Sunday, June 21, 2026
7:36 a.m. Room A1 Makhota Vibe Inn
Melaka, Malaysia
Yesterday was not an eventful day, so I don’t have a big story to tell. I spent some of the morning writing about my trip out to the ship graveyard and things like that. And then the rest of the day was devoted to reframing the 360 video that I shot on the island. When I started working on that, I had my usual mood that I was going to whip through those and get them done and then move on to editing the actual video. It was going to be fast and easy. Of course, that turned out to be a fantasy. I shot quite a bit of 360 video. More than I should have. I had a total of nine separate clips to reframe and I spent the entire day working on that, and I’m still not done. I finally called it quits when I completed number eight. I still have one more to complete this morning or sometime today.
The main issue with this is the exporting. I reframe my 360 videos on my phone so that I can take advantage of the gyroscope. And that works great. However, exporting the reframed video takes a lot of processing power, and even my Samsung Note 10+ isn’t up the job. It takes a long time. Each clip that I reframed was on average eight or nine minutes long. And the reframing process takes an hour from start to finish for each clip. Add that up, and you’re looking at nine hours straight of nothing but reframing. I think a modern flagship phone would do the same job in just a few minutes, but I’m not sure about that. I’d have to do an experiment to know for sure.
Exporting 360 video on my laptop would likely be a lot faster. It has the processing horsepower to handle it. But the reframing would be tedious and probably take MUCH MUCH longer. That’s the eternal problem. I’ve long wanted the ability to reframe the video on my phone but then export the final video on my laptop. And I don’t see any technical reason why this isn’t possible. The reframing is just data. All you need to do is transfer the reframing data (similar to transferring a GPX file with GPS coordinates) to the Insta360 desktop software and apply it to the video and export it. And there used to be a feature built into the Insta360 software that allowed for this, but there was a big caveat. You have to be working on the original copy of the video that is stored on your camera’s SD card. If you do that, then it is possible to save the editing data to the SD card in the camera and then transfer that to the laptop. But that’s only in theory. I’ve tried to do it in the past, but it won’t work. It is far too glitchy. It depends on a strong WiFI connection between the camera and your phone, and that never happens.
I really enjoyed working with the 360 video that I shot on the island of misfit ships. When I went to the island, I essentially did two entirely separate walkthroughs, exactly as I did at the Submarine Museum. I walked from one end of the island to the other while shooting video with my GoPro. Then I turned around and retraced my steps while shooting video with my Insta360 X3. Doing it that way while narrating in real time means that I’m not combining the video in the edit. I’m not mixing the GoPro video with the 360 video. In the final video, I’ll have all the GoPro video first. Then I’ll have all the 360 video next. One set of video clips just follows the other. And once I switched to reframing the 360 video, I really noticed the difference. The GoPro is always pointing in just one direction. And when it comes to a place as visually striking as this island of beached ships, it’s natural to always keep the camera pointed at the ships. Why would I aim the camera at my face when it is the most boring thing around? But I noticed that when I walked around for long stretches of time with the camera pointing away from me, it started to feel a bit empty of personality. It’s like the camera was just floating through the air, like a drone. There wasn’t a sense that I was there holding the camera, if you know what I mean. A couple of times, I did turn the GoPro around to aim it at me so I could speak directly into the camera. And that felt like a nice relief and a nice change of pace. And I did that only when I was walking away from one ship and toward another, so I knew the ship I had just visited was behind me and in the background of the video.
When I switched to the 360 camera, suddenly I could change the camera perspective more dynamically. There were lots more opportunities to have me in the video with the ships behind or around or below or above me. And that felt like interesting context. You saw not just the ships but you saw the scale of them with me in the foreground. You saw that I was right there in the middle of all that steel and rust. The video felt more visually interesting to me. So that is the big advantage of shooting 360 video. The disadvantage is the huge time commitment. And the time commitment isn’t just the reframing and rendering. There is also a much larger time commitment when it comes to copying the files. The original files are on my camera’s SD card. For every 360 video clip, there are three files: there is one LRV file and two INSV files – one from each lens and sensor combo. By the time I’ve finished the project, I have had to copy huge files five times: once from the camera’s MicroSD card to my laptop; a second time from the laptop to an external drive; a third time from the external drive to my phone; and then a fourth time as I copy the rendered 2D video file from my phone to back to the external drive; and finally, fifth time, I copy the final 2D rendered video file back to my laptop. That takes a long time when you are talking about as much as 70 gigabytes of video files.
There’s a possibility that the software and firmware has improved and I can now smoothly edit video directly from the camera. If that’s the case, I can test out this more efficient method: reframing on my phone but rendering on my laptop. That depends on the WiFi connection between camera and phone and between camera and laptop being strong enough and reliable enough for a long job. I’ll test that out today and see what happens. Fingers crossed. It could save me a lot of time.
5:00 p.m.
Good news! Since it was on my mind, I decided to test the 360 video reframing system whereby you reframe the video directly from the camera. And it worked! It never worked before. I guess since the days when I did my testing in the past, the software and firmware has improved. This time, when I connected my camera to my phone, the WiFi connection was strong enough to play the video smoothly and reframe it without any issues. It didn’t freeze at all. It didn’t even glitch or lag. I couldn’t believe it. And I was even doing the test with a huge 16-minute 360 video file. And once I had finished the reframing, rather than export the video on my phone, I simply saved a special metadata file containing all the reframing information. The feature to do this is somewhat hidden. It’s not in the place you would expect but buried deep in the Settings menu. But I found it, and it was straightforward and fast to do it. And it ended up saving a file to the MicroSD card that looks like this:
VID_20251124_093356_00_006_edit.insdata.
And once you have that file, you can simply do the render on the Insta360 desktop app. It contains all the camera movements that you recorded while reframing on your phone.
When you do the render through the full desktop app and not through the mobile app, it goes much faster and gives you a lot more options. You can improve the video quality with features like Color Plus and Clarity Plus. And you can increase the bitrate to as high as 200 mb/s. Just for fun, I started a render on my laptop and a render on my phone at the same time. And the render on the laptop reached 100% before the mobile phone job even reached 25%. And I know from experience that that job on the phone will just go slower and slower as it goes on. In fact, I completed 4 complete renders on the desktop app before the mobile app finished just one. It’s so much faster.
So I guess that will be my new workflow from now on. And that means I don’t have to be so nervous about shooting 360 video. It won’t take as long to do the work afterwards. Not only will the rendering occur at least four times faster, I don’t have to spend all that time copying and saving all the files. The originals can all just stay on the original MicroSD card. That saves a huge amount of time. So that was a very successful test this morning. I’m very happy about that.
MUSEUM VISIT
After I completed that test this morning, I set off with my GoPro Hero 12 to visit a new museum in Melaka called the Galeri Warisan Kokta Melaka or Fort of Melaka Heritage Gallery. I was mainly interested in seeing an exhibit there about the Melaka Fort itself – its history and construction. My theme for the YouTube video is going to be something like “Melaka, I have a bone to pick with you!” And the idea is that Melaka is not very good at telling its own stories. For one thing, I learned recently that the huge observation tower, the Menara Taming Sari was originally intended to be located right beside the Melaka Bridge near Dutch Square. But when they brought in the excavators to start digging, they hit some rock. And they realized they were digging up the foundations of the Middleburg Bastion! I guess they didn’t even know it was there. And they ended up halting construction and eventually moved the site of the tower over a kilometer away to where it sits now. And then they brought in a team of historians to dig up the rest of the foundations of the Middleburg Bastion and they uncovered the Frederik Hendrik Bastion as well. Of course, they knew that the fort once existed and they had access to old maps and paintings and drawings, so they had a rough idea of where it was. But I guess when they brought in the excavators to start digging, finding the ruins of the fortress right there was a complete surprise.
And it seems to me that this story should be advertised. They eventually reconstructed the Middleburg Bastion in full, and it is now a big tourist attraction. And there is a tourist information sign there that tells the story of the fort. But I think the human interest story about how the remains were accidentally discovered is equally if not even MORE interesting. And there should be a big “Did You Know?” sign right there as well. It’s such an amazing story.
And the other story that Melaka failed to tell me is that this Fort of Melaka Heritage Gallery even existed in the first place. I’ve been doing a ton of research and exploring to figure out the full extent and history of the fort. And as I’ve done this, I must have passed by the big white building a hundred times. It is a very striking building, and I’ve noted it every single time I’ve gone past. Yet, I had zero idea that there was a wonderful museum inside it! And I had zero idea that the museum was connected directly to the Frederik Hendrik Bastion, which sits right beside it. In fact, when they uncovered the Frederik Hendrik Bastion and turned it into a preserved historical site, they found four complete human skeletons dating back to the 1500s or 1600s. And those skeletons are now on display inside the museum. And they have a TON of information about the fort, including a wonderful model that shows its exact location right next to the Melaka Strait. All the information I had been painstakingly learning on my own was right there in that museum the entire time, and they did such a poor job of marketing it that I didn’t even know it was there.
So that is why I had a bone to pick with Melaka.
I enjoyed my visit to the museum very much, and I like this theme of having a bone to pick with Melaka. I really have that feeling. But it’s probably not worth the effort of actually editing and posting the video. I’ll end up doing it anyway, I’m sure. But it’s not going to be very popular or do anything for my YouTube channel. I have so many videos already about visiting museums here. I try to make them interesting and give them a point and a perspective, but they are still just museum walkthroughs in the end. People don’t even want to visit museums themselves, so why would they want to watch a video about someone else visiting a museum? But I’ll post it anyway. It could be my last such video from Melaka. Believe it or not, there are probably at least 10 more museums out there that I would find interesting and haven’t found the time to visit. But I should probably quit making videos about them.