360 imaging is a new and exciting area of photography that’s quite hard to get your head around. The technical achievement is amazing, but the potential can be difficult to grasp. So here are 6 basic things about 360 cameras that might make things clearer.
1. It doesn’t matter where you point the camera
To use the motto of Insta360, one of the leaders in 360 imaging, you can “shoot first, point later”. It’s natural to point any camera, including a 360 camera, at the subject you want to film – especially since the camera, or the camera’s app, will present a flat ‘window’ on the scene. However, the camera will actually record everything around you as a 360° sphere, with you at the center. You can look in any direction you like once you’ve shot a still or a video and you’re looking at it on your phone.
2. It DOES matter where you position the camera
A 360 camera can look in all directions at once, but only from its own fixed viewpoint. If you want a high perspective, you’ll need to raise the camera on a pole or on a selfie stick. If an object is obscured by something in the foreground, it’s going to stay obscured. If you want a close-up you need to move the camera closer. 360 cameras can look everywhere, but they can’t BE everywhere.
3. Viewing 360 VR isn’t straightforward
You’ll be about to look around a 360 scene on your phone and you can upload 360 videos to YouTube where people will be able to enjoy the 3D experience online, but if you want to quickly share 360 VR stills or movies with friends, it may not be so easy. 360 VR is no longer a niche speciality, but it’s not quite mainstream viewing technology yet either.
4. Your viewers could be looking the wrong way!
That’s the disorientating thing about watching VR video. The camera records everything around it, but the action you’re filming will very often be in one particular area. If your viewers are free to look where they like, they can very easily (actually, VERY easily) just be looking the wrong way.
5. You’re always in the shot
Unless you put your 360 camera on a stand and move away before filming and hope somebody doesn’t just pick it up and walk off with it, you’re always going to be in the shot. Every shot. Sometimes in horrendous close-up. It helps to have an ‘invisible’ extending selfie stick, but you’re still never very far away. You have to learn to be an actor, or an extra, in your own movies.
6. You can create regular ‘flat’ video, but…
This is one of the major strengths of 360 cameras. Not necessarily the ability to create immersive 360 VR content, but to edit your spherical videos later to produce regular movies. The advantages are huge. You add camera movements later, panning horizontally or vertically to take in a scene, or control the ‘direction’ of the camera for run and gun style sequences. Some makers offer AI tracking for automatically following a chosen subject through a sequence. This is great for action shots, where you can cut to your subject, the scenery, your own reactions any time you like. HOWEVER, you have to remember that a 360 camera’s resolution, impressive though it might sound, is spread over the inside of a sphere, and when you edit that down to a flat video, you’re only using a fraction of that. So that while the latest Insta360 ONE RS 1-inch 360 camera I recently reviewed has 6K capture, it can only output full HD 1920 x 1080 ‘flat’ videos. So you get editing opportunities that action cameras don’t have, but you don’t get action cam resolution.