GoPro has unveiled Fusion, a new pro-grade spherical camera capable of capturing regular and VR video at a 5.2K resolution. The camera will be released this fall, but ahead of the launch comes a pilot program that GoPro will introduce this summer. Interested professional content creators can apply to take part in the pilot program, which GoPro says will be used to 'refine the user experience.'
The company hasn't revealed many details about Fusion, saying only that it capable of recording 5.2K spherical video at 30fps.Operators will also be able to produce ordinary non-VR videos from spherical videos using GoPro's OverCapture technology. GoPro's CEO Nicholas Woodman explains that Fusion can 'capture every angle simultaneously... as though you had six GoPro cameras fused into one.'
I understand everyone's concerns about the quality, etc., but I think it's a given that the tech is going to continually improve. I am more interested in the larger view, e.g. VR's intended and perhaps unanticipated applications. Where can I read some quality discussion about where VR is going?
Quality is a two fold problem. One is easily solve-able, the other is not.
Resolution is the first issue with quality in 360º. Because the resolution is spread across the entire 360º, you have to divide the resolution by either 3 or 4 to get the effective resolution for any given 90º-120º FOV. If you want to look around in the video and have 4K equivelance, you need to capture in 16K. This is the easily solvable problem. We're already at 5.2K for $700, so give it a year or two and we'll be in the 12-16K resolution range.
The second problem is harder to solve. Resolution gives you more pixels, but if the light that hits the sensor is distorted you just get more distorted pixels. All 360º video suffers from very soft images because they all use small sensors and fixed 2.8-ish apertures. Peak sharpness is around 1-meter from the camera (and even that isn't that good) and everything else is soft. What we really need is something like a 1" or 4/3" sensor with an adjustable aperture.
Well the quality of the footage is predictable, since 5K is stretched to all sides, so the NET resolution in any given direction would be quite low. That's understandable and I'm guessing this will improve just like ordinary imaging sensors do. The fact that YouTube supports VR videos is cool though.
I'm still struggling with the idea of 360 footage as a whole... From watching that, yeah, it was cool, but what makes a good photo and or video/short film/feature film is the ability to smoothly direct the focus of the viewer between subjects. Half the time while watching 360 footage, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to look at.
But, the stiching on this thing was really good! I'm still struggling to find the stiching line
I think what we are going to see is less compelling use cases of 360º video playback and more compelling use cases for using a 360º camera to capture an experience and then crop out different FOVs from the same video in post and edit them together in a compelling story. Give it another two years and the quality will be good enough that you can use a single camera instead of two or three to capture the same scene. You often see people with multiple GoPro's strapped to themselves or a bike or a rig trying to capture two or three different FOVs around a subject. Soon you'll need just a single camera.
For stills its kind of cool in a way too, since you don't have to spend so much time framing things up in order to capture an experience. You just click. Everyone is guaranteed to be in the scene. To some extent you can recompose in post.
Un-be-lievable. At 4K playback, this sample video approximates about 720p at best. (The clips seem to vary a bit in quality, with the stationary clip being the clearest.) The ONLY 360 product that actually looks CLOSE to 4K is the yet-to-be-released Insta360 Pro (8K). And at $3500 for the base package, it still really only approximates about 2.7K quality video, IMHO. Maybe the stills it takes will be worth it?
Genuine question - what's the point? It doesn't look good, induces sea sickness and looks like a gimmick that quickly wears thin. Not sure who would want to make or watch this sort of distorted footage.
Don't look at it using a mobile browser (well, at least Safari on iOS). If you use a desktop browser you get the correct VR Youtube playback that allows you to pan around.
You really need chrome, then pick the 4k quality. Even then, its not super sharp. They have to have an alternate to the gopro Omni, which is crazy unaffordable. It doesn't look as good as the Samsun Gear 360 quality tho.
The point is this: https://goo.gl/ie8iLr There are places all over the world that are being destroyed every moment. While a photog can take a picture, it's only a cropped portion of the whole 360 experience. There's no real feel of the place. Many of us 360 cam lovers don't shoot videos. We take photos; no motion sickness to speak of. We do so to preserve the memory of those places. There are many cameras out there now that shoot 360 photos. I'd admit that all of them are quite disappointing. Before going with a Ricoh Theta S, I've checked out Samsung Gear 360 (gen 1) and LG 360. My conclusion: Samsung is pretty good with details, but horrible in dynamic range, despite its "HDR" mode, and it can't handle dark areas. Plus: it only works with Samsung's high end phones. LG: too much blind spot. And TBH, Ricoh is too low MP for me. I've been waiting for a better 360 camera. What I can tell, this GoPro is definitely better than Samsung (1st or 2nd). The only factor right now is price.
Same as Safari, Chrome for iOS doesn't support 360 videos. The only one that works is YouTube for iOS. By viewing 360 videos on Windows/Mac Chrome, you miss out on gyroscope movement.
The stitching is very impressive, I wonder what they are doing? The quality not so much, but early days. The stitching and parallax are the things that are the trickiest. Then again they might have captured 10,000 hours and came up with 90 seconds of good stuff... Hang on the sky isn't consistent, are these samples where the camera orientation is changed based on subject?
I'm interested in a 360° camera, with better resolution than the Ricoh Theta and with parents that love it more than Nikon's Keymission 360, so the GoPro name caught my attention, but - wow - that video is bad. I don't know what to say.
Actually the video is good. Possibly the best you can get now from a consumer device. As 3DSimmon said, make sure you watch it properly, and also stream the 4k setting (however note that it is 4K for the entire data, you see "at one time" on screen a resolution closer to 720p, with the IQ of the tiny sensor)
4k is the absolute minimum required for 360. It means a 600p (read PAL TV resolution) per 100 degrees FoV eye (non stereo/3D, 3D requires twice as much).
VR, in particular VR/3D, will fly when 8k hits the masses.
1080p covering 360 degrees? You really want it to look that bad?
I'm not making fun, but did you realize the 4/5k doesn't mean what's being captured in one frame, one direction at a time, right? That's the resolution for everything this camera is capturing.
Hence why it looks like crap.
As a matter of fact, when watching only one angle of the footage it's probably already at, or under 1080p.
splendic: Quality is not even @720p, which is strange as this resolution should be covered by @4K. It looks like this is either caused by poor youtube VR plugin or heavy processing (to stich multiple streams into one) or by low video bitrate.
arra, I wrote a whole response to you assuming the mushiness was due to whatever processing compromises GoPro made with this camera.
But then I went to Youtube to see if anyone else has posted a single tack sharp 360 video and couldn't find one. I guess there's potential for the mushiness to be caused on the back end.
Don't look at it using a mobile browser (well, at least Safari on iOS). If you use a desktop browser you get the correct VR Youtube playback that allows you to pan around.
If it floats, I'm sure it will make a great fishing float. Can't think of any other use for this mushy quality video... oh wait, cat videos...sure lots and lots of 360 cat videos.....
If it was even quarter decent, it would be an option for a 360 bike/cycling cam...but going by the sample (even allowing for youlube's downsampling) you need to have your face in the rear end of a car to see the plate....
That's exactly what I've been looking for... a good 360 cycling cam.
The problem is, it's going to be a loooooong time before we have one recording 360 degrees with high enough resolution to be usable, and isn't chewing through battery and card storage faster than a single ride.
As long as it doesnt end up being another Nikon Keymission 360... software, usuability and iq are going to be things I will look for before considering between Ricoh and this Gopro.
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