Inside The Lens: Insta360 X5 & the Future Of Immersive Video With Adam Stringer
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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. We have an interesting guest, Adam Stringer. He's the director of the Insta360 camera. He was very generous and gracious and sent me a whole setup

which I'm going to leave to my son, who's more tech savvy, to set that up this weekend. So I'll be getting my own experience of the camera, which looks cool. It says 8K on the box. And I know from watching TV, 4K is pretty amazing. So an 8K camera is going to be like very ridiculously good. So I'm looking forward to that. Thanks for coming, Adam.

Brilliant. Well, yeah, thanks so much for the invitation, Richard. And I'm glad to hear that you've already received your X5 and you're looking forward to testing it out. And that's right. So I'm the Director of Partnerships here for Insta360 in North America. And key areas that I focus in for my work is our brand partnerships, especially within motorcycling with

with BMW, with Harley-Davidson, and then also on the winter sports side with all of our winter resort partners. But yeah, outside of that, I also work at a lot of other key verticals too, including tech, travel, lifestyle, virtual halls, enterprise use cases, construction. So there's really quite a broad scope of work we do here at Insta360. And yeah, really excited to talk more with you about Insta360 and especially on new

X5, which recently released. Okay. So what was the, is this a long line of cameras that just got more and more capable or is this a new invention that was, you know, that just hadn't existed at all before for you guys? Yeah, great question. So we've been working on our X series of cameras for quite some time now.

And this is now the fifth generation. So the X5 and it's came quite a long way since the beginning. The company has been going now since 2015. So this year on our 10th anniversary. And now the X5 is really the culmination of all those years of experience and technological breakthroughs to be a complete success.

Undoubtable industry leader in 360 action cameras right now. Yeah, and it says 8K and the camera itself is like, it's about half the size of a smartphone, which is crazy to pack all that into a small device. Is that like in the field of cameras and the resolution, where does this one stand in terms of like size to, you know, to I guess pixel density ratio, you can call it. Yeah, it's quite a,

a mighty little piece of equipment that's that's for sure in terms of power power to size ratio and in terms of 360 action cameras right now it's leading with 8k 360 video and i know you mentioned before that 4k even sounds like a lot but yeah 8k is uh pretty incredible and also you gotta think too with it being a 360 camera that's 8k but those pixels are dispersed in a full 360 sphere right so

Let's say when you're shooting in 360, but then you want to cut out, let's say, one direction or one angle for a video that you might want to edit and share on social media or YouTube. Depending on how you reframe and cut from that 360 image, you could get around like a 3 to 4K image when you actually like cut one perspective. So how many cameras are embedded in this form? And there's one, it looks like one camera, I guess, but how many are in there? So in terms of lenses that...

the x5 has two lenses and we have a lot of different 360 cameras in our in our product line we have the x series and we also formerly had the 1r 1rs rs 1 inch 360 but the x series is our leading our leading 360 camera line and the x5 is our new flagship and it has these two fisheye lenses which each shoot around a 200 degrees field of view and then with the tech

it can then just merge those images and make a really kind of seamless stitch line. So when you're shooting, you're shooting everything. And the real beauty of that is, let's say you're just traveling on vacation and you want to get some cool shots. Recently, I was actually jet skiing, which was really nice. And I was just holding the stick pointing forward and there was a dolphin. Yeah.

zooming around which was really cool and let's say normally if I was videoing that with my phone or a traditional camera you have to really think about framing all your shots and making sure you're pointing the camera at the subject you're wanting to record however that would obviously detract a lot from my experience and things like dolphins they're popping up they're here they're there it's hard to know where they're going to be right so when I had my Insta360 x5 on the selfie stick I don't need to worry where

where the camera's pointing and where it's framed because it's filming everything so i'm enjoying my activity the camera's rolling i'm rest assured that it's filming everything going on and then after the activity in the app i can then all in check all those moments and i have everything

Yeah, but I mean, to do the 360, though, I would still think unless it was above your head, you'd have to turn around, you know, about 180 to capture everything, everything around you. I could see it, you know, capturing approximately 160 or 180, depending on what you're facing. But how much do you have to move to get a true 360?

So no matter where the camera is placed, it's shooting in full 360. It depends on the camera mounted. So in this scenario, I had the X5 on the invisible selfie stick, which is around one meter long, the stick that I was using. So then I can point that forward and point it in the air. And then also the cool thing about these 360 cameras is there's basically an invisible blind spot right below the camera. So what's

that selfie stick becomes invisible in the video. So the resulting shot is kind of like a drone shot. You don't see the stick, you don't see the stitch line, it just looks like a floating drone. So for example, I'm talking about this jet ski shot that I was doing, I was pointing the selfie stick forwards and upwards in the air a little to get a good view of me and the surroundings showing the dolphins. But I could also mount it, let's say to my chest if I wanted. And

And although it's shooting in 360, it would then capture, let's say, a really wide angle forwards facing POV. Have you had, I don't know why, I guess, I like real estate, but have you had realtors use this? And if so, do they make really cool videos of the properties? Absolutely. Absolutely. So one of our leading software providers in this space is Matterport, which we're going to soon be announcing our compatibility with X5 and Matterport, just like all the previous X-series products. Yeah.

And yeah, great and amazing immersive virtual tours for real estate is a huge use case. And especially you were saying before, you know, it's just a pocket sized tiny little camera. You put that in your bag, in your pocket, you pull out the tripod, the selfie stick, and then you can get these incredible 72 megapixel virtual tour shots in like super quickly with the different... And also what's quite nice is...

Our cameras are compatible with multiple software providers. So whether you want to use Matterport or any of the other leading providers out there, you have the flexibility to choose. But yeah, in a matter of, let's say, 30 minutes, you could probably scan, for the most part, a standard size property and then build your virtual tour. So it's pretty powerful. Has there ever been a use case to combine this with drone footage?

and then mesh the two together. So you're not only getting like this 360, but you're getting like just, I don't know, just even more data from a certain situation. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the 8K quality now, especially with the X5, you can merge that footage with lots of other high quality footage. And whereas maybe let's say on the 1X, X2, when you cut and reframe that footage and then integrate it into with, let's say other big cameras or drone footage, you might see that quality difference. Yeah.

But now it's really nice with X5, that 8K footage, even when you reframe it, you're still going to get that 4K, 3K style footage that fits really nice. Let's say if you want to then combine it with drone footage or DSLR footage, you're not going to see like a big gap in quality there. So to answer your question, yes, it cuts really nicely with drone footage. And speaking of drones, we also have a fun campaign we often do where we say no drone, no problem. So...

Let's say if you're in a national park and there's strict drone laws or you're in a city and you can't just whip out and fly your drone around or on a mountain at a ski resort and it's not safe or again, rules prohibiting drone use. You can use our camera on the invisible selfie stick and you get that drone-like shot for a fraction of the cost and it's super easy. And we also have, Richard, 10-foot long selfie poles available at our online store, which

which is pretty funny like you can put you put the camera on the end of that 10-foot pole and when you raise it in the air it literally just looks like a drone angle and it's really easy to control as well and i've used that in quite a few cool cool scenarios what about uh stores or security or banks you know instead of a video camera tucked in the corner and the ceiling or even the ones that are in the ceiling you need multiple cameras to get some kind of view i could

picture a couple of these like drops down from the ceiling, you know, sitting there that could get a much better view of everything going on and much higher resolution. Yeah, I think that's a pretty cool use case idea. And right now I'd say the hardware is there with our cameras, but it would then need, I think, the software and the app being built to

to go around that to make that use case um feasible but that's something we may potentially explore more in the future regarding the safety aspect of our cameras we already have a lot of motorcyclists and car car drivers that will use these as dash cams because you can just plug it in by the usb c so you can just power it as long as you like you can put it in loop recording mode

And then you get that unique 360 dash cam perspective, you know, shooting everything. So again, you don't have to worry about framing. You can be rest assured you're really capturing everything. And for motorcyclists, especially, this is something that's just not existed before. So we're finding that that's a valuable tool for those guys to help them keep safe on the road.

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Can you, um, so like at 8K, I don't, I guess the camera wouldn't be operating 8K at all times, but, um, let's say I have a scene, I don't know, my friend's like water skiing and I want to get some cool footage of him. But when he gets close, what I would like is his face and maybe his body to be in 8K. I mean, 8K right around him, but everything else, it's okay if it's like 4K or even 2K because it's, it's like my normal vision, you know, peripheral, I don't care as much.

let's say but if I want to focus on certain things within a scene can the camera be tuned to do like facial recognition again increase the the pixel density on certain parts to get more detail I'd say there are maybe third-party softwares that allow such advanced features like that but standard when you're recording let's say eight

8K 360 video, the whole video is going to be shot in 8K. And then you can just kind of cut and edit that as you like. So I understand your point, Richard, that peripheral is not as important. But yeah, it's still fine to shoot in full 8K 360 and then you just capture everything basically. What about if I want to later zoom selectively on certain parts of the footage? Because you're recording natively in 8K, does that allow me to zoom more without

image distortion or blurriness than otherwise it would. Exactly. Exactly that. So let's say if you've got a 1x2 or an x3 and they shoot in 5.7K, when you then want to go and cut and crop and really pull in on a certain angle, you're going to sacrifice quality there. However, with the x5 now having 8K,

You can still put and zoom in on those angles and not sacrifice as much quality and you can maintain really nice shots. Yeah, that's really cool. Are there any cameras out there that do 12 or 16K or is that not even possible yet? I'm not aware of that yet, especially like handheld action cameras. X5 is by far the industry leader right now. We do have, you know, Pro X5.

pro um 360 cameras like a pro 2 and a titan that's shooting uh stereoscopic vr but yeah those things are definitely not gonna fit in your pocket and and uh are at quite a significantly higher price point so probably not for the average user i'd say yeah size and price point the power ratio i'd say x5 is by far uh the leader right now yeah that's really cool um

Is there, can you put any attachments on it, like lenses, like a macro lens? You know, let's say I want to shoot a really, really tiny scene or really close up. Let's say I want to like zoom in on a flower and look around as if I'm like a bee, you know, and each of the flower petals are really close to me. So I would need a macro lens. Or if I'm in a big expansive area, can I somehow like tell a photo or something to just so I could see even more? Can you do that?

Okay, so yeah, we don't have macro lenses for 360 cameras, but the focal distance is really short and you can get amazing shots. And we have some really cool stuff shot with flowers, with people using the X5 on the invisible selfie stick, really sticking it right into the flowers and you just raise that stick up and get...

get amazing shots um and then regarding our accessories for the camera so there's there's literally hundreds and hundreds of accessories depending on the the sport you like to do or your hobby uh different tripods different selfie stick lengths different cases there's

there's infinite accessories almost so no matter what your shooting scenario is you can you can set the camera up and get amazing results and regarding accessories one that I really wanted to mention with the X5 today actually is a pretty groundbreaking new feature for 360 action cameras we've got the first replaceable lenses on a 360 action camera so one of the big pain points previously with 360 action cameras was because those lenses are fisheye and

and there's two of them, one on each side, they can often ding up. Like if you put your camera down on a hard surface, even, or you drop it, or you just ding it on something, basically. In the past, you would then have to send that camera in for repair to the headquarter. It can take a bit of time, cost a bit of money, and it's just,

quite inconvenient so now though with x5 we've got like a locking mechanism around the lenses and for thirty dollars you can get these lens replacement kits so if you ding up your lens you can just literally replace it in a matter of minutes at the comfort of your own home

and it's done it and it's ready to go with previous generations you can put lens protectors on like we had plastic ones and glass ones that did protect the glass lenses but you know you guys know that's just an extra point of refraction maybe it steams up a little bit or gets dirty and can degrade the footage but that's really a massive new feature with the X5 probably the biggest pain point of all 360 action cameras is just dinging up those lenses and dealing with

that so yeah the replaceable glass lenses is massive and already people are super excited about that we've had some really funny videos of our partners purposely actually smashing up lenses and then showing how easy it is to replace them that's really cool that's a good idea

Or if you're in a place where there's sand that's blowing or other stuff, what if it abrades the lens over time? If you have it outside, maybe sunlight, UV, ocean spray, maybe salt gets on it, again, or sand, and that abrades the lens. You could always put new eyes on it if it gets cataracts, I guess.

Exactly. That's another good point because obviously these 360 cameras are built for action and to be capturing in also harsh environments. So when you're pushing it like that and the lens gets scratched up or degraded over time, just being able to replace that now in a couple of minutes for less than $30 is pretty sweet. Is there like a waterproof housing you could put over it or a night vision housing or an infrared housing?

instead of like putting it I mean I guess you could either put in a lens or maybe you could put something that just goes over the whole camera that has a hole in its own lens so now you can do again night vision or infrared or something. Yeah so regarding waterproofing the camera itself the camera body is waterproof to a depth of 33 feet without a dive case housing which is really nice so let's say if you're like me going jet skiing and it's getting wet or dipping in the water there's no problem there but

But if you really want super high quality footage under the water, you can just pop on a dive case, an invisible dive case. So basically when you put the selfie stick on the camera and you're, let's say scuba diving or sticking it underwater, you still get that really clear, amazing video quality. And the stick's going to be invisible too. And it's to a depth that I think past 150 feet. So it can go very deep, very deep indeed. Yeah, that's crazy. Oh.

Interesting. Any applications for the camera that surprised you? You know, like people that you've partnered with or that you've spoken to and you're like, really? You know, like weird applications you never thought of. Yeah, that's a good one. So there's so many, I guess, popping into my mind, like weird and cool applications. One that recently was just really impressive that's been going viral was we got this partner called

out here in the US and what he did he was at this like beautiful waterfall and he was stood on the path and he had the invisible selfie stick and he had like a little floaty grip like he kind of taped to the base of the stick and he actually put some like fins on the bottom of the stick to make it more aerodynamic so he stood on the top of this waterfall and with his x5 he could

threw it over the waterfall like a javelin like through the air so it arced over the waterfall and then dipped right down over the water following the water down and into the pool at the bottom and now because x5 shoots 4k 120 frames per second he basically made this incredible like javelin style video that looks just like a floating drone flying through the air in slow motion and then dipping over the waterfall and landing and that was really incredible so i'd

I'd say that was one that stood out recently that I've seen. Again, some really beautiful virtual tours and people using it for the photo taking abilities, which are really amazing. And then also I think because motorcycling and winter sports are both really like key user groups for us. I've seen some amazing stuff here. Like one of my favorite ones with the motorcycling is people put it on the selfie stick and they attach it to the back of their motorcycle. And because

And because that stick is invisible, the resulting shot, it's just like a video game style third person shot, like following the bike along the road. So those are really awesome too. How many frames per second is the 8K, the most recent one? So 8K shoots 30 frames per second 8K. And for most shooting scenarios, I'd say that's generally going to be

going to be sufficient like um so is there a trade-off then if i wanted more frames per second i couldn't have as high a resolution or no exactly exactly so for example if you want to shoot in 8k you can shoot 8k 30 but then maybe you want to shoot 4k 120 frames per second so it's always that kind of um yeah the higher frame rate you sacrifice a bit of resolution but we still find that with 4k one

120, you still get amazing quality. And especially if it's just a video, let's say for social media, that's going to compress the video anyway, it's still going to generally be sufficient. And with X5, yeah, you can get really, really nice slow-mos. That's what I was going to ask you, right? How do you, I guess a real slow-motion camera would be like, what, 10,000 frames in a second or something? But, yeah,

Do you ever see that? Could a slow motion camera ever be integrated into, you know, your camera or is it just the form factor is way too small? Who knows? And so yeah, form factor and price point, we have to kind of balance out there. So for kind of a pocket sized, uh, camera for $549, we can't, we're not quite at the 10,000 frames per second just yet. Uh, but who knows, who knows in future generations what we might pack in there, but yeah. Uh,

8K30 is probably our standard shooting mode that most people use, but yeah, going down to 4K120 still looks pretty epic. Any calls or interest in infrared or night vision? That's not really the...

The area where this camera lives. Yeah, it's not particularly the area this camera lives, especially the infrared. But regarding night vision, with the X5 now, so the image sensors are 144% bigger than that of the X4. So the low light performance is way, way better. Pulling all of those details out of the shadows, not having that kind of grain and noise that you might have seen in the footage from previous generations. We also have an upgraded Pure Video Mode, which basically uses AI to kind of denoise

those shots and really choose all the best exposure for the camera and settings depending on the shooting scenario in low light. So we've had a lot of people really singing the praises of that and some great content coming from our partners, from people reviewing the cameras online. And I would say that's actually probably the two biggest upgrades with the X5 compared to previous generations is going to be those replaceable glass lenses that I was talking about. And then those like giant image sensors that it's got now giving you the

real amazing low light performance. Well, you know, if I have like the top of the line photo editing software, video editing software, and I get, you know, a video from you guys in 8K and they get it from, you know, someone else in 4K, what can I do more with your video that I couldn't do with someone else's because of the much higher resolution? And so are you talking about there, Richard, you get 360 images or videos, one in 4K in 8K? Right.

I get one from you guys and then you X number of years ago. Like, what can I do as like a top end video editor with the footage you guys have now that I couldn't do before? I'd say, uh, primarily what you can do now with, with the AK footage, it's just, it's just going to be way high quality, um, with me way more data, way more detail, um, giving you more flexibility for, for grading basically and playing around with the footage. So yeah, just, just,

far superior quality, but in the same kind of format. Do you have to use like a different compression framework? Because 8K, I would guess, would produce a lot of data every second versus 4K or even less. Yeah, so regarding the actual compression frameworks, I'm not sure if it's changed too much from previous generations. But generally, what's really nice with our editor when you're having to deal with that 8K footage is for most people like myself, people

people will just do the editing on the Insta360 app. So like when you get the camera, you get the Insta360 app for iOS, for Android, which is completely free.

And then you can just remotely connect to the camera via the camera Wi-Fi Bluetooth and then edit the videos from the camera on your phone. And then you just download locally to your phone to edits and the videos you like and all those big heavy video files, the 360 8K files. They stay on the SD card on the camera. So it saves kind of your phone memory there. But let's say if you're on the more like prosumer end of things and you're really wanting to custom all the settings and maybe reframe on our desktop,

Insta360 Studio app

You can do it on there. No problem. If you prefer desktop editing, that's also free, comes with the camera. And then you can export in, let's say, 4K ProRes for long-form YouTube videos. It has a direct Premiere Pro plugin on our studio as well, which a lot of editors like. So we can try and give all of our users from the lower end to the higher end the flexibility to choose the editing workflows that work best for them. Okay.

And right now, where can people get the camera? Is it available on Amazon and stuff or where do they have to go? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of places that you guys can go to pick one up. We have the Insta360 store on our website.

You guys can check it out there. We also have them available on Amazon. It's just going to be maybe the fastest actually in terms of delivery and shipping. And then Costco, Best Buy, B&H, your standard stores like this are also going to be stocking our products. But yeah, I'd probably say Insta360,

online store would be the best place to go and pick one up and for the X5 right now the standard bundle it's just $549 so you definitely get a lot of bang for your buck in this pocket size pocket size camera well excellent well thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for sending me one looking forward to using it and this was a great call I appreciate it thanks Adam brilliant thanks so much Richard

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