When viewing 360 video with a VR headset, a high resolution can make the difference between an immersive experience and a blurry novelty. We’ve recently been working with the Insta360 Pro which is capable of filming in 8K and it’s produced some of the sharpest 360 video I’ve seen yet.
Like other 360 cameras we’ve tested recently (such as the Garmin VIRB) operating the Insta360 Pro is a relatively simple procedure of point and shoot (or in the case of filming in 360, just shoot). After a minute-long boot-up sequence, you just navigate to the video icon in the camera’s menu screen and hit enter. An Android/iOS app will also allow you to remotely control the recording. In addition to recording in 8K, you can also configure the camera to record in 3D/stereoscopic 360, or up to 120 frames per second, though not all at once. Prioritizing a high FPS or 3D means reducing the resolution to 6K or 4K.
Once turned on, the camera’s cooling fan will start running which is quite noisy. This could be an issue for video where you’ll want to use the spatial audio. However, upgrading the camera’s firmware will allow you to turn the camera off while recording for fifteen minutes at a time. You have the option of immediately recording again, though I’d be wary of the camera overheating.
At lower resolutions, each of the videos from the six lenses will be stitched in real time in-camera. But for 8K, you’ll need to bring the videos into Insta360’s proprietary stitching software, which requires the camera’s serial number and a user registration to download and operate. Though it’s a bit of a hassle to get set up, I found the actual stitching process straightforward while still allowing for a lot of customization. It allows for batch exports, compression to lower resolutions, and offers a low-res preview of the final video.
For the project we’re working on, we wanted viewing the 360 videos to be both immersive and accessible. The solution we found was to load the video onto an Oculus Go, a wireless VR headset. At $200, it seemed like the best compromise to get a full 360 experience. While the 4K and 3D videos have looked great, we haven’t been able to playback 8K video on the device. This remains one of the biggest challenges to working with 8K video at this point, let alone 8K 360 video: there’s simply not many places to actually view it. For now, I’m already impressed with the quality of the Insta360 Pro’s 4K output, even if it’s not the full capability of the camera.
