today we are going to test and review the brand new Adobe Premiere Pro no
stitch editing extension for the Insta360 Pro users this is a very
innovative proxy approach for 8K or 6K3D 360 video editing and can
potentially save you lots of time but the question remains should you use it
or how is this going to affect your current injection workflow
hey what's up everybody's your boy Hugh here from CreatorUp
so before we test and review the brand-new plugin from Insta360 Pro
for premiere we are gonna review the old proxy workflow I introduced in
couple tutorials back so you can have a clear work for comparison first transfer
your footage from your hard drive to SSD or and raid 0 drive so pretty fast write
speed and then I usually don't use the Insta360 Proo stitcher I prefer
to use Mistika VR so go ahead and open Mistika is open right here you
drop in six lens profile into the Mistika window and go ahead and his
stitch use the Insta360 Pro calibration and then go ahead and
calibrate your footage into stereo and then go ahead and put your in point and
out boy go ahead and match color in time and then you go ahead render if you want
more information how to use a Mistika VR to stitch Insta360 Pro footage I
have an entire tutorial the very important step on the old workflow is
render so here I'll go ahead a hit here file render for low-budget or
personal project I usually just go ahead and use the MP4 in the Nvidia movies
again you don't have this option if you're on a Mac so man you probably
picked up the quicktime prores and then in the codecs I usually pick
either the first one or the second one Q P for Insta360 Pro footage the
first one is enough open country right here and you can pick the bitrate so for
Insta360 Pro footage if you don't have a lot of movement a hundred
you should is good enough and then go ahead and pick the stereo top and bottom
make sure help audio and then you can go ahead and render the footage so this is
actually pretty good for Facebook and YouTube delivery if I have a pretty
high-end client job and I need to go through a lot of special effect pass and
rotoscoping and a lot of complicated work I will usually pick the image
sequence and now you should pay DPX 10 is actually fine because for Insta360 Pro
they don't produce 16-bit sometimes for save space I
also use PNG 8 bit again top and bottom and render than out this one not have
audios but that will be the master pass and then beside that I will also render
and a NVidia movie just the same setting we have before as a reference footage to
let the director that go through the reference footage pick which clip they
gonna use and then I would use that image sequence in post production to do
final fine stitch rotoscoping and cleanup so this is my workflow for Mistika
part so after render we go back on premiere
so we go ahead and import the footage that is the NVidia render Mistika VR and
you go ahead and track it and create a timeline just go ahead and make sure
because it have meta already but to be safe just make sure your project setting
is correct stereoscopic projection we go with stereoscopic over and under
and that as you see you see stereoscopic right there again you will not have this
turn on because you haven't have any proxy yes of this actually the 8k
resolution footage as you looked at resolution is actually very high sorry
this is actually 6k top and bottoms and then the next step actually we can go
ahead and play this
indicator so it's a little bit glitchy but is still have a pretty smooth
playback in general scenario for Insta360 Pro footage I don't
even need to use proxy if you can drop down to 1/8 let's go ahead and play that
you still have drop frame but as you see it's all we have very very smooth
playback already so why can't we have such a smooth playback in even 8k
footage as you see if you look at the window here is 6 K times 6 K because we
render out using the NVidia codecs if you want to read more about what is
Nvidia codec you can go ahead and go into the official Nvidia
website and look at to check out their codecs
they have this special ability to leverage the GPU render instead of CPU
render so Premiere can really leverage this like encode and decode
and had a pretty smooth play back so that's why I would highly recommend
intermediate code that using the Nvidia render so you will have a pretty
enjoyable editing experience but again if you want to absolutely smooth
playback so this will be actually a green dot not drop frame the next step
you would do let's assume that this is actually not Insta360 Pro
a footage from maybe Yi Halo maybe the Kandao Obsidian maybe the Z cam so you
will actually create a proxy again I have a full proxy workflow tutorial
already on my youtube channel so definitely go check that one out instead
and then come back go ahead and right click that footage and right here hit
proxy create proxy and I already have couple proxy preset right here so I will
basically pick the stereoscopic proxy preset my proxy is actually pretty high
resolution because I have a pretty beefy machine as well so we'll have a 2k x 2k
DnxHR and hit okay and then we'll pop Adobe Media encoder and in the
background Adobe Media encoder will generate a proxy file right here
it's just finish and then we directly attached to this video so if I turn on
proxy right here tako proxy how do you know if I touching a proxy go ahead and
hit here through detailed view and then just hit the tilde key on your keyboard
open this up and right click anywhere so meta display right here go ahead and
toggle open the Premiere Pro project metadata and go ahead and find proxy and
check the proxy window and then also check the proxy location the proxy file
path and the proxy media file name and go ahead hit OK and as you see process
is attached so go ahead and hit to bring back the window so
now you know this is actually attached with proxy when I toggle with the proxy
button and then now I go ahead and play that now you see actually now we have
the green dog so it's no drop frame so let's actually like even go ahead and do
full go ahead and play that the little drop frame but in a regular scenario
that's actually would be green as well in the proxy because why now I'm doing a
screen recording and also tracking my GPU resources so that is why I have lack
like it but as you see we pretty smooth playback even with my
screen recording turn on why now and go ahead and turn on look at that
very very smooth playback didn't see any drop frame at all whatsoever so this is
the entire old proxy workflow and you see there's a many many steps involved now
let's take a look at the brand new workflow with the Insta360 Pro
importer so with the importer I am NOT gonna even touch Mistika or the
Insta360 Pro Stitcher because there's no stitching necessary what you
need to do is go to the window and then your extension and pick the
Insta360 Pro importer right here as I already picked that and I
dock it into my window right here and as you see I already import one clip so go
ahead again if you do mono pick mono if you be do stereo
to stereoscopic and here i gonna demo the stereoscopic and then go ahead hit
and go ahead and pick all the folder right here every folder of my entire day
of shooting go ahead and select folder and then premier gonna import all the files
so now as you see all the file is imported great and again if you wanna
fine Stitch the stereoscopic footage you can actually click the gear icon right
here and we open the familiar window just like what you see in the Insta360 Pro
Stitcher and here you can pick what type optical flow mode you use i
again just leave it as a default and new
optical flow sample time I usually just pick fast and then on here preview
stitch effect you can hit that open you've actually opened a really familiar
a calibration window so this is the frame that came up back to as a
reference frame but again is there's a lot of people around the camera it's
actually not a good reference frame so go ahead and try this around here
there's no like visible object near the camera so that's a really really good
reference frame by the way that is a sunset in front of the griffin observatory in
hollywood Hill is really nice footage is actually on the rover
thank you Devlin from Gimbal Guru to provide me this
really nice rollin footage if you wanna check out their roller
go check their website out how can I set this frame as a reference frame right
here the auto stitcher will actually using that frame right now as the
optical flow stitching so go ahead and save that and go
ahead and drag the video file into the new icon so by default this button is
turned on already the toggle proxy bottom meaning that we are already using a live
proxy what I say again is a live proxy what happened in the background is in
Insta360 Pro is actually using Adobe Premiere doing a live optical
flow stitching of your footage to create that proxy file so it's actually
pretty crazy again right here I'm still trying like conforming all the footage so
it's give me a second to let it finish so now you just go
ahead and pick the in point and out point for frames I need I'm just
going to cut it so we're done so why now we can just go ahead and hit in premiere
render its actually export media and in here you can use all the premiere favor
of rendering codecs and even the third-party like AfterCodec to
generate your 8k or 6k stereoscopic high-resolution footage and upload on
youtube facebook visbit or whatever platform you use and in the whole
project Insta360 Pro Stitcher the plug-in is doing everything on the in
the background in stitching it's no stitching involved in this entire
process which is great and amazing or at least that is what it seemed to be but
is this word for actually really practical to use in your production
let me actually run the test for you if you go ahead and play this footage and
then you see is really really stuck like stuck and
again am paying in half a solution let's drop into actually sixteen resolution
you can go ahead and play that
even in 1/16 is still see stuck if you turn up the VR mode
it's very stuck and you cannot really preview and edit in this environment is very
frustrated and that's the actually report from a lot of the viewers actually
trying this plugin right now that is what happened this is YELLOW
and it's dropping frame left and right the reason why is because I think that
Insta360 Pro try to do a live optical flow stitching using the Premiere
engine and that is actually very resource intensive
by the way I have a very very beefy machine my machine is the i7
CPU in the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti as the GPU and have 120 gigabyte of RAM this
footage is on an SSD raid 0 so really fast speed but with this beefy machine I
still do not have a smooth playback now as you see right here that is not
practical at all with a live stitching when I'm actually stuck and if you
actually put on full you look at the footage it's actually very pixelized
this proxy is action 960x960 it's a very very low res proxy if you actually go
ahead and turn on activity monitor and go ahead and pay attention on the GPU
and CPU usage so go ahead and play the footage it's playing right now as you
see using around six or seven percent of the GPU but the CPU is to the roof this
is not really relying on your GPU rendering this is actually fully using
your CPU so why not my CPU is hitting a hundred percent on this live optical
flow stitching which is not ideal I will actually assumed it will actually
leverage my really fast graphic card my GPU to do this live stitching
compare to Mistika which 100% using the GPU
you that is a very not a good solution for live rendering or live preview so
if you want to compare that with let's go ahead and grab the high resolution
Nvidia render we got from Mistika and go ahead and I should go ahead and put on
top of this footage so as the same footage with the proxy attached so see
we see a very smooth real-time playback right now with my Old proxy workflow I can
compare that with the lower resolution Insta360 Pro proxy I'm playing
right now in a quarter you see that crazy drop frame right here and it's not
a smooth playback and even in paning is a little bit lagging to see right
here okay this is Insta360 Pro and that is the old proxy file if I actually turn
off the proxy you'll go ahead and actually look at the original a 6k
stereo file I still get a really smooth playback
using proxy and 6k because I leverage Nvidia codecs from Mistika
rendering speed let's actually check the stitching's quality of the new workflow
as well so here again is the Mistika stitch as you see the stereo is really
good there's no vertical parallax and go ahead and turn this off and take a look
at the Default stitch right here go ahead and you can turn the proxy mode off so if
you turn the Proxy Mode is actually very pixel right as you see it you cannot
really exam the stereo quality so to the proxy mode off and then if you look at the
stereo is also very good so is actually that's stitching quality as you see right
here close up so you see the stitching quality right here
this is actually close up to the the stitching quality is identical with
Mistika VR that's actually good because they improve the stitching quality of
this new plugin but the lagging playback speed is make this workflow unusable so
yes with this brand new workflow it basically doesn't need to use Mistika you
need a stitch you can immediately drop the footage in the Premiere timeline if
you have a laptop and go ahead and preview that and show that to your
director and show the final result of the cut which is very convenient on set
but again because you don't really get a real-time preview of your window
it's sometimes better just go ahead and render and proxy file like I did right
here and just show this to theater why don't you actually see light on color we
get a green dot right here and a real-time playback to show the director
and that also is necessary for EDITING so in conclusion I don't think this new
plugin for premiere from Insta360 Pro is that practical it's a great
step to the right direction to actually create something like that but they
still need to really leverage the GPU rendering using the GPU instead of CPU
to really achieve a real-time render so before Insta360 Pro or Adobe can
do an upgrade of the plug-in to have a smooth render a smooth playback I will
personally stick with my own proxy workflow and I will urge you to
stick to your own proxy workflow as well to have a more smooth playback
and better editing experience