so if you've got favourite ways you like
using this camera, like me modes, time lapse, photo or maybe you want one with your favorite low light
settings. You can add new presets, like if you're doing any outdoor activities, your camera settings
might be slightly different or just create your own. To edit your presets, tap the three dots and
overwrite. This will update the preset with the current manual settings that you're using with
the camera, so be sure to set them beforehand. Last but not least we have our Gallery, so by
swiping left we have instant access to all of our 360 shots, with videos you tap to play, with photos
same thing. To delete your shots one by one tap the trash can at the top right, if you want to delete
multiple at once hit the icon at the top left then with the check mark we can select all of the clips
we want to delete and those are all the settings as they stand now in late 2022. If there's any
I missed be sure to let me know down below. So there you have it, that is how you can get the
most out of your insta 360 X3. There are really so many ways you can use this camera, so I definitely
recommend going out and trying a few of these modes, because they'll produce some weird amazing
crazy mind-blowing shots. If there are any new additions to the X3 through firmware updates and
there will be, I'll be sure to let you guys know. So make sure you hit the Subscribe button so you
can be the first to find out about those. So now that you know how to shoot with the X3, next you'll
need to know how to edit. So be sure to check out this video here to learn the full editing workflow
for getting awesome reframe 360 shots quickly and easily using the insta 360 app on your smartphone