An Honest Review Of The Insta360 X3 // The Companion Camera

okay so I finally did it I pulled the trigger on an insta 360 camera specifically the X3 yep that's right the guy that's been making videos on the DJI Ronin 40 cinema camera has bought an insta 360. I've seen a lot of reviews on YouTube but I really wanted to focus this review on practical usage I want to take it out on a trip a camping trip with my family because I view this camera as a companion camera a big selling point is the 360 feature which allows you to shoot first and reframe later so we're definitely going to check that out along with the sound and video quality test of course all the pros and cons thank you so we're going to take him camping we're taking the kids up camping nothing crazy but I figured perfect time to take it up with me maybe we'll hit the beach and I'll just kind of showcase how this is a great travel camera but you can also use it to Vlog and you can also use it to capture some great memories so with that being said let's get camping [Music] okay let's do a quick unboxing because I know some folks really enjoy unboxing videos and because I'm intending this to be a complete review I figured why not so right off the bat it's packaged really really well everything's secure and I got the ultimate kit which came with the selfie stick the invisible selfie stick obviously the insta 360 X3 the bullet time cord and I'm not sure if I'm gonna use that all that much a lens cap which I'll talk about a little bit more later on because I ended up getting something else that came with a better lens cap the battery charging Hub which has a capability of charging up to three batteries and a spare battery along with a memory card but the memory card only has 64 gigabytes which isn't enough you're gonna need more memory now I wanted to kind of generally say that the ultimate kit doesn't really feel too ultimate but I'll talk about that later on because I'm going to recommend some really good accessories that I think are crucial [Music] so now I'm in the shade and this is the insta360 X3 and we're using the inner camera so it's shooting at 4K I have it unlocked profile so I'm gonna need to color grade it when I get home but hopefully everything sounds good now we're using the standard picture profile so this is a standard picture profile right now and finally this is the Vivid profile this should look really good this is kind of like a baked in profile picture profile for those of you that don't want to deal with log or having to color grade or anything like that I'm looking at right now it looks really saturated it looks good but it's a bit saturated for me but I'm sure a lot of you are going to love the Vivid profile [Music] gonna win here's the killer shot there it is here it is hey you want to come see my new camera okay let's check out my new camera you wanna come see it okay this is my new camera what do you think I see you right there so I have been noticing almost every video on playback has a delay in the audio you know the I really hope that's just the playback in the camera and not in the follows themselves so I'm going to download them to my phone right now and hopefully it's not unusable footage that would really suck I already did a firmware update so it should be the latest update [Music] all right [Music] okay now we're at the beach and I want to test out the picture profiles again I really want to compare logs versus the normal picture profile versus HDR and see what you're getting right now we are shooting long and this is long color grading so hopefully it looks pretty good but this is long color green [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] ly this is where the insta 360 X3 really starts to crumble especially when you compare it to regular old iPhone footage we were basically done camping but I wasn't done testing out the camera so I took it back home and ran a couple more tests in particular I wanted to test out the internal microphone versus the rode Wireless scope 2 and some of the tracking and 360 features [Music] foreign we're actually going to test out the internal mics on the X3 just just straight from the camera and I'm just going to show you guys it's really good and we're going to compare it to the rode Wireless go too so right now you are hearing the internal microphone from the X3 I'm not processing it in any way I'm just boosting the levels so it's louder and this is what the microphone sounds like edited now I'm getting closer to a noisy environment we're getting closer to the freeway so I'm going to add some noise cancellation and you can hear that it's really really good I mean eight times out of ten this is really good enough for what I'm intending this camera to be okay let's move away from the freeway but now you're actually hearing the rode Wireless go to this is the rode Wireless go to plugged into the camera and now you are hearing the rode Wireless go to completely edited I added my compression and eqs and all that good stuff of course if you ever want to improve any video quality whether it's this or Sony a7s3 or a cinema camera invest in lighting invest in microphones and that's already going to take you Leaps and Bounds above everybody else this is the audio coming from the road with noise cancellation and it should sound really really good one more thing I kind of wanted to highlight and really I don't know just kind of showcase if you're vlogging I would use one of the cameras not the 360 mode right now I'm using the innermost camera I can see myself in the screen it's 4K resolution I find that the resolution is way better than 360 because 360 has to stitch everything together right so I would use the dedicated cameras right now I'm not really in an interesting environment so I don't need the 360 view that's kind of a con that I have with this camera it's very interesting it's very Dynamic it gives you great perspective but when compared to like an iPhone I felt like the iPhone had better image quality that's just me so I was starting to quickly realize that I needed to get a few more accessories and a really really crucial one that was missing in the quote unquote ultimate package was a tripod so I found this one it's fairly cheap but it's high quality and more importantly it does Disappear With The Invisible selfie stick when you fold it up but when you unfold it it has a pretty good spread it's pretty stable but yet it's still Compact and small so I'll put this in the link below and I highly recommend this tripod the next really important thing that I thought I needed was the mic adapter and I'm surprised that this is not included in the ultimate kit because having good audio is crucial having good audio is really ultimate so anyways I got the mic adapter so I can use my rode Wireless go 2 which will be dedicated to the X3 and the DJI mic will be used for my other cameras [Music] the next thing I got was a case I highly recommend this case but make sure you put a sticker on top so you can figure out which side is up this case houses all my accessories the tripod the spare battery the battery charging Hub the invisible selfie stick and inside the original sleeve I have the mic adapter and the bullet time cord now what's really neat about this case is it actually comes with another case that you can put your insta360 in with the included lens cover and it all fits neatly but I ended up getting a cage which included its own lens Hood specific to the cage [Music] and this lens hood is as good quality if not better quality than what's included with the insta 360 lens Hood now this cage is really really cool I bought it because it has the multi-interface attachment point at the bottom that's also magnetic and you still have your threaded adapter so you can use your selfie stick and so forth it also includes two cold shoe adapters it's really easy to use you just unscrew it slide in your insta360 lock it all up make sure screw it in tight and you're good to go and the lens sleeve just fits like a glove there is a trade-off though that extra small case doesn't fit anymore if you use the cage and of course the cage has its pros and cons foreign [Music] menu features we're going to go ahead and Power on our insta360 camera this is also going to Showcase just how laggy everything is and you'll kind of see what I mean you can easily swap between cameras when you're in 360 mode very similar to your iPhone where you can toggle the front and back camera if you prefer to just use a single camera you can press the right button which will toggle you between 360 mode and the individual inner or outer cameras the left button starts recording and if you do a hard swipe right you can get into the playback menu if you do a short swipe right you can get into quick menu functions and a hard swipe left will get you into the camera settings there's also a button on the side right below the power button and this will get you into custom presets or your custom saved presets for the camera now I'm not going to show you all the features but if you'd like me to leave me a comment below and I can make a future video so I think this case is really cool and it's an essential accessory to this system now it's not a protective case yeah you do get a protective lens cover but as far as the screen's concerned it's still exposed and I think that's just by Design with the camera the insta360 X3 and I think manufacturers are trying their best to kind of overcome it but I consider this a feature case and the best part is it works with the battery compartment and the microphone compartment what I'm calling the microphone charging compartment it's slotted for those features and it's one of the reasons why I bought this over the small rig or whatever insta360 is officially selling on their website because I noticed with those you couldn't remove the battery out you had to remove the entire case so let me show you guys what I mean with the cage it's pretty neat feature but basically here's the cage if I want to remove the battery it's already slotted you can just remove the battery and put it in the cage is not going to get in your way it also works the same way with the microphone adapter you have to open up the door and then the door just pops off it's actually held together via clip and then the whole thing just goes in here fits right in there the cage is not obstructing any of the features of the insta360 so I really like that so I'll leave a link in the description below with all the accessories that I bought but yeah it's a pretty cool feature so let's talk about the app real quick the app is actually fantastic you get two apps you get the phone version you get the desktop version they're both really good and there's so much you can do it's really easy to learn on I mean I got the hang of it really quick basically you have to keyframe everything but a neat feature in the app which is an AI feature I believe is tracking it can actually track people track objects which really gives you a cool 360 Dynamic look okay speaking of the 360 mode let me show you guys what tracking looks like and we're going to kill two birds with one stone I also have the road mounted on the cage and I'll show you guys that it does unfortunately show up in a 360 view you can kind of get away with it it's really high and I found that the top mount is way better than the side mount so use the top mount and if we fix it a bit maybe that's a little bit less noticeable I know the cable gets in the lane and obviously the actual you know receiver so with that being said let me run around I'll show you guys what tracking looks like so this is tracking just walking around the camera right now and it's going to track me you can do it on your phone too phone or desktop you can do the tracking on either and I think that if you're again just trying to capture the moments the camera really does it all for you and that's a pretty cool thing now what this is also going to show you is stitching you'll see clearly where the stitching is in the 360 mode you want to avoid the stitching right the stitching zones get the lenses pointed at your subject avoid the sides and the tops and you should be okay with stitching once again 360 mode I took off the road now I left the microphone adapter in there to see if it comes up with a 360 view but this is what it looks like with the cage the cage is completely invisible with the selfie stick the tripod's not going to be the tripod legs and you're good to go okay that segment was probably getting a lot of you nauseous out there but I really wanted to showcase the case I really like it let's talk about the pros the cons and some of the things I don't like about this camera well it's really interesting I love how having the ability to shoot in 360 and then reframe afterwards it can really help you kind of Drive the story or figure out what the story is later on so you're just focused on shooting getting the moment and later on you can create a story or reframe it to repurpose it in any way that you want during my trip I was really concerned about the audio files lagging I kind of suspected it was just the device itself because I was downloading them to my phone when I had cell phone reception and they seemed to be okay but I am relieved to find out that when I actually got the footage on my computer everything's fine so there's definitely a processing issue with this camera I feel like the next iteration should really beef up the processing because there just seems to be a general lag in playback the quality gets reduced pretty dramatically and then getting in the menus and getting out of the menus is kind of tiresome I mean it takes a while to initiate a command or to start recording or whatever so that's a big con so far with this camera is it just kind of lags maybe I'm just spoiled with my mirrorless cameras where the Sony a7s3 or the Canon R even things are instant and with this camera it's not okay so once again one of the reasons why I bought this camera I really wanted a companion camera something I can take with me and just kind of document my travels or memories with the family or do some Vlogs and I feel like this fits the bill because of its versatility and that 360 mode you guys are gonna have different reasons for buying this camera I know this camera is very popular for social media videos like Instagram and Tick Tock and things like that and that's cool and I'll probably use it for that too but I love that it's really small take it anywhere has a lot of cool features great audio quality and you can even hook up a rode Wireless code too if you want So yeah so far I'm really really loving it [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tom Wade

Views: 57,304

Keywords: Insta360 X3 review, The Best accessories for the Insta360 X3, The pros and cons of the insta360 X3, Insta360 low light footage, The differences between the Insta360 X3 picture profiles, why the insta360 X3 is the best travel camera, vlogging with the insta360 X3, Why the insta360 X3 is worth it, Insta360 X3 for social media videos, Insta360 X3 mic test, Insta360 X3 vs rode wireless go 2, how to use the mic adaptor in the insta360 X3, Best Cage for Insta360 X3, Insta360 Issues

Id: DuB-ZRQp3XY

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023