Hello I hope you enjoyed that little video
I shot it with just the Insta360 ONE RS
and a selfie stick, no other gear,
so in this video I’m gonna tell you about
how I worked with the one rs to get
the best image possible.
Before we go further I do want to say
that this is a sponsored video by Insta360
but my opinion of the camera is still my own
and of course the images don't lie.
Let's get into the settings first starting with
the 4K Boost Lens which is what I used
for most of the Chicago video.
First of all let’s go into the general menu
and reduce that sharpening all the way down.
Digital sharpening is the quickest way to
ruin your image and make it look like a phone.
Then I set my stabilization level to high,
but actually I’m not sure if this makes a difference.
I always record so that I stabilize it in post,
so I'm not sure if adjusting the stabilization
level in-camera actually
makes a difference anymore,
but I just set it to high anyway.
Then I go into regular video mode,
not Active HDR, because the
regular video mode seems to be
sharper with less shadow noise,
and Active HDR doesn’t let you
lock in your exposure settings.
In video mode, I choose 4K resolution
at 24 frames per second because
24P is the proper frame rate for filmmaking.
I use the 4:3 aspect ratio because
it allows me to crop in a bit
if I’m going to be delivering a 16:9 video.
Shooting in a 4:3 frame is really
really helpful when you just need
a little bit more headroom or a little
more room at the bottom of the frame,
you can shift the image up or shift it down.
Or if you want to roll your horizon in post
it helps to have a little bit more headroom
and a little bit more room at the bottom.
Then I set my color to Standard,
not Vivid, not Log.
Vivid is too saturated for my taste,
and Log just doesn’t work right
with 8-bit footage in my opinion.
Next I adjust my shutter, my ISO
and my white balance for each shot.
You could make life easier just by
using Auto for everything,
but then you'd see all those elements
shifting during the shot while you shoot,
so it would look more vloggy and less filmic,
because when they're shooting a
professional movie obviously they’re not
using auto ISO or auto shutter.
So here’s how to do that:
I go into Manual mode and I use
the little screen on the ONE RS
to judge the exposure.
I could use the Insta360 app
to have a bigger screen,
but it does take some time to connect
to the app each time you want to use it,
and that slows me down when I’m just
running around with the camera grabbing
shots so I usually don’t use the app,
I just eyeball it.
To adjust my exposure,
I start by setting the ISO to 100,
the base ISO, then I adjust my shutter
to expose for the highlights,
meaning I expose a little bit darker
to keep the bright parts from blowing out.
Blown highlights will ruin
the cinematic look right away.
Quick note about shutter,
you usually don’t want to go
below 1/50 shutter speed,
no matter how dark the scene is.
If you’re shooting at 24fps,
you’re shutter is supposed to be
locked at double the frame rate
so that would be 1/50
because 50 is roughly double of 24.
This is because you get the
proper motion blur at 1/50,
that’s where the motion blur looks normal,
it looks like it would look during a movie.
Now of course this rule gets broken
all the time when we’re shooting
with action cameras because
faster shutter means better stabilization
with less blurry artifacts
and also you need to increase the
shutter speed just to make the
scene darker if it's too bright.
But, when the light gets lower,
and you need to choose between
a slower shutter speed and a higher ISO,
I go with the higher ISO.
High shutter speed for more
stabilization in bright environments.
1/50 shutter in low light.
Then I just boost the ISO as needed.
For White Balance I use
5500K on sunny days,
6000 for cloudy days,
4500 or 4000K for mixed light,
and 3200 to 3800 for artificial
tungsten light and nighttime.
Doing all these manual settings
is a bit inconvenient so here’s
one little hack I use for doing the
manual settings a bit faster.
I switch to Auto mode,
then I switch right back to Manual mode
and this locks in the settings that the
Auto mode has chosen.
Then I adjust the manual settings to my taste.
OK, on to the 360 Lens.
For the 360 Lens there’s not a whole
lot of difference in the settings,
sharpness low, regular Video mode not HDR,
5.7K 24P, manual exposure,
and that hack of switching over to
Auto and switching back to Manual,
that works for the 360 Lens as well.
But because it’s tricky to expose for a 360 image,
I do sometimes leave it in full Auto when
I’m shooting 360, especially in situations
when the light is changing a lot or
I'm moving through mixed lighting.
And I will sometimes use HDR when I’m
dealing with too much dynamic range
in the scene but it is a last resort.
Ok those are my settings,
now let’s talk about my shooting process.
Everything you saw in the Chicago video
was shot with just the ONE RS and a selfie stick,
no gimbals, no other accessories.
The way I see it, if you're gonna use a gimbal,
you might as well go out with a
bigger camera as well because
its not gonna fit in your pocket anymore.
The whole point of using action cameras
is portability and flexibility
so for this video I just used Insta360’s
tiny selfie stick or I went handheld
because that's what fits in my pocket.
So how did i get smooth shots with
no mechanical stabilizer at all?
Well it’s a combination of the in-camera
FlowState Stabilization and the way
I move my body.
Proper body movement is really important,
whether you’re shooting handheld
or with a gimbal.
I actually have a whole Film School course
explaining my movement techniques,
there’s a link in the description
if you’re interested,
but i will give you a quick breakdown
of how that works here.
I try to walk as smoothly as possible,
like I’m holding a full glass of water
and I’m trying not to spill it.
This is called the ninja walk.
Second, I ease in and out of each movement
so that it has a nice gliding feel.
Then I let the FlowState Stabilization
handle the rest of the little jitters,
and the end result is a nice smooth shot.
So that’s how I get smooth movements
in my shots, the next important decision
is the framing of the shot.
Choosing the right kinds of subjects
and the right angles is also crucial
for making action camera shots look good,
because you can’t zoom in.
So obviously you need to
take advantage of that wide angle perspective.
So for this video I avoided distant subjects,
with no foreground elements in the shot
because that’s boring.
Instead I mostly did shots where
there was some interesting subject
within about one meter of the camera.
I also tried to film subjects that were
in some sort of direct light or spotlight
that separated them from the background.
This is because I had no
depth of field blur in the background
because it's a wide angle action camera
so I had to use light instead to
separate my subject from its environment.
Also the dynamic range on
the ONE RS is good
but it's not as good as a cinema camera
or mirrorless camera would be,
so I didn’t want to try to pull
too much detail from the shadows in post,
instead I chose my lighting very carefully
to avoid putting my subjects
in the dark parts of the shot.
And to add a sense of motion and
energy to my shots I filmed a lot of
subjects that were either moving
toward the camera or moving away
from the camera. This is because
wide angle lenses exaggerate movement
on that axis, moving toward or away
from the camera.
They make it look like
that movement’s going faster
so this makes the shots more exciting.
One good thing about shooting
with an action camera like the ONE RS
is that I didn’t really have to worry about
getting too much water or sand on the lens.
So that allows me to do riskier shots,
such as this shot during the spikeball game
where I lay down the camera in the sand
under the net.
The selfie stick was my only accessory
that I used here, I used it of course for selfies,
and I also used it for high angles, low angles,
and going through small spaces.
When I filmed with the selfie stick,
I would often set my framing
using the Insta360 app.
This is one time when it would be
really useful to spend that time
to connect the app.
Mainly, I just used the app when
I couldn’t see the camera’s screen
and I needed some other way
to frame my shot.
The app connects wirelessly to
the camera and it gives you
a realtime preview and it also
gives you playback of your takes
and you have access to the
camera settings.
There is a bit of a delay with the app
and the resolution isn't super high
but it’s perfectly adequate for getting
your framing before you hit record.
OK now I’ll just quickly talk about how I
processed my ONE RS footage in post.
I used Insta360 Studio,
which is the desktop app,
not the mobile one.
First I imported my clips.
Then, under FOV or Field of View options
I chose FPV. This gives me straight lines,
instead of the fisheye look,
and it doesn’t zoom in too much
on my image.
I don’t use the Linear or Narrow settings,
because they crop in too much
on my image which increases
the visible noise and reduces the sharpness.
I can always crop it later
and get exactly the same effect.
For my 360 shots, I did all my reframing
in the Insta360 Studio app
instead of my editing program,
DaVinci Resolve, because Resolve
has no built-in 360 camera support
and there’s not even a good
third-party plugin if you’re using a Mac.
The only good plugin that I know of is for PC.
I’m not gonna do a full reframing
tutorial here because you can learn
how those controls work just by
watching the tutorial videos on
Insta360’s channel,
but I will talk a little bit about
how I removed lens distortion which is,
you know, the fisheye look.
I manually adjusted the FOV
and the distortion correction separately
and I just sort of played around with them
for each shot and juggled them
to get the maximum FOV
with the least stretching on the edges
of the image and that can actually change
depending on the shot you’re doing,
depending on what’s in shot,
how distorted things are at the corners,
so for each shot I just tried to
maximize how wide I could go
because that uses more pixels
and that makes the image look sharper
and I try to minimize the amount of
stretching at the edges of the image.
Then I just added those keyframes
for movement and I used the
easing curves to smooth out each shot.
You have a couple of different options
for the type of curve that it
applies to your movement.
In other words, the way that
it smooths your movement and
I think that I always used Fade-In
and Fade-Out for each shot.
Then when I pre-rendered my shots
out of Insta360 Studio I chose to
render them in ProRes 422
because that is the highest quality format.
OK, what about color grading?
Well, I didn’t use Insta360’s Color Plus
because it was way too intense,
and I didn’t grade too much in Resolve either,
because I think the colors mostly
look fine straight out of the camera
and it’s 8-bit, so you can’t really
push it too far.
Mostly I just raised the shadows a bit
so what you saw in the video was
almost exactly how the raw footage
looked straight out of the camera.
Finally I added some
digital motion blur with the
ReelSmart Motion Blur plugin because
when you use a high shutter speed
like I did during the daytime,
you don’t have any motion blur naturally
in your shot so it looks a little bit more vloggy,
a little bit less cinematic in that way.
I wanted that motion blur
so I added it digitally.
It doesn’t work perfectly,
but if you play around with the settings
in ReelSmart Motion Blur you can
usually get acceptable results.
OK so that’s how I made this little video
with the Insta360 ONE RS.
It really is a beast of a camera
in a tiny package and I have found
the image good enough to use
in my other productions as well.
It’s a great little crash cam,
action cam, POV cam, camera to
throw on a stick and get high shots
if you can’t fly a drone.
It’s really versatile for grabbing that shot
that you couldn’t get with your bigger camera.
So thank you Insta360 for sponsoring
this video and thank you for watching.
Please like and subscribe if you like
what you see and I‘ll see you next time.