This week, Insta360 announced a new workflow enhancement for its Pro and Pro 2 cameras, allowing filmmakers to render 180-degree crops of their 360-degree 3D footage quickly and easily. How? By using the company's proprietary Premiere Pro CC workflow and its branded Insta360 Stitcher software.
As you may be aware, Insta360 developed an Adobe Premiere Pro CC plugin to use with its Pro & Pro 2 camera models designed to greatly speed up workflow and reduce duplicated energy spent stitching and wrangling heavy VR footage. What it's done is create a proxy-based workflow that allows you to pull in a low res proxy file into your Adobe Premiere Pro CC timeline and make your edit decisions.
Upon rendering, the software will carry out the stitching only on the footage that found its way into your final cut, greatly saving time and drive space.
Premiere Pro Workflow
Built on the back of its Premiere Pro CC workflow, the company's latest enhancement, the 180 3D workflow, will be available for download and integration later this month. You can still capture your video in 360-degrees in 3D, but now in post, you will be able to decide whether you're going to use the entire 360-degrees or, if a 180 field of view is more appropriate, you will be able to quickly and easily set up that output.
To do this, you will point the front (where the LCD screen is) of your camera in the direction you want to face, proceeding to record video as you normally would. In post, you will be able to enable the 180-degree setting during import and this will only pull footage from the lenses required to create your 180-degree 3D content.
Insta360 Stitcher Workflow
If you're using the Insta360 Stitcher software to do your stitching, the workflow will be just as intuitive. It will allow you to automatically stitch and convert your footage into a standard VR format with a 180-degree field of view that you can then import into your favorite editing software and finish your edit.
Conclusions
This feature is definitely "nice-to-have" as there are plenty of instances where a project could benefit from front-facing 3D content without the need for the full 360 sphere. If this can be expanded, allowing you to crop and render flat (non-3D) video with a 180-degree FoV (similar to what the Insta360 OneX can allow you to do) especially if that can be done at a high frame rate, it could open up even more creative possibilities.
It could be pretty interesting to film from a drone and capture buttery smooth slow motion videos from the air. Or, just having an ultra wide-angle camera angle could come in handy on a project. All in all, if you find yourself needing to create 3D content with a 180 FoV and you own an Insta360 Pro or Pro2, that just became much easier to do.
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