I recently borrowed an Insta360 ONE X with the main purpose of contributing 360° imagery. When capturing and uploading, I followed the guide for the X3 that is availabe, as it’s the closest match to the ONE X.
My first tests included walking two tracks that are pedestrian-only, camera mounted on the stick. Recording with GPS via smartphone app in timelapse video mode.
After uploading the first tracks, I discovered the following issues:
Images are oriented backwards compared to the actual track direction: I guess this is caused by me pointing the camera screen backwards, easily solvable. But may be good to add a note to the Insta360 X3 guide if it’s the same front/rear lens assignment.
Only very few images are extracted from the timelapse video: While the desktop uploader did show the whole track, only a few frames were extracted from the video.
See this image as an example: Mapillary
Only one image was extracted while the 1s timelapse video covers the whole currently uncovered way to the northeast. Is there something missing in processing that marks the video as timelapse? Or is there an option for uploading that I didn’t see?
Thanks for letting us know! We haven’t tried the One X timelapse mode. Would you mind sending a link to the original video file from the camera so we can take a look?
When you say “pointing the camera screen backwards” - do you mean that the camera screen was facing the direction of travel, or opposite the direction of travel (which is generally the expected way)
Sure, here’s the stitched video that was uploaded: Dropbox
Let me know if you also need the .insv files.
When recording the video, the camera screen was facing in the opposite direction of travel. When viewing the raw video, this results in the “forward” direction being at the image borders while the “backward” direction being in the center. My guess is that it’s expected to be the opposite direction.
Thanks so much! I was able to replicate your problem, and we will take a look to see if we can fix what’s going on here. I think in theory it should work the same way it does for Insta360 X3 cc: @tao
Regarding orientation: when I play the file in Insta360 Studio it is shown with the orientation “backwards” - so yes, I think you were holding the camera differently than expected.
Another make of camera had the same forward / backward looking issue; found that can change icons on the screen or via the app, there’s one to select which lens is ‘forward’, turns out I’d accidentally enabled and touched that.
Thanks for the hint, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any setting related to that on the ONE X or in Insta360 Studio.
I did another capture session today and tested different modes of operation. Conclusions:
If you hold the ONE X correctly (screen facing forward, in direction of travel), 360° image orientations are correct!
Capturing video (5.7K, 24fps) works with smartphone GPS using the Mapillary Desktop Uploader, but produces huge amounts of data and you need a fast microSD card (SanDisk Ultra C10 is too slow, recording simply stopped after around 20 seconds). Image quality seems to decrease after being uploaded to Mapillary, just my first impression, didn’t verify that. Example: Mapillary
Capturing image sequences is useless for Mapillary: Minimum interval is 3s, which is too slow (or I’m walking too fast), and it has the same GPS issue as other cameras (first GPS position in all images)
So timelapse video seems like the way to go for the ONE X. I have 2 new timelapse sequences from today, waiting for upload. Any news on if/when they will be handled correctly during processing @boris ?
I have Insta360 X4. The mode whether timelapse video or interval photo depends also on what visual quality is satisfying you. Setting a 3 sec photo interval on X4 effectively gets me just every 6 sec a photo. Too much for a nice transition on mapillary, but interval photos are of significantly better quality than timelapse video. When recording timelapse video I see a big degradation in quality after exporting the INSV video with Insta360 Studio as MP4.
With timelapse video I also have to correct the frame rate of the video because the stored timestamp (pts) in the frames is based on e. g. 24 fps. At least I have to do it to upload to Google Street View or Google shows the track on the map being much shorter than in reality. Did not try it with Mapillary.
To get the GPS locations into the photos I record the GPS track with a different device and use exiftool to insert the locations in the photos afterwards.
Looking forward to any updates on the timelapse video issue.