VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
When you watch the commercials for 360 cameras, they generally show you amazing cinematic footage of people surfing, skiing, skateboarding, mountain biking, and other wild and crazy stuff. A common thing of these videos is that they are short and contain no audio. That’s what 360 cameras are best at: wild action with no audio.
So when you try to vlog with a 360 camera, you face a set of problems that the advertisers never mention. One is audio. How do you record audio with your 360 camera, particularly with an older model like the Insta360 X3?
I shot this short video while I was getting ready for a day of shooting video, and I was mounting my microphone on the camera. I figured I might as well record it for posterity. So, here it is.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
A quick behind-the-scenes look at setting up my 360 camera for a little bit of a video shoot. My plan is to go out and walk around a local neighborhood, and it occurred to me that I haven’t given my 360 camera much love lately, and this particular walk seems like it might be a good way to use the 360 camera.
So, anyway, this is the Insta360 invisible selfie stick. And what makes it invisible is that it is thin and narrow. So that in terms of being an invisible selfie stick, the only special quality it has is that as a selfie stick, it is very narrow. That and that you need a narrow stick in order for the Insta360 program to make it invisible. So that’s the stick.
This is the camera, my Insta360 X3. I’d really like to upgrade to the X5 or maybe even switch over to the DJI. They came out with a new 360 camera. GoPro came out with a new 360 camera, but all of the new ones are much better than this one in terms of low light capability and video quality, like image quality. This one is a really good 360 camera. This is the X3 as I said, but it really needs a lot of light. You can only use it on really bright, sunny days. Otherwise, the video quality just falls apart.
I have this mounted on it right now because if I mount it on my bicycle, I need this RAM mount. But I take that off, of course, and then I basically all you really need to do is screw the camera onto the invisible selfie stick. And that’s it. Now you’re ready to go. You can make it as long or as short as you want and now you’re ready to go.
But the issue is always audio. Audio is the problem every single time. Like when you look at camera reviews and people talk about how amazing this 360 camera is, they’re out there shooting little video clips of somebody skateboarding or skiing or doing something for 20 seconds that’s very visual and they’re not recording any audio. But as soon as you want to go vlogging with this camera, now you have to think about audio. And when you stretch out this invisible selfie stick, the built-in microphones don’t work. They’re too far away. So, it’s audio that is always the problem.
So, what you need to do with this particular camera, get out all your little gizmos here. And you need this, at least I need this to mount a microphone. So, what you do is put this bracket on with your invisible selfie stick. So, now that I have this bracket, and I’ve already removed the door here, which you need to do. So, now I’ve got a bracket there, and then I get my Rode Wireless Go microphone. So, here, this is my microphone kit right here. So, I take out my microphone and the receiver cuz this microphone system has one receiver and then two transmitters. And the receiver has to go on the camera. And the key here is that it has to fit into the invisible area. So, if I turn the camera this way, you can see that the Rode Wireless Go is just as wide as the camera. So, it’s actually hidden within what they call the stitch line. And that’s the key to the whole thing. So, the microphone has to be here. So, it becomes invisible. If, for example, the microphone was there, now it’s not hidden anymore because this lens can see it and you get a big black blob in the video. So your microphone has to be hidden on the edges and it has to be very very thin and then it becomes invisible.
So you put that there and then you need a special cable because the cable also has to be invisible. So for example, if you used a regular cable, let’s see if I have one handy right now. Yeah. So I’ve got here’s an audio cable. And if I put this in, I plug this in and then plug it into the camera, you can see that cable is flopping all over the place and it will not be invisible. So, what you need to do is use a special cable like this one and then it goes into your receiver and then it goes into the camera in theory.
But the other trick, and this is why audio is such a pain, cameras don’t have 3.5 mm audio jacks. Like, if I could just plug this in, I’d be all done. But GoPros don’t have this. No, no vlogging camera, action cameras ever have a 3.5 mm audio jack. So, now you need something else. So, what I need to do is put in this adapter. And this is an adapter from 3.5 mm to USB-C. So, you expose the USB-C thing. And you click this into place. So, now I’ve got the adapter plugged into the USB-C and then I plug the 3.5 mm jack into the adapter. And now you’re finally ready to go.
So, this is how you would go vlogging with a 360 camera using a Rode Wireless Go. And I guess Insta360 has come out with a new like a Bluetooth or wireless microphone of their own. And you don’t need adapters or plugs or anything. It connects directly to the camera, I think, via Bluetooth. But I don’t know whether it works with the X3. And that’s another reason upgrading to the X5 is very attractive to me because I can get rid of all of this junk and I could use the automatic Bluetooth connection and I won’t need a receiver. I don’t need an adapter and I don’t need a cable anymore. And the cable, as you can see, if you’re not paying attention and it twists now, the cable goes off to the left and now it’s visible in the video. So you have to make sure that the cable stays straight and stays in a natural line like that so that everything is invisible.
So that’s it. That is how you set up an Insta360 X3 with a Rode Wireless Go microphone.