Why Insta360’s X4 camera hits different.

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last week I came home to find insta 360’s Next Generation X4 camera sitting at my doorstep and a company wanting to sponsor a video about it I didn’t initially say yes cuz as cool as these 360 cameras look some part of me was thinking I have a phone camera now that I’m really happy with that I already take everywhere when would I actually use this and so that became my mission I booked a trip to London I took this X4 I took my phone so that we can find out what it actually means to own a 2024 360 camera so the very first thing you notice filming on this versus your phone apart from the fact that it looks like one meaty technological finger is that it takes a lot of the thought out of filming if people have this idea that 360° video is kind of pointless and for the most part I actually agree like am I realistically going to post a 360° video anywhere probably not but that’s actually not the point of it the point I think of shooting every single angle all at once is not to keep every single angle it’s so that you can decide later it’s to stop this this thing that all of us do anytime we think something worth recording happens all our attention disappears away from the moment and what’s actually happening and goes towards just focusing on keeping the framing right cuz you got one shot at this and God forbid you miss the moment where your sister blows out the candles of her cake for the 20th time but here’s what happens when you record something on the X4 because the 360 camera isn’t just shooting what’s in front of it but instead a full sphere of video all the time you get three options you can either use AI if you want to have zero involvement and your phone will automatically look around that footage and turn it into a clip that shows what it thinks is the most interesting moment at every step there’s the quick mode which lets you change the Viewpoint of the footage but by using quick tools like this little joystick at the bottom or the gyro sensors in your phone so as you look around physically you’re looking around inside that clip or what I think is by far the coolest deep track 3.0 which means I’ll just draw on an object I’ll tap the play button and it’s actually so impressive it just in real time changes the footage to constantly keep that thing in the center at all times and then if you want to get completely stuck in that’s what prom mode is for but the big thing that really makes it all click together this time round is that the camera now records an 8K resolution for a long time the 360 camera industry has kind of been stuck at 5.7k being the maximum and while of course that is still a lot of pixels it does mean that anytime you’d want to reframe your footage afterwards and you might want to zoom in a little bit on top of that there would be some resolution compromise but that is not the case anymore so that is definitely one perk but I still don’t think that alone would be enough for me to justify carrying around a whole extra Gadget so I started digging a little deeper what situations could I use this in where my phone just would not cut it and then I remembered there is another extremely powerful benefit from having one camera on each side that can both record at the same time well you get two cameras so that means yes if you decide you want to use it as a normal single action camera you can do that and you get full 4K quality at 60 frames per second it’s very pretty if you want a dash cam for your car then this is literally the highest end dash cam that money can buy shooting full quality 4K video both ways at the same time with the same Flow State stabilization that’s used to make mountain biking look smooth so it’s almost good enough for my driving if you wanted a webcam it’s going to be that too with an incoming update but a webcam with two ultra wide cameras at once covering every single person in the room with four directional microphones to individually pick up each person’s audio or actually where whole multiple camera thing really hit me was when I remembered the unbreakable Tech video that we filmed a few weeks ago we were shooting this car in our garden and because it’s such a fast car and we didn’t know where it was going to end up we had Josh our main cameraman filming from one Viewpoint we had Joseph our everything man filming from another Viewpoint and then we had drer from another whereas this X4 has made me realize that all I would have needed to do was to stick it in the ground and leave it there because it records everything you’ll be able to focus on the car as it approaches the camera you’ll be able to track it with complete accuracy and smoothness carry on following it as it goes past you and then also whenever we decide we want to show where I am in the frame so zero people on camera oh actually can we just talk Hardware a second I wanted to start the video with Hardware drisha told me no ear and stop no one will watch it but maybe you’ll find this cool because unlike phone companies insta 360 only upgrades their cameras once every 2 years so the jump in specs on the X4 versus the previous already very well reviewed X3 I think is massive like the battery lasts almost 70% longer just to give you an idea the GoPro Hero 12 can shoot 90 minutes at 5.3k this can shoot 135 minutes at 5.7k in 360° it’s powered by a new 5 nanom AI chip which makes just everything run faster it boosts the footage transfer speed to between 50% and 100% faster and also it allows the camera to shoot that footage using high efficiency video coding which basically means the new higher quality 8K clips now take up Less storage space than previous lower quality Clips it’s got a bigger more colorful display but if you don’t want to use it you can control the camera with gestures in case you’re wearing gloves or you want to make it super easy to teach your grandparents as well as Ultra wide mode there is now Mega view which is absolutely insane it feels like a field of view that shouldn’t actually even be possible like I can see both sides of my hand in one frame which is is this what it would look like if we also had eyes on the back of our heads the body is more durable the glass is now Gorilla Glass it comes ready to fit removable lens guards too which now come included in the box and I have to say do massively improve the durability oh yeah and the whole thing is also dive proof to 10 m and then as far as recording is concerned I’ve already mentioned that normal video is now up from 5.7k to 8K and well just to give you an idea this is what that looks like in practice with my insta 360 X4 next to last Generations in 360 X3 but it’s not just normal video slow motion is also now way higher quality you can take 5.7k at 60 frames per second and then 4K at 100 frames per second which is a world first for a 360° camera and when you combine slow-mo and 360 you can do some very interesting stuff and if you want to take a time-lapse video instead of 8K resolution which by the way is already four times the resolution of 4K this thing can shoot in 11k resolution which I mean what does that even look like so I tested it and well it does need decent lighting that is one restriction but feed it that and yeah no phone has ever recorded anything like this you can move to any angle and it looks good because there are just so many pixels present and then what I find really cool is that because it’s 360 footage you can also just keep zooming out and that is your 11k resolution mini globe of a memory the other thing that I’ve come to realize is does this not look an awful lot like Drone footage because this is essentially two cameras each with a 210° field of vision you do get a tactical blind spot which allows the selfie stick that you use to just disappear and for the camera to look like it is flying I don’t think it’s a full drone replacement like we’ve started using a drone every now and again like in our unbreakable Tech video actually where we hired out this big lift and we wanted to get a shot of the full scene this can’t do that actually probably could if I just attached it to a 3M selfie stick and then stuck that selfie stick to the lift I was on yeah that would be the same thing right well I guess the point that I was going to make is that this can be do a lot of what a drone could do in the way that many people do use drones but without most of the downsides it’s silent it’s easier to control it’s cheaper it has longer battery it’s less fragile and it isn’t going to suddenly decide to kamikazi into the nearest tree but what I think is the most important part of this equation is that this can use M mode which means even if you film as you’re normally filming like not really paying particular attention to which way the camera is facing it will just stay locked onto your face it’s also got a gyroscope on the inside that can not just keep you level with the Horizon in one axis but literally in full 360° all the time it’s an effect that I have never seen on any other camera I’ve ever used I do still feel like the phone is always going to be the first camera you reach for cuz nothing’s more convenient than that but then this for anyone who’s like just a little bit more creatively oriented feels like it covers just about every other possible use you can think of without having to Lug around professional camera gear but okay everything that we’ve talked about so far I would say those are the fundamentals where this gets particularly spicy is with shot lab this absolutely enormous list of different types of effects that you can create think filters for your camera but just to another level because they’re actually fully taking advantage of this camera’s panoptic ability to see everything all at once also the list is like twice the size now compared to when I first booted it up on the X3 so with that last camera I showed you how you can swap out the sky which is still here but now has more options I thought electric surge was so cool cuz it can automatically loop around you with these lighting effects there was bullet time which is of course also here just now in higher quality on the X4 but it feels properly Next Level now there’s flash Dash which looks like a move out of Dragon Ball rest in peace Mr Toriyama by the way that was heartbreaking there’s AI War which is absolutely Next Level you pick a style and then AI completely reskins your video in that style and then there’s even Inception looking Horizon bending effects and it’s always shocking how cool the end clip can look even if the base clip is literally me having a walk on the street now I do think that this camera itself is starting to reach premium tier pricing like the X4 is $499 but shot laab is for me what makes that worth it because it is vast in terms of what it lets you do and completely included in that purchase price the only one exception to that is AI warp which has a cap of three free uses a day presumably because it’s quite expensive on their and to process it but like gopro’s equivalent editing Suite is much more basic but also it’s a paid subscription and if you want to know the state of subscriptions in 2024 well I have the perfect video for you I’ll link it from here and for the insta 360 they’ve also given us a special link that gets you a free invisible selfie stick with the camera so that is in the description too