Insta 360 x3 video

[philw]

Here's a snow video from xmas 2022 / new year 2023 shot on the Insta 360 x3.

That's a Hometown Hero 148, slightly bigger than my own 144 model. It was the smallest they had, but I didn't want to use my own board as the snow depth was less than normal (1.5m instead of 3.0m). In the end I didn't damage the board, although there were some rocks on the high ridge lines (riding tip: ride the ridge lines flat, when it's like that, don't hit them cranked over at 45°).

Boots are Atomic Backland Carbons with gold Phantom Springs. Bindings are standard F2 with 1° toe lift and 3° heel. The front boot is maximally upright, the rear maximal forward lean. Stance is about 1cm narrower than reference, centred on reference.

The pole was about 20cm longer than the standard Insta, so about 1:40m. I'm not sure if that's necessary and the Insta pole is better engineered & folds smaller, so I'll try that next.

Snow conditions... were less than the best, as you can see if you know your powder. We had everything from a bit of jersey cream though... crust.

Heard in the heli line:

• "usually we have to wait for the snowboarder, not the other way around" - skiers

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The resolution of the Insta 360 x3 is 5.7k, the same as my 4 year old Rylo. However the Insta output is a significant improvement. My Vimeo account has a couple of Rylo videos which clearly show the quality difference I'm getting from the combination of the x3 plus Topaz.

Cropping into the Insta spherical video, the largest you can get is a quite clean 1080p... not bad, but not great if you're using 4k displays. There's a fix for that...

Tools

• Insta 360 x3, Insta 360 Studio 2023
• Topaz AI (paid-for version)
• Davinci Resolve
• Handbrake

Workflow

1. Use Insta Studio to track the main ego, or use waypoints. Reframe it, tweak field of view.
2. Export from Insta Studio to ProRes222 (uncompressed) 1920x1080 (1080p) at max data rate (around 140Mbps with snowy stuff).
3. Import into Topaz AI and up scale to 4k. Take Proteus default settings. The 4K files aren't massively different in size from the 1080p sources.
4. Stuff clips into DaVinci resolve and edit. 
5. Export finished video as DNxHD 444 12-bit
6. Use Handbrake to convert DNxHD -> H.265, a conversion which uses the GPU and is real-time.

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Notes

• Tracking is smooth, easy, and entirely reliable, but it's not "creative". It'll track you, but it'll put you centre frame and has zero imagination.
• The "extract all the interesting bits from this clip" feature doesn't understand enough about snow to be useful here.
• Tracking is real time on a decent desktop with just snow, slower with a lot of trees or other detail. 
• On a very powerful laptop with a GPU the frame rate is about 1/15th real time, so this is really a desktop job. 
  The phone app will do the same thing, but my phone isn't as powerful as either laptop or desktop. That's probably for more people extracting portrait videos of their Insta lips.
• Tracking's "person detection" doesn't always cover snowboards, if they're visible above the powder. 
  You can manually select the whole thing (person plus the board nose) or tweak the field of view a bit after tracking, or use a longer pole than Insta's.
• Insta Studio's "project" feature means "create another cut from this same video".
• Videos come in pairs (one per lens). The last number in the name is the sequence number, eg 065. If you want to re-edit a clip ending in that, just "open" one or the other of the files for that in InstaStudio.
• Topaz is the paid-for component in this work flow. It's not a real-time "wait for it" activity, consuming 100% of my 24 cores and RTX3080Ti/ Studio driver, if you let it.
• The Insta's frame rate is 29.97 not 30, so ensure DaVinci Resolve timeline is correct on that, plus also the 4k dimensions (typical defaults are different)
• If you export as H.265 (compressed) from the free version of Davinci Resolve, rendering's inordinately slow as it uses only the CPU not the GPU - it's been nerfed.
  The work-around is to export uncompressed DNxHD 444 12-bit. Then use Handbrake to quickly do the compression to H.265 [i]via the GPU[/i].
• The Insta needs more positive exposure compensation when used on a dull day, same as ordinary cameras. I used +1 throughout and tweaked the dull days in post.

Defects

• Insta 360 Studio forgets the video sort order, and comes up with some weird order [i]which isn't shot date/time [/i]if you restart it.
• Insta's post production "timeshift" is useless: the preview isn't good, it's simpler to do this in other workflow tools.
• VLC renders colours slightly video differently from the Insta app, one of them isn't using the OS colour profile correctly.