I made that
on this camera here, the Insta360 ONE R.
And that's what today's video is going to be about.
About slow motion and specifically the freeze frame effect,
which is a super cool effect,
that they've added to their app.
And, not only can you do it with the ONE R,
but you can also do it with the ONE X.
I know Insta360 just removed a whole bunch of effects,
that you could do with the ONE X inside the ONE R app,
but now you can't.
WTF? Not a good move.
But, they have kept the freeze frame.
So, if you own a ONE X and not a ONE R,
you can still do it inside the brand new Insta360 app.
It's good to be back, by the way.
I know I took a few weeks off,
just busy with my business and you know, the virus.
And if you're wondering what I've got here,
no, this isn't a new 360 camera.
This is still the Insta360 ONE R.
It's just got the boosted battery base,
that I got in the mail,
and it claims it can hold twice as much battery,
as the regular ONE R battery.
So today, I'll also be putting that to the test.
Okay, so what is freeze frame?
Do you remember, in the 2000s,
they came out with that plugin
for Final Cut Pro called Twixtor?
Where it would essentially interpolate regular footage,
and slow it down, into extreme super slow motion.
But it never really took off, and to be honest,
I could never get that plugin to work
with my Final Cut, because my computer was too slow.
And, it would take about three days
to render one second of footage.
But, essentially what Insta360 are doing with the ONE R is,
it's like they're adding Twixtor to their camera and app.
Where it's artificial slow motion,
and you can slow it down almost to be like that scene
in the Matrix.
Yeah, you know the one.
But, how good can it really be from a camera this small?
Let's go and find out.
I took the ONE R out to Sydney Harbour.
Both the 360 build and the one inch build,
to see what kinds of cool slow motion shots I could get.
I'm going to be trying out every slow motion mode,
I can think of today.
So, hopefully I end up with at least one really,
really cool shot.
Okay, I'm here at Luna Park
Okay, so that was pretty cool. You gotta admit.
It wasn't perfect, and if you stop and look closely,
it looks pretty interpolated.
Let's start with the 5.3K,
and while it does a good job most of the time,
a lot of the time, it looks glitchy and pixelated.
So while having all that resolution was really good,
having the frame rate limited to 25,
didn't provide enough information, as I was running
to really get a satisfying slow motion.
Because, it's guessing what happens
in between those quick movements and it got it wrong.
The 4K 50 FPS was a little bit better,
it wasn't perfect either. But yeah, now we're talking.
This looks pretty good.
And finally, there's the 3K 100 frames per second.
This was actually really good in terms of slow motion,
because I was starting with slow motion,
and then it slowed it down,
when I applied the freeze frame effect in the app.
So, it's like a slow version of slow motion.
So naturally, of course it worked out.
Well, the issue is though, the resolution is not good.
It's fine for an Instagram story,
which of course I uploaded it to.
But for any other type of use,
I think 3K is just a little bit too low res.
In case you missed my last video about the ONE R,
applying the freeze frame effect is really simple.
You simply just tap speed.
Then you can see it as a freeze frame option
and you can choose one, three, five, and 10 seconds.
It gives you an option to use the slow motion sound effect,
and you hit the tick up the top right.
That's it, the effect will be applied
once you export this as a fixed frame video.
All right, our next stop is Sydney's Darling Harbour,
and no doubt, we'll be able to find
some cool shots here somewhere, if we look hard enough.
Before we get started, though,
I was curious to test this again.
I want to know exactly what conditions,
the freeze frame performs best.
Is it 25 FPS, 50 or a 100?
So, I did the selfie stick test.
I put my camera on the ground
and threw the selfie stick above my head.
I made sure it was spinning,
so there was lots of movement for the camera to capture.
And here's the 5.3K and I stopped it just at the start there
and hey, that's working out okay.
Nice. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
It was good for most of it, but fell apart at the end.
Okay, here's the 4K, 50 FPS.
And oh, uh, ew. No, nah.
It's okay. It's just very choppy.
Okay, 3K 100 FPS.
And look at that.
Nice.
All right. No interpolation at all.
I still just think the quality is too low.
When you really zoom in on this 3K, it looks so pixelated.
I wouldn't use this professionally.
Probably not even for social media,
unless it was on a low resolution screen and zoomed out,
but, still that was impressive slow motion,
for how fast I spun the selfie stick.
Next, I filmed the opening sequence of this video,
that gangster walk along the pier.
And, this was done with the one inch mod.
I shot in 5.3K 25 FPS.
Because, at this point I didn't have a chance
to fully sit down and look at the differences
between the three frame rates.
Going back, I would have shot it at 4K 50 FPS,
but I didn't and still worked out okay.
From the sequence you saw,
I'd say I had to do at least two or three edits of each shot
before I came to the one that you saw.
So, a lot of the time when I applied the effect
on fast motion, it appeared glitchy and laggy,
and it just wasn't good enough.
It would have ruined the sequence.
So, what I did was I tried freeze framing,
maybe half a second later,
and then half a second after that,
and eventually I found bits of the movement,
that worked perfectly with the freeze frame effect.
So that wasn't instant, that took a bit of tinkering,
but I think it was probably worth it,
to get that cool little sequence.
I found the overall freeze frame editing experience,
to be similar to this.
You'll try it once. It won't work out.
You'll try it again, by moving the freeze frame
down the timeline a little bit to a subtle movement,
and then it works a charm.
And I'd say, it especially struggles
with really fast movement, like tying my shoe laces here.
It was just too fast for this effect.
So I probably wouldn't do this, unless it was in 3K 100 FPS.
I've got to say though,
something that was really cool was,
I was able to edit most of these shots as I was filming.
And. I uploaded them to Instagram stories straight away.
I didn't need to go home and edit on my computer.
It was all possible within the app.
And you can export in 4K on your phone.
So by this point, I realised that the best settings
for the freeze frame effect, were 4K 50 FPS.
And here's some shots I got,
with absolutely no creative thought being put whatsoever
into them, I just walked around Darling Harbour
and pressed record, really, with the camera pointed
in front of me.
But hey, look at this, nice. That's cinematic as, wow.
Can't believe that.
I shot that, on this little camera.
Now, I thought it would be a great idea
to be my own camera operator,
and just put the selfie stick behind me somehow.
And yeah,
it took a lot of trying and failing, as you can see,
but in the end, it actually turned out okay.
Look at that, I switched back to 5.3K for this one,
but I only slowed it down a little bit.
This time I'm not using freeze frame,
but just regular slow motion.
And that looks pretty good.
If I do say so myself.
Yes, it probably would have been better
if someone was behind me filming,
but you don't always have that luxury.
So in situations like this,
where you want to get a cool tracking shot of yourself,
you could either use the 360 mod, shooting at 5.7K,
which reframed, would be about HD or just above.
Or you could use the one inch mod, in one direction
and get 5.3K, in one direction.
That's actually quite powerful when you think about it,
and worth using this over this,
in certain situations, when you need that extra resolution.
I think when you shoot in 360 mode,
at a 100 frames per second at 3K resolution,
that's when it just becomes too low.
Because, when you're reframing that in one direction,
it becomes more like...
28, 41 times 36.
Square root of PI minus three equals.
I don't know, but it becomes quite low resolution,
like 480P or something and that's where I draw the line.
We're in 2020 right now, as much as we don't want to be.
And in 2020, resolution standards are higher than 480P,
they're more like HD to 4K.
So if you're going to shoot at a 100 frames per second,
I would probably do it with this mode right here.
Look at this fun shot.
Here, I've gone back to 4K 50 FPS,
and that actually looks pretty good.
This was all edited on my phone,
exported at 4K, with colour plus on.
And hey, I don't mind that at all.
It's a nice little slow-mo shot.
Here, I chased some birds and yeah, that looks okay.
Again, this is 4K 50 FPS.
Not super crispy, but it's pretty decent.
As my final sequence of the day,
I thought I'd make a cinematic short film,
as a homage to my failed career as a movie director.
And, this was all shot with the one inch mod, at 4K 50 FPS.
That's so sad.
Poor, Mr. Ben, probably never got a snack.
Oh, I can relate.
But on a serious note, that was actually okay.
Can't believe I shot that with absolutely no care.
I can't believe I shot that,
with absolutely no care in the world.
I just pressed record and moved the camera around randomly.
And yeah, those shots look pretty good at 4K 50 FPS.
So I think this is a nice little B-roll camera,
for shooting those little slow-mo shots.
Look, it has its flaws, including contrast and colour.
I think there are other cameras,
that do those things much better.
But for a camera that can do so many things,
the ONE R is actually a really good little pocket,
slow motion camera.
So yeah, I totally rate a lot of the clips from this video.
They turned out really cool, really fun,
happy to use them in my YouTube videos.
Don't know if I would use them anywhere else,
other than social media, but that's okay.
Because we're all shooting so much
social media content, these days.
Well, as much as we can without going outside,
but as feature number 50, 51, 52, I've lost count,
of this camera, I give it a pass.
Now, I want to give some thoughts
on the boosted battery as well.
Now, I was out shooting for about four or five hours
around Sydney Harbour, and by the time I finished,
this had only depleted by 50%.
And I was filming a lot on it.
Yes, I did turn it off in between setups,
but the battery lasted a really long time.
And I think you could probably shoot for a full day with it.
This one will obviously last half as long.
So I think if you have one of each,
you should have more than enough battery,
to last you quite a while.
A big issue, I did find though,
shooting with this, even with all of that battery,
is, my phone's battery wasn't really able to keep up.
It ran out before the end of this shoot.
So I had to carry a power bank around with me
and keep my phone's battery topped up.
Because, editing that 5.3K video wirelessly
really did push my phone to its limits.
And I'm using a new phone here, the iPhone 11 Pro Max.
And, it should hypothetically have a battery
that lasts all day, yet it lasted less than half a day here,
using the ONE R.
So if you're going to get a big battery like this,
you'll need power for your phone,
if you plan on editing on the go.
And yeah, that's it for this video.
If you have any questions about the ONE R
or the slow motion,
or if you just want to complain about something,
then let me know down there.
Also, I'll be making another course about 360 video.
It's going to take me many months to put together,
but I think it will be ready in...
Square root of 6 million minus three,
early 2021 sometime, I don't know when.
But you can sign up to be notified for when that's ready,
because this is going to be an ultimate in-depth guide
to 360 video, that will cover everything you need to know.
I'll put a link down there.
Peace out. It's been real.
Until next time.