So you may understand our excitement when Insta360 announced their Pro 2 360° camera in August 2018. Yes, they solved a lot of problems that the Omni had, however, they introduced their own set of issues or were simply too expensive for too little improvement. To us, this first generation of ‘true’ 360° cameras felt more like a cross-grade from the Omni rather than a real upgrade. Awkward positioning of ethernet ports that required the battery to be removed so you were able to plug in the cable to change the camera settings (with a laptop and battery extension cable out in the field), or image quality that wasn’t so much better than the Omni’s as to justify a $7000 expense, made it really hard for us to justify this step. However, this didn’t mean that they weren’t coming with their own set of problems. ZCam’s S1/Pro as well as Kandao’s Obsidian (R/S) and Insta360’s Pro 1 - as well as some others - were close on the heels of the Omni and in contrast to the Omni they were not individual cameras grouped together as one, they really were a dedicated one-piece 360° camera. Yet, while putting up with the shortcomings of these rigs and doing our best to compensated for their flaws, we longingly waited for a new breed of cameras that would address the massive pain points of this first generation of 360° cameras. We have filmed with these rigs for many years and they were the best that was realistically available for anything smaller than a Hollywood production studio. The Omni also came with camera synchronisation that was built into the rig, so no more twisting the rig or clapping your hands was necessary – in theory, because the synchronisation did not always work as expected and there were still situations where one or more cameras were off by a few milliseconds. Regardless of these very different lighting situations, you could only put all cameras into the same setting, which more often than not created more problems than the convenience of controlling all cameras at once were worth it.
This meant that now we couldn’t set the exposure of each camera individually, which was a pain in the neck because sometimes the front of the scene was in bright daylight while the back or another area of the scene was pointed towards the shadowy undergrowth of a forest. While this had obvious advantages of not having to start each camera separately and change settings for each one of them, it also removed the ability to do just that – change the settings individually. Along came the GoPro Omni which was still a bunch of GoPro’s stuck together in a cube, however, the main improvement was that now all cameras could be controlled from one master camera. And even then the results weren’t always beautiful, with blurry edges where two cameras overlapped or stark differences in exposure between bright and shadowy areas ruining the immersive feeling of the stitched footage. The rig needed to be synced by twisting it a few times or clapping your hands. Settings for each individual camera needed to be adjusted to the particular lighting situation while keeping in mind that the settings of each individual camera also needed to somehow match or play well with the settings of the other cameras. A 360° camera was a cobbled together bunch of individual GoPro’s that was half a step further from a prototype. When we started filming 360° videos many years ago, the life of a 360° videographer was very different to what it is now. We will discuss our thoughts and findings in four very distinctly different filming situations (forest, bike ride, city night shoot and HDR) and hopefully, give you some information that will help you to form your own opinion of this very capable 360° video camera. In this article, we are looking at some of its features as well as present you with real-world footage. Posted March 12th, 2019 by Eric Fassbender & filed under All.Ī few weeks ago we received an Insta360 Pro 2 360° video camera for testing purposes.
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