I thought I would write about the Insta 360 one X3 camera that I bought recently. I have by no means used it fully but I am very happy with it. One issue is that videos are not .camm format. Instead the camera produces two files for each video, both with a .insv suffix. One of these has a 00 in the file name and contains the video from the front camera and the gps data if applicable, and the other has a 10 in the filename and contans the video from the rear camera. Both are playable as .mp4 files, but are unstitched and uncorrected for spherical distortion. They can be stitched with either the insta360 studio app or the desktop studio. I have written how I upload in another post. I have not played with uploading timelapse photos yet.
The camera does not have a built in GPS, but can be connected to either a dedicated GPS remote (sold separately) or a phone running the insta360 app. I use the phone app, I am not clear on the advantages of buying a seperate controller, except you have full use of your phone when recording.
Image quality is good and the fact that it is lightweight and waterproof reassuring. The motion smoothing is impressive, I record with a selfie stick stuck in a backpack and it wobbles around a bit, but this is barely noticable in the videos.
Good write up.
I can see why you went with this camera for GSV, but given the arduous workflow for Mapillary and its image quality being seemingly the same as eg GoPro Fusion/Max, this wouldn’t be my first choice for a camera
I think in timelapse it is supposed to have 72MP resolution? Can you try that? Would be interesting to see the quality of those higher resolution photos 11.968 x 5.984 px ?
Yes I’ll give it a try sometime. When I have recorded timelapse I have no idea how to process them for mapillary, but I can upload one so that you can see it.
Cool - if you manage to get GPS EXIF data in the photos of the timelapse (if it is recording writing single photos?), you just can upload them as-is I believe.
I need to look through the manual but by default timelapse produces a video. I need to find the right settings to extract the gps and extract images for uploading. Using the usual defaults I only get a couple of jpegs and they don’t match the timestamps on the extracted gpx
Dear @Chris108,
Thank you for your pioneering use of the Insta X3, which I’ve been eyeing since introduction.
1/ Time-lapse is a video setting, according to the specs on the product page there is an Interval Photo setting - would that achieve what other cameras may refer to as time-lapse, please?
2/ in interval / time-lapse mode (whatever one calls automatically taking a series of 72MP still photos) : what is the shortest interval, please?
3/ would there be a difference in interval time between saving in INSP and DNG RAW? (Given that the specifically recommended SD-card is a V30, the interval will likely be greater with the larger DNG RAW files?)
4/ most digital cameras’ clocks run a bit fast : the GoPro Hero in the order of 45secs/week : have you managed to take readable pics of a GPS or a radio controlled clock - one week / 168 hours apart?
Met vriendelijke groet, (Dutch for 'with friendly greeting),
Time lapse produces a “speeded up” video. I’m not sure what other cameras do.
The interval can be from 0.2 seconds to 2 minutes.
As far as I can see time lapse can only be used to produce .insv files
I have not had a chance to do that. I believe that the time is reset every time you connect the phone app, which I use for recording as the controls on the camera are not as intuitive.
I hope this helps, there are a lot of features I have not used yet, so I may have missed something.
I have the X2 which does have the photo interval setting so I assume the X3 has that too.
The shortest interval on the X2 is 3s, but in real it is like 6s. If you set the shooting mode to DNG/RAW it will be 9s between two photos.
@Ligfietser,
Thank you for the additional information, the 9secs between RAW 72MP photos @ max 120Mb/sec = 15MB/sec is in the expected ballpark : 9secs×15MB/sec > 135MB RAW files per 72MP still photo. Which’ll be rather space consuming, and take a long time to upload.
Met vriendelijke groet,
if a user of an insta3600 x3 can upload a photo with exif tag to see how the time is stored.
And if a user can confirme the time of interval on x3 ( ligfietser have put the time for x2)
I want to use this camera with RTK to have better position but need to see if time info a detailled
thanks
Hi @Chris108
Thank you for sharing! As I understood from your posts you shoot with video rather then photo. Because all your photos have 5760*2880 resolution
But according to this instruction this camera has photos with resolution 18 or 72 MP and with interval 3/5/10/30/60/120s Other page
A lot of people want to check how 72MP resolution photos look on Mapillary. I believe 18MP photos also will have better quality if photo mode will be used instead of video mode.
If somebody will find example of such sequence from Insta 360 X3 please share in this topic.
