Cycling with the Insta360 ONE X2

look what i got this week hey y'all my name is mitch i used to make printing videos now i make cycling videos i know it's a weird pivot as part of that i picked this little guy up the insta360 one x two i took it on a ride on saturdays i'm gonna show you that footage and all the different camera angles that i tried i'll also talk about how it works things i liked things i didn't like some tips and tricks that i've learned to get the best footage possible i should warn you though i'll probably be a little biased because when this was on my bike the other day i got my very first kom ever on stravo so i guess that answers the age-old cycling question is it arrow this is the insta360 one x2 it's the second generation of their first non-modular 360 camera that's a mouthful uh so i'm just going to talk basics of how it works unlike say a gopro that has one sensor one camera this thing has two lenses two sensors two cameras the lens on this side takes a picture of everything over here and it lands on this side takes a picture of everything over here it stitches those two pictures together projects that onto a globe and then you can look all over the globe and pick the part of the picture that you want to use as cool as that is you may be wondering why did i get this camera for cycling especially if i already have a gopro it turns out if you take this camera and a selfie stick and you put the camera on the selfie stick as you do and extend that selfie stick because this lens overlaps a little bit with this lens the space between the two disappears that means you can get shots like this without needing a friend to hold the camera for my very simple test i tried six different angles one behind the bike one behind the bike but down by the wheel one behind the bike and off to the left one in front of the bike this is really weird like blessing the camera with all these hand movements one in front of the bike one in the front down by the wheel and then one in front off to the left this will all make a lot more sense when you see the angles so let's see the angles first up behind the bike this one was probably the most obvious to me it made a lot of sense like why don't you just put it behind the bike it's like somebody's following you in theory makes a lot of sense in practice don't love this angle so much uh it's a little jumpy and basically just like my butt is in the center of the frame right in the middle so not ideal the good thing about this angle though is i did get the kom it was completely an accident not because i'm the kind of person that gets koams by accident this was my very first one and i'm very very excited about it that's why i'm bringing it up a second time in this video what happened was i knew the camera was on there and so i was riding as fast as i could i wanted to make you all think i'm stronger than i am and the result was i rode up that hill faster than anybody else had and i got a kom i'm going to take that win so the next angle i took the selfie stick and kind of twisted it off to the right and put it down so it's over by the rear derailleur and cassette as you can see the wheel is kind of messed up it looks almost like somebody cut the wheel in half and then stitched it together i guess that is exactly what happened that doesn't happen every time you kind of have to like mess with angles and learn you know which angle where do you have to angle the camera to minimize those kinds of stitching errors but the shot looks really cool it's low to the ground makes it feel really fast i guess it's a good shot if you want like get new wheels or something and you want to show them off i like this angle [Music] for the next angle i sent the selfie stick off to the left so it's still attached to the seat post it's about the same height as the top tube on the bike but it's basically just sticking like almost straight out to the left this shot looks really cool but it tends to be super wobbly i've found and it makes sense i mean you're basically taking a selfie stick and then you're riding on bumpy la tarmac you know of course it's going to look wobbly so if you're on really smooth tarmac if you have a super smooth pedal stroke i imagine you wouldn't be as wobbly as this but that is something to look out for [Music] out front it was the one i was the most excited about i thought this would be great like if i could just put like a selfie stick on my bike here and turn it into a unicorn if i just put the selfie stick here and the camera here then i can ride you know both hands on the wheel i don't have to hold the gopro out like while i'm riding in reality it just didn't look the way that i wanted it to look i tried a couple different angles like i moved the selfie stick up and down again it looks cool i don't know if it's good for a segment like this where i'm talking to you i think it'll be better for action shots but i'm going to try again like if i can get that angle to work like i will use it every single video [Laughter] the penultimate angle that i used was the front of the wheel and then down a bit i like this angle it's low the ground it feels really fast again it's a great way to show off your tires it just feels kind of unique as cool as it is though it's not as cool as the next one the last one which was my favorite [Music] i took the selfie stick i attached it to my drop bars and i sent it like way out to the left and the cool thing about this is you can get the full bike and rider i guess without a lot of distortion and it looks really cool on turns let me show you this so here's a map i'm going through like this little set of turns and here's what it looks like on camera that was my favorite angle and i thought it looked pretty cool but really what makes these all look cool is when you put them all together in a sequence but before i show you the sequence do me a solid hit the like button and as a thank you here's a picture of my adorable dog so now that i've had it for one full week what do i think of the insta360 one x2 let's start with the bad because it's not all good there are some things that i don't love about it image quality it's not great and i'm not just talking about resolution we'll talk about that in a second but the color science like gopro's color science is way better than insta360s color science the colors i can get out of here are like amazing the colors i get out of here are like you know they're good disclaimer on that i'm a designer i've worked as a printer as a retoucher like colors are super important to me i may just be nitpicking here the second thing i don't love about it it's not unique to the insta360 camera it happens to all 360 cameras and that's stitching ears it is annoying to have a shot set up and then when you look at it later you realize there's a stitching area that cuts your wheel right in half i imagine i'll get better at making sure to avoid those situations and one day the technology will get better where you don't have to worry about that the third thing that i'll complain a little bit about it is super bumpy on a bike now granted a lot of that may be the fact that la roads especially in my neighborhood are terrible i mean you saw the footage i guess i was just hoping that it was magically perfect and looked like it was another person filming it's again like it's a selfie stick and it's going like this on the road it's gonna be bumpy it's amazing it looks as smooth as it does so those are those are kind of my complaints about it but there are a lot of things that i do really love about this for example you can get really fun camera angles related to that is my next point which is you can kind of like fix it in post with this camera which is crazy because it takes the images and projects them on a sphere you can reframe things and move the camera around and do literal camera movements after the fact when i'm writing with the gopro or like the mirrorless camera part of my mind is always thinking about framing probably isn't the safest thing to be doing while you're riding a bike right like i'm holding the camera i'm riding the bike but part of my brain is thinking like oh is this like level is it lined up and gopro has a lot of cool things like auto leveling makes it a little easier but i can just kind of stick this anywhere i want in the back of my head at least there's this like relief that i can probably still get like a good shot in there even if it isn't the shot that i expected and that's nice not only for knowing that i'll get the shot but then it turns a bike ride that's a shoot back into more of a bike ride there there is a difference like i still have to go on rides where i'm not shooting just so i can like enjoy the ride shooting a bike ride is work this makes it a little less work oh and i almost forgot the battery life on this insane i rode around for like an hour and a half recorded pretty much the entire time and the battery still had plenty of charge left the gopros batteries i thought were like awesome somehow this is even more awesome it does have quite a few little like quirks you really have to work so i thought i'd share a couple tips that i've learned to get the best possible footage out of this thing disclaimer i've only had it for a week very early learnings first tip stay wide this camera does have a 5.7 k resolution but it comes with a pretty big butt that resolution is achieved by stitching those two cameras together projected on a globe right so what happens in post is you pick which area of the globe you're going to look at so the globe has a resolution of 5.7 k but the little like postage stamp area that you're looking at doesn't and if you make that area really small you're not even getting hd you're not even getting 720p like you're going back into sd land so what you want to do is pick an area in the globe that's as wide as possible because then you're going to get more resolution i was hoping that i'd be able to like zoom in on on little portions the footage just kind of falls apart i hope it's a lot better in future models i assume it will be just the fact that you can move around is really cool but for now i definitely recommend like stay wide with your shots second tip that i've learned this week is do not drop the exposure compensation when i'm shooting with the gopro i drop the footage by a full stop so for you non-camera nerds out there you make the whole image darker and the reason why you do that the sky especially when you're riding in the middle of the day super bright and the rest of your image could be dark that's why sometimes you'll get pictures where like the sky is blown out to white so by dropping it by full stop you usually save the blue in the sky at least with the gopro and the gopro does an awesome job of doing that since this is also an action camera i thought okay i'll do that it doesn't hold up this camera does not do well in low light in the shadows it struggles and then if you drop it down by a stop it struggles even more for now i'm going to keep the exposure compensation just level at zero and it pains my heart but i'm going to let the sky blow out i come from a background of image manipulation and optimization and so i may just be nitpicking here but yeah don't drop the exposure compensation tip three maybe controversial i'm going against the big reason why a lot of people like this camera do not use the mobile app use the desktop app with the caveat only do this if you care about image quality the app itself really intuitive you can do some really cool things the desktop app and i say this as a product designer the desktop app is horrendous but you can get much better footage quality out of the desktop app again we're going to video nerd land here but on the phone you can only export a compressed h.264 file on the desktop app you can export prores 422. let me explain what that means to those of you who are not super nerds like me this camera produces a video but that video is compressed to save file size that compressed video if you edit it on the phone is compressed again the compression both times is pretty substantial on the desktop app the video you get out of the camera is still compressed you can't change that but the compression out of the app on the desktop is slightly less it's not quite lossless but it's prores 422. if you know about video codecs it's really pretty you know let me just show you the footage and then you'll see what i mean so that's tip three if you're a nerd like me you're gonna want to use the desktop app you know i was really hoping that this could be my one camera on the ride but the image quality just isn't there yet i am hopeful for the future but for now i'm gonna have to bring both cameras they both have a place in my toolbox but my toolbox right now is my jersey pockets and they're about to explode i guess that means i'm gonna have to get a bar bag what do you all use for storage on your rides especially on your long rides let me know in the comments and let me know what you thought of the insta 360 one x two while you're there if you haven't already give this video a like thanks so much see you soon

Channel: Mitch Boyer

Views: 40,963

Keywords: cycling, bikes, road biking, mitch boyer, insta360, 360 camera, cycling photography, giant revolt, camera review, action camera, bike photography, insta360 one x2, insta360 bike mount, insta360 bike ride, insta360 bike video, insta360 cycling, filming bike ride, riding bike with a camera, 360 camera on bike, 360 camera mount on bike, 360 camera cycling, bicycle, road bike, cyclist, cycling tips, insta360 one x2 review, best 360 camera, insta360 bike

Id: oVt0C26fMl8

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021