Hey guys this is Ben and in this video I'm going to show you exactly why the
GoPro Fusion is the best consumer 360 camera for both photo and video as of
early 2018!
Link to the GoPro Fusion can be found down in the description as well
as all the must-have GoPro Fusion accessories I'm also going to upload
some samples for you guys to download if you like to make sure you are happy with
this camera before you press that buy button. Here's the design of the camera
and it looks just like a normal GoPro however they've extended it down so it
becomes a square the camera is made of rubber so if it hits a hard surface it's
not going to break however it's probably likely that your lens is going to hit
the surface if you do drop it and smash so while the rubber is good it doesn't
protect those lenses and the lenses are the most important part you need to
protect here we have the battery compartment and two micro SD slots
that's right this camera takes two micro SD s instead of one meaning your footage
is going to be a lot safer because it puts less stress on the camera having
two places to write the data to the camera has two buttons only one here
which is on and changing modes and this one is your record button as well as
confirm selections while the camera is kind of heavy I'd say you could put this
in your pocket which is rare for a prosumer 360 camera knowing their bigger
bulkier and heavier so that's a win for the Fusions design one thing I really
don't like is the GoPro mount it means you have to get a separate adapter to
put it on a tripod I'll link this one down in the description it cost me about
$3 on Amazon here's the selfie stick the Fusion came with and I really don't like
this at all look how big that thing is it's going to
leave a massive footprint in your 360 photos and videos and to be perfectly
honest I've not used this even once they had good intentions because this does
double as a selfie stick but it's just too big and clunky do yourself a favor
get the GoPro adapter and then pair it with another normal tripod like this
Manfrotto Mini Pixie Tabletop Tripod even better here's the tiny little
Manfrotto tripod I showed you guys in my last video and this is a perfect match
for the Fusion because it's the exact width of it this selfie stick also goes
great with the Fusion overall I'd say the Fusion is well-designed however
because of the tripod thread and the exposed lenses
I'm not going to put the design as a pro or a con here's the photo resolution of
the Fusion and here's the video resolution although those are very good
numbers what amazed me when I first saw this camera was just how sharp it looks
it looks even sharper than these might indicate by far the fusion has produced
the sharpest looking images and videos from any consumer 360 camera I've seen
when watching back that beautiful 5.2 K video less sharpness looks absolutely
incredible and it's 5.2 K resolution there have been other 5 K cameras come
out prior to a Fusion they haven't looked that shop why is that well there
are some 360 cameras that despite resolution have really good optics as
well as all of the best internal components that make a certain
resolution look sharper than it actually is there's so much more to cameras than
just resolution and something I've noticed about the GoPro as well as the
Theta cameras is that despite the resolution on the Box they actually do
look sharper and overall the look is much better than that number might
suggest and it's gonna silence those naysayers who still haven't bought into
360 video because of its softness this legitimately looks like HD video and the
photo is also look incredibly sharp I'm not going to say like DSLR but it's
getting close accompanying this amazing sharpness is also excellent dynamic
range perhaps the best I've ever seen from a 360 camera the Fusion is a camera
you can rely on to not only get a really good exposure but also get beautiful
crystal-clear colors if you saw my side-by-side comparison of the Fusion
and its 6 closest competitors you'll see that the Fusions videos and photos were
the most lifelike and realistic to the situation's I was in it came first in
almost every situation and to me that says this is a camera you can rely on in
almost any situation whether you're on the move whether you're on a tripod
whether you're in bright light low-light mix light the Fusion just knows how to
handle it it won't be perfect every time but it will be 95% of the time something
that contributes these excellent looking photos and videos is manual exposure
manual exposure is key for anyone that wants a really specific look or strong
control over their photos over their videos if you're working with difficult
lighting situations take this photo for example I went into the manual mode I
changed my shutter speed to 10 second now wave a flashlight around the camera
resulting in an awesome little piece for Instagram manual exposure is key for
effects like this so if there's someone that likes playing with every last
little variable of your camera then the Fusion will have your back
the fusion also shoots RAW and wa-wa-wa-wait don't get too excited because the
workflow isn't quite in place just yet it does allow you to adjust your RAW
files inside of Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom however you're not able to
stitch the two circular spheres unless you have a third-party software like
Mistica or Kolor which for me rules RAW out for now they're probably going to
fix this in the future but I wouldn't consider this a feature of the Fusion
given you can't do it natively within Fusion studio you can export TIFF files
instead of JPEG which is kind of like RAW but it's not quite RAW at the same
time though I've known as Fusion files are actually really easy to color
correct and you get a decent amount of latitude anyway if you do make any big
boo-boos with your photos you can correct them pretty easily this brings
me to the first floor of the Fusion and it's a big one you can't save your 360
photos and videos to your camera roll you can only edit them within the GoPro
app as someone who shoots 360 mainly with the intention of editing into a
Tiny Planet and uploading to Instagram this is super annoying I don't like this
at all you can add a Tiny Planets within the GoPro app however it's extremely
limiting I like having the full equirectangular 360 photo then I can
then manipulate in another app like Roll World or Theta+ so this limitation
rules out those apps and it means you have to go to your computer if you want
those 360 equirectangular photo and video files another flaw is there's no
self timer for photos so if you want to take a photo all you have to do this
or connect to your smart phone app and use your phone as a remote shutter on a
side note this is one of many reasons why the Fusion beats the Rylo because
although they both don't have self timers at least you can connect
wirelessly to your phone with the Fusion and use your phone as a timing with the
Rylo you can't you need it plugged in via a cable so while this lack of self
timer sucks at least there's some kind of solution and hopefully they will fix
it in a future firmware update one thing I love about the fusion is burst mode it
allows you to take 30 photos within one single
second which means it's the perfect camera to shoot a jumping shot with
So let's give it a go. [Music]
how good does that look straightaway first shot I got an amazing
jumping shot normally it takes me 20 goes I thought then the first time only
because it took 30 photos over the course of the jump and therefore I can
choose the one riding the middle primer at the very highest point and turn that
into a tiny plant that's going to be nice on Instagram
[Music]
another big strength of the Fusion is its stabilization you can shake this
thing around like you've forgotten to take your meds and it will be silky
smooth when you watch it back this is industry-leading stabilization and
second only to the Rylo so if you're someone that's into sports and moving
your camera around and the Fusion is going to be an excellent option for you
the Fusions also excellent the time-lapses whether you want to do a photo
time-lapse and end up with thousands of individual photos or if you want to do a
video time-lapse where it combines all of them together into one shorter video
file so does the GoPro Fusion swim well yeah we know it does swim it's
waterproof up to around 15 feet but I haven't seen anyone actually take it
into the water from what I did to my Xiaomi Mi Sphere I'm a little bit scared right now
but a threat says on the box it's waterproof so let's take a look
success no watery death for the Fusion whoo-hoo the Fusion doesn't even care that I've
tried to drown it it's still rolling and still working eh okay and while
waterproofness will now go into the pro list immediately it does bring up a few
issues around visibility when the water hits the lenses directly this causes
refraction which makes the stitching significantly worse as you can see here
the seam line has a lot more cutoff than usual and the only way to avoid this is
to get an underwater housing which seems totally counterintuitive to buying a
waterproof camera but if you want the stitching right you're going to need it
I also noticed when swimming with the camera naked and yes I mean the camera
naked not me that the lenses fog up instantly when removing it from the
water so if you're planning a shot the starts in the water and ends out of the
water depending on the climate you're in the lenses are probably going to fog up
so really I think of the waterproofness as an excuse to take more of a risk with
my camera and get cool shots like this one shot so that I wouldn't be gaming up
to try with my new Mi Sphere or would I the Fusion also record spatial audio
which means 360 audio so if it's someone that cares about spatial audio which is
not me then this is going to be an awesome feature for you another area
that the Fusion excels is in low-light up to this point there hasn't really
been a 360 video camera that can do well in low light the Fusion
is not only sharp in low-light but the images are also relatively clear of
grain and it handles strong light sources really well and doesn't over
blow the image or create strong distracting lens flares the Fusion
stitching is really good as you can see the lenses are offset and this works to
its advantage I'm still yet to be disappointed by the stitching of
the Fusion it hasn't let me down for photo or video well I wouldn't say it
does as good of a job as first advertised when they release those
samples of the dogs running past the camera a few months ago I found overall
I've been able to get a stitch that I've been happy with and for anyone buying
the Fusion I'd strongly suggest keeping PROTUNE on because this is going to help
stitching immensely
one good thing about the app is that connects to the camera
lightning-fast you don't even need to join the network manually it will
automatically search for it and join it now we can access all the settings of
the camera we can change modes I found the mobile workflow to be really
restricting well you can download and view your photos and videos like this
that's about all you can do you can't actually download the equirectangular
files like I mentioned earlier you can reframe them and edit them like this
however it's really hard to edit it uses the gyroscope of the phone I find it
awkward and clunky if you want to share your 360 you can share to Facebook only
right now but I find this extremely limiting I'd want to upload a few photos
at once not just one and really I prefer bringing this to my camera roll and
editing the photo before I go ahead and upload to social media these are a few
reasons why the mobile workflow needs improvement still using over capture in
the GoPro app is very similar to the insta 360 app your press record and then
you can move the frame around as you please I have a big issue with this
because my hands are not steady and the shake of the gyroscope means your final
video is going to be shaky and unpleasant I want to be able to create
keyframes well automatically move from one point to another the best way to
import your photos and videos to Fusion Studio is by directly connecting the
camera to your computer you won't be able to put your card in a card reader
because Fusion Studio won't recognize it which is annoying but not that annoying
this is Fusion Studio and you've probably heard lots of
Planes about this software firstly it'll keep you waiting for a crazy long time
while it import your footage and in fact I got a brand new iMac because I
knew I was going to use the Fusion a lot and I couldn't take the slowness of my
old iMac so I got this brand new iMac has 64 gigabytes of RAM 8 Gig graphics card
really fast processor and its handling Fusion Studio a lot better I would say
if you have a slow computer anything older than about 4 or 5 years you're
going to struggle with Fusion Studio and you know what this isn't even GoPros
fault this is the fault of the fact that you're working with 5k footage and it
needs a fast computer to deal with it it doesn't matter which camera you own the
higher up you go in Res the faster a fine you will need in the faster of a
computer you will need still importing my footage so I'd say if you have a
slower computer and think about it can your computer successfully edit 4k
footage I'm just talking normal 4k footage add a decent speed does it take
days or can you do it within 24 hours or so if you're can and it doesn't take
days then there's a decent chance you'll be able to edit GoPro Fusion footage
however it will take a long time this is without question the number one
frustration that GoPro Fusion it takes a long time to get that footage from your
camera onto your computer as an equirectangular video file so if you're
someone who doesn't have a lot of patience then there's a good chance that
your Fusion will be flying through the closest window oh my god it's finished
woooo yeah! okay we are in business and on the left we have all of our photos and
videos on the right is our viewer where we can edit them one cool thing I
actually really like about this software is you can just use your mouse and you
can totally change the orientation of your photo or video you know this
software gets a really bad rap for its slowness and it's crashing but it does
have a few really good things about it another cool thing is you can edit your
Tiny Planets here within the app and while you can also use over capture in
Fusion Studio and it's pretty easy you can add keyframes you just stuck with
one point of view so the better option is going into premiere and using some of
GoPros inbuilt 360 manipulation tools I'll make a video very soon about how
but for now let's explore our equirectangular 360 video so we go to 360
and once we're happy with the orientation of this video you simply hit
add to render queue down there with video you can choose your codec H.264
CineForm and ProRes 422 you can choose your resolution 5.2K / 4K / 3K / 2K
you can choose your audio whether it's stereo or spatial audio this is the plan
of frustration for most people because Fusion Studio crashes a lot back when I
was using my old computer it crashed probably 10 times while trying to export
the same clips so again you will need a lot of patience when using Fusion Studio
but for now it's still quite buggy and if you have a slow computer
and then it will crash however when you finally get to the other side of this
export and you have your final 360 video everything's relatively easy from there
you'll bring me into premiere and edit as you normally would at 360 video one
final pro of the Fusion is as compatibility the Fusions compatible
across iPhone Android Mac and PC and that's surprisingly rare some of its
closest competitors like RYlo and the Yi 360 VR are only compatible on
either Mac or PC so there's a good chance that no matter which platform
you're on that the Fusion will work with your setup so here's the final list you
can see there's way more pros than cons and the cons aren't even really
deal-breakers these are all the reasons why the GoPro Fusion is the best 360
camera for both photo and video as of early 2018 with that said is it worth
$700 hell's yes but that's only if you have $700 if you don't you might want to
consider this Xiaomi Mi Sphere which is a lot cheaper and has a lot of the good things that the Fusion has
So Mr Ben should I buy the Fusion or the Xiaomi Mi Sphere
Hmmmm... overall I'd say the Fusion is about one and a half
times to two times better than the Mi Sphere let's say two times let's round
up and it comes in at three and a half times the price so if you can afford
three and a half times the price for two times as good of a camera then the
Fusion is the option for you if you don't want to spend that much if you've
only got $200 in your wallet then you should go the Mi Sphere because it's an
awesome camera check out my review
Okay, so whats better the Fusion or Rylo
the Rylo is the best 360 camera right now for stabilization hyper-lapses and
reframing so if those things are important to you then you should
consider the RYlo the Gopro Fusion outperforms it at everything else so if
your interests lie elsewhere say in 360 photography then the Fusion hands down
beats the Rylo
But Mr. Ben I heard that GoPro is trying to sell their company, and they are going down the toilet
yeah I mean look times are looking tough
for GoPro right now however at the camera I have in my hand is complete
enough even if GoPro went completely bankrupt and they never did anything for
this camera ever again I feel like this will still be a camera that delivers me
awesome 360 photo and video content again you can find a link to the GoPro
Fusion down in the description as well as those sample photos and videos if you
want to take a look for yourself before you buy in conclusion this is an amazing
all-around 360 camera that has some workflow issues when I rather wait a few
months for them to sort out these workflow issues hell no I want this
camera right now so I can make awesome Instagram and YouTube content this is an
awesome all-around camera and the best $700 I've spent this year there's a
Facebook page for the Fusion you guys should definitely check out because it's
filled with awesome samples of the camera as well as just general
discussion and insight from people that are actually using and enjoying this
camera so if you have any questions or you want interact with fellow users then
that's a great group to join so I'd be curious to know are you considering
buying the GoPro Fusion leave a comment in the box below and let me know I'd be
really keen to see if you guys are as excited about the Fusion as I am by the
way before someone leaves a comment down there just letting you know that this
men in black shirt that I've been wearing is now available on my website
I'll link it down there until next time this has been Ben and the Fusion I will see you
[Me and the weird ninja sound effects again]
in the next video [Music]