Hello everybody, I’m Alessandro, I started working at Mapillary a few months ago and I’m currently adding support to mapillary_tools for external GPX files for videos.
I’m reaching out to the community to ask if someone could provide us with the original .insv files taken from an Insta360 ONE X3 (previous models could work too), with no GPS signal in the beginning. The optimal sample could be something like 10 seconds without GPS, and then 10/20 seconds moving around with stable GPS signal. I don’t care about images, the video can be blacked out.
Does anybody already have something suitable, or could do a short recording sessions? Thanks!
I’ve just recorded a few files for you with the X3. I did a few via the GPS remote and then via the iphone app. Also did some regular video and some of the time-lapse 0.2s interval video.
In case it makes a difference, there was camera firmware upgrade available today so the last few are with the new firmware … will be interesting to see if there is any difference.
PM me and I will send you a download link
Have a look and let me know if those are sufficient… I can record more if needed. It would be brilliant if mapillary could process the X3 files, the camera is a nightmare of bad design when it comes to how they manage GPS, even with the expensive GPS remote.
Cheers
These are golden and it’s great to have timelapses too, thank you very much!
I see that exiftool reports the timestamps (e.g. QuickTime:CreateDate) in UTC for files _007, _008, _009, while it uses your local time for all other files. The filename always contains the local time. Do you remember how you made those three videos? Were they the ones tracked with the iphone app? (This is mostly out of curiosity, I think generally we cannot rely on internal camera clocks anyway.)
Insta Studio seems to save GPX tracks with one point per second. When it comes to timelapse videos, it saves one point per second of video duration, not elapsed time, and I don’t see any logic in how it picks those points - so timelapse GPX are unusable. Power users can still use the GPX exported by UL2GSV, or we can automate running exiftool on the INSV or LRV.
When you speak of “nightmare of bad design when it comes to how they manage GPS”, what are the pain points? Do you see possible mitigations in mapillary_tools, best if starting from the stitched video?
Glad it was helpful. The camera also support non-video timelapse so I can upload some of those images as well.
re timestamp… my guess is that those 3 were recorded using the phone app and the rest via the GPS action remote… I tried to do a mix of both, but I didn’t have a good way to mark down which was which.
re X3 bad design… omg, everything!
A short overview of the nightmares.:
They brand all their ads with “google street view” references but both desktop and phone apps strip gps data from videos. They just recently updated InstaStudio to let you export gpx (10 months after the x3 release), but as you note it makes GPX that are largely useless for mapping.
The desktop app strips GPS data from images which is particularly maddening because this means the only way to use their “interval” capture feature for mapping would be to manually download and process each image on your phone one at a time which takes about 5 clicks and ~15 seconds per image. This makes this capture method not usable by any sane concept of that word because even for say a 5 minute recording, you would have to manually download 100 images to your phone if you want to retain GPS on them.
If you want to record GPS on X3 video and don’t have their $80USD GPS remote ($150 in Australia), you have to leave your phone unlocked and open to the insta360 app and even then there is no indication that it is working, which it often doesn’t. The inst360 forums are rife with people trying to figure out why their X3 data has no gps when the answer is really that insta hasn’t bothered to make it actually work.
All in all super frustrating because 78MP stills and 5.7K videos re awesome features for mapping.
So, TLDR, yes! If the mapillary uploader or CL tools had a somewhat one-click way to provide a post-processed MP4 file and and the path to the original INVS file to get the GPS, that would be brilliant.
I guess one additional handy feature would be a way to either trim the start/end of videos before upload, or have the mapillary software be able to align the the timestamp between a raw GPX, exported from INVS, and a trimmed mp4 of the same video.
I often end up with a few seconds of myself at the start and end of the video, which I’d rather not upload and it also makes for bad data on the mapillary end. I could trim this prior to export of the video, using instaStudio, but then the start/end of the gpx file isn’t aligned with the video timestamp. My guess is that instaStudio would strip any usable actual capture time info from the video, so I think you’d need to provide the trim feature on the mapillary end, but maybe there is an easier way like a setting that just auto-deletes n seconds from the start/end of the video?
Please! I guess in this case the raw images are .INSP? I hope Insta Studio preserves geotagging when stitching single images, but let’s see
I’m making good progress on a proof of concept in the CLI uploader, thanks to your samples. I’ll follow up here when it’s ready for public testing
I’m afraid there are no silver bullets here. Metadata in videos seem to be very poorly standardized, camera clocks are not reliable, post-processing software doesn’t necessarily fix the start time if you clip away the start of a video - so auto-syncing is unreliable at best. We can add support for more manual tuning, but it won’t be very friendly.
I’ll explore the idea with colleagues more familiar with video processing.
