IrishmanPDX wrote:Just a few not so quick answers to the questions about this video, unfortunately there is no simple quick answer!

1) Is this all MAC compatible ?
Yes.... However the video you saw was created using a paid version of Adobe Premier Pro, so there is a cost involved. You also need a pretty powerful MAC or Windows PC to be able to stitch and then edit the video. You also need a bit of video editing knowledge to be able to work with the footage.

The good news is that GoPro have released new software for the Mac that allows you to reframe (pan, zoom, tilt) your 360 footage for free that works with both the GoPro Fusion and the newer version of the camera the GoPro Max.

2) Are the video file sizes huge since you're using two cameras in one housing ?
With the GoPro Fusion, it is indeed two camera's in one housing, so you have files for the Front Camera and files for the Back Camera and each has it's own SD card. The file sizes for each camera are the same as a regular GoPro, there's just twice as many of them. However during the "stitching" process (joining the back and front camera footage into a single 360 spherical video) that increases the size of the files vastly as they are uncompressed video editing standard files. To give you an idea of the file sizes you would be dealing with:
Entire Flight Time 1Hr 35Mins
Entire File Size: 139GB
Stitched File Size: 321GB (and this could have been larger if I had exported in ProRes)
Time to stitch: (Depends on how powerful a system you have, but the average could be 2 mins per 1 minute of footage).
Edited File Size: 1.36GB

The newer GoPro Max only uses a single SD card and does it's stitching in Camera. So this is a huge workflow time savings, the downside is the bitrate is nearly 30% lower than the Fusion and for video editing on a Mac, you still need to convert the files for use with a video editor and this could take quite a bit of time.

3) What do you really like about this outfit ?
The ability to Pan, Zoom, Tilt the footage in post production. This is far better than using a fixed view camera. Have you ever been flying and seen something out of the corner of your eye and thought "I hope I caught that on camera" only to find out later it was JUST out of view of the camera lens? Well not a problem with a 360 Camera as you can turn the view around later on. Before shooting in 360, I had tried buying a 3 camera mount that attached to a wing strut. So basically to get certain shots, I would have had to use 3 different camera's, work with 3 different video tracks and this would have been 3 times the work. Now I can use a single camera and make it look like I have a multiple camera setup. Also the stabilization when shooting in 360 is fantastic. With the GoPro Max it's done in camera, with the GoPro Fusion it's done during the stitching process. Either way, it's amazingly smooth stabilization. All the footage you saw was shot at 30FPS. if you did that with a standard GoPro you'd see nothing but Jello in the footage. Not so with the GoPro Fusion.
GoPro's mobile app can also be used to edit short small clips very quickly if you have a compatible phone. The app used to be horrible however this year they really did put a lot of effort into updating the app and making sure 360 video was supported on it and I have to say, it's now pretty darned good and it just keeps getting better. So they really made some good choices by concentrating on that.
GoPro also recently updated their VR plugin for Adobe Premier Pro. Good news is that it's fantastic and has some amazingly useful and powerful bells and whistles while being even simpler to use.


4) Anything you don't like about the camera or software ?
Oh yes, shooting 360 has it's disadvantages. Overall, it's a much lower resolution than shooting with a standard GoPro. When you think about it, with a standard GoPro, you have a much reduced FOV that's being filmed in 4K. With the GoPro Fusion and GoPro Max you're shooting in higher quality (6K reduced down to 5.6K once stitched) but that covers an entire 360 degree sphere. So the same FOV as a standard GoPro could actually end up being less than 1080P. This means that the 360 footage is great for up close shots, but shots of the horizon or anything far away isn't going to look as clear or sharp.

It takes a lot of time to get the footage prepared with the Fusion due to the fact that stitching and stabilization needs to be done on your PC or Mac before you can edit the footage. So you need a lot of hard drive space, a very powerful PC or Mac and spare time. I found that with large file sizes like this it was best to prep the footage and let it stitch overnight so it was ready the following day.

Currently the best way to work with 360 footage is to get and Adobe Subscription so you can use their video editing software which allows for 360 editing. This will set you back a minimum of $24 per month. So it's an ongoing cost. There are alternatives out there, but the reliability and quality isn't there yet. GoPro does have free software for the Mac and there is a PC version being worked on, but I haven't used either yet so I can't comment on they work or what the quality is like, but I'm guessing it will be as basic as their mobile app.

When working with the footage and editing it, you still need a pretty powerful system, you also need a very fast large hard drive. Working from your primary drive is always best as external USB drives tend to be a lot slower than people think. Their access times can be much slower, they could also have built in sleep functions to preserve their durability and this all affects working with your footage.

If you want gauges on your footage that's another cost. Currently only the GoPro app has the ability to add gauges to 360 footage. So if you want gauges on your 360 footage on the Mac or PC, you need to use another program to create them and it's a bit of a chore to insert them into your footage.

The new Plugin that GoPro released for Adobe Premier Pro only works with Premier Pro 2019. Adobe recently upgraded their editing software to a 2020 version and it's caused issues with the plug in. So GoPro is working on an update but until it's ready you need to edit with the older version of Premier Pro (which is an issue but it isn't a huge issue).



So I hope that answers your questions. I know it was a bit of a slog but just wanted to make sure that you have all the relevant info. If you have any further questions or need anything more in depth, feel free to ask. My overall thoughts are that with shooting 360, you get back exactly what you invest into it. The more you invest (money and time) the better the return.

IrishmanPDX wrote:I would be interested in what you would consider "minimum system requirements" for editing mostly 1080p video, and the occasional 4k video for personal hobby use. Processor speed, number of cores, how much RAM, how much internal storage space, etc would be very helpful

If you have time and don't mind typing, perhaps a "Good, Better, Best" of system requirements. I am MAC based and would be using a laptop due to living in a camper while traveling if that matters.

I would assume the output from the GoPro Fusion or MAX would require the "Best" equipment ?

I can't give you info on Mac stuff since I'm a Windows PC based person, however I'm guessing similar specs apply. If you're shooting with a standard GoPro (lets say 1080P footage) then you don't need a top end PC, you can do that on your phone if you don't mind the small workspace and possibly heavily compressed footage. However it's a very bad idea to try and work with 1080P with 360 footage due to the heavy quality loss. Sure you can output the product in 1080P, but you need to first render and work with the 5.6K footage. Most 360 camera's have the option of shooting at a lower 3K @60FPS however the quality drop makes the resulting footage look pretty awful. So you need to shoot and edit in full quality.

So for this reason I would shoot for the highest specs possible in a laptop, after all it's going to help you render/stitch/output the footage faster. Lets say you're shooting with a Fusion camera. All the stitching and stabilization is done on the PC afterwards. On an average system you're looking at 2 minutes stitching for a 1 minute clip. The less powerful the PC the longer this process takes and that's just creating the 360 degree spherical footage to work with. You haven't even started editing yet... So always shoot for best PC you can get, after all, the more you spend now, the longer that PC will last you in terms of what's to come camera hardware wise.
Even shooting with the Max which does it's stabilization and stitching onboard the camera is still going to take time. This is because the Max records in it's own proprietary format which needs to be converted before you can use it in a 3rd party video editor and this conversion process takes time. However as previously stated for the MAC GoPro does have it's own GoPro Player which can be used to edit and export 360 footage, however I'm not sure how good that software is and what it allows you to do (color grading? create titles? Use more than one clip at a time?).

At minimum, I would say a core I7 -8750 processor (that's a 6 core processor). The more ram you have the better as you don't want to be creating swap files while you work, so aim for the 32GB. You'll also want a pretty decent graphics card in there, at minimum go for a GTX 1060, however the new RTX laptops are out now and there is a significant improvement in time when rendering with an RTX 2080 graphics card. It's important that you have such a graphics card as laptops with a built in card like the Intel HD graphics card won't work with most 360 video editing due to the fact they share the system ram, aren't fast enough and also don't support GPU rendering.
Hard disc space is also going to be very important. You'll want at the very least a primary drive that's an SSD (solid state drive) that's 500GB in size or bigger and a secondary drive that's at least 1TB in size. Since some 360 footage can easily top 500GB in size or more, this is pretty important.
Currently I'd expect to pay from $1500 to $3000 for a mid end to high end laptop for video editing.
There's a few other things to keep in mind such as installing all your software and programs on your secondary drive and leaving as much room as possible free on the SSD. Also while you may be tempted to just buy a cheap 4TB external USB drive for file storage you really can't edit from these drives as regardless of how they are advertised, they are just far too slow to edit from. I didn't realize this in the beginning and thought I had software issues as all the footage I was working with didn't have any audio on them. Turns out the audio was there, the drive just wasn't fast enough to edit video from (and this was advertised as a blazingly fast USB 3.0 drive).
So its not just about spending the money on the hardware, it's also about setting up your hardware correctly so you don't have issues.

On the wish list if you have money to burn....
An external monitor is a nice thing to have. That way you can have your laptop screen display your work area and the secondary monitor screen displaying your output as you work. This is handy for knowing exactly what your viewers will see when looking at the final product. Most decent video editors support this function.
Upgrade to a 2TB SSD internally (make sure your laptop allows this, most do, but it's all about ease of access and how easy it is to open your hard drive access door).

Ok, going to leave it here before I overburden you with info for now. However feel free to ask if you have any further questions. Also one last thing, there are companies out there who actually rent out camera equipment including 360 camera's. So you could always install the software and then rent out a camera to get used to how it feels and works for you.