Samsung Gear 360 is coming. Review of the camera and test footage
Someone has already bought it, others received it for tests from local Samsung branch or got it from Samsung S7 conference. I’ve posted the original review in Russian on Holographica, but I thought it’d be good to have English version as well. So, here it is.
I’ve been lucky to test the camera in the beginning of March in Tel Aviv in Samsung office. Samsung was a general sponsor of Steamer Salon — Interactive Storytelling Festival and Lab. As a lead mentor of VR Lab I’ve been working with fiction directors there to make them “think spherically”.
For that they had to produce several short VR films, which have just been premiered within the Marche du Film at Cannes Film Festival. Most of them were available to be watched at Israeli pavilion, while one of them was officially screened at NEXT program, which was a curated section of the best world VR films and experiences.
So… we really considered Samsung Gear 360 to be one of the cameras which those directors could use to make their films. To do that, I had to test it and I’ve been given 45 minutes to make this possible. Together with amazing director Gur Bentwich and Tal Haring, creator&producer of Steamer Lab, we did some tests which might be really interesting to those, who are looking for a good 360 quality with easy workflow or an additional camera for their general 360 production.
First of all, let’s speak about official specifications.
- Record 360° Spherical Photos/Videos
- Dual 15MP CMOS Sensors
- Dual f/2.0 195 degrees Fisheye Lenses
- 3840 x 1920 Video Recording at 30 fps
- 30MP Still Images in Dual Lens Mode
- Dual & Single Lens Modes
- Built-In Wi-Fi, Bluetooth & NFC
- Supports microSD Card Up to 128GB
- Google Street View Compatible
Camera works the best in Samsung environment, which includes camera itself, smartphone (Galaxy S6, S6 edge, S6 edge +, Note 5, S7, S7 edge) with Gear 360 manager app and GearVR to watch it. The quickest workflow would look like that:
- shoot (with live viewfinder on smartphone)
- stitch, trim and save on smartphone
- watch on GearVR.
However, that’s not the way you can use it for more professional production, so for that you can use your pc/mac with their Gear360 ActionDirector software or with alternative workflow, which gives you a chance to use Kolor Autopano Video software to make a perfect stitch.
That is why, resolution is crucial. At the moment, UHD 4K format (3840x1920, 30 fps) is the minimal preferable to shoot 360 material. Other 2 lens cameras like Ricoh Theta S or LG 360 or Giroptic are not giving this resoltuion in video mode, even thought all of them have their own advantages (one of them — you don’t need a specific model of smartphone to watch and work with material, and the deviced, suppported by Gear360 are not the most cheap one).
I won pair of Kodak SP 360 4K which works great as a pair cameras — you have two sources which might be easily edited in Kodak own software or stitched in Kolor. However, single Kodak camera doesn’t give you 360x180 (full sphere).
As a result, out of all cameras in the range of $300–$500, Samsung Gear 360 has the best specifications as a stand alone product.
Of course, it’s better to have the supported smartphone, but you can still shoot without it (and without monitoring) and download the material on your laptop to watch.
What is more interesting is a photo resolution — photo — 7776x3888. That’s way higher than Ricoh Theta S (5376 × 2688), however, stitching is not yet as perfect as it might be.
CAMERA
But let’s look on device itself first. Camera has a spherical shape with an access to battery, USB port and SD card from one side.
When I’ll own it — first thing I’ll do is would get rid of this cover, as you could not leave it open and shoot good 360 (white part would be in the shot) and without it you’ll have to stay with just a battery (and we all know how quickly batteries are drowning on those kind of cameras).
On top you’ve got the record button and screen, which shows you the most important information.
From another side you have buttons to access menu, turn on/off bluetooth/wife and turn on/off the camera.
MOBILE APP
Mobile App provides you with all the settings you can change on camera, bluetooth file transfer and wi-fi direct for live preview.
What might be really interesting is the HDR photo mode and maximum ISO 1600. With the f-stop 2.0 that might be really promising and give lots of creative choices for a low light video/photo.
As for video relosutions, that are our options:
I presume that 2880x1440 with 50 fps might be a possible option for some scenes which need a better syncronisation or some kind of slow motion in post production, so the material might be upscaled to UHD 4K in post. Well, as soon as we did it with 1920x960 and that was “fine”, this option might be really “good”.
MATERIAL
Now, let’s see what we have out of all this amazing devices — content itself.
- This is how the material looks like in a rough file.
2. And here is our equirectangular projection stitch “on the go” on phone:
I wanted to make a shot with the direct light on one lens, dark areas (in shadow) and close objects. So, the stitching is… I hope it is better since March :)
But what I’m interested in more than in stitching is the quality of the material. That what iFFmpeg tells me about the original file:
However, when we transfer it to the phone, that’s what we have:
So, you have h.265 on your SD and h.264 on your smartphone. That leaves you with 30 mbps in h.265 or with 60 mbps in h.264. That’s really great and might be compared with GoPro/Kodak SP 360 4K quality.
Here is a video test, occasionally shot in 2880x1400:
As you might see, we have huge stitching problems with a person being close to the camera on a seam line:
you can see — I’m quite far from the camera and still I’m really thin! I can thank Samsung for that, but I’d still prefer to go to fitness for this result than to be modified by this kind of stitching.
With photos in 7776x3888 pixels resolution you can see overlapping here:
And that’s what you have stitched:
I still think that with such a great overlap camera might did here work in stitching me (in a blue shirt) better.
As for the dark areas, we also did some tests and that what I had stitched by the app:
We shot it with the wrong balance and it has some blue areas with noise there:
however, we didn’t have it in original file:
So….stitch plus encoding from h.265 to h.264 makes some changes which destroys the image, so you have to be careful with that and try another methods of stitching.
And that’s where Nick Bicanic’s workflow can help you — I’ve wrote about possibility of bringing Samsung footage to Kolor Autopano Video several times, so that’s where you can find the workflow (made with Theta, but, basically, the same approach):
CONCLUSIONS:
45 minutes is not enough, but I see, that there are a lot of people in the Internet, who are looking for an actual photos/videos made with Samsung. Of course, you can go with their official videos:
But I hope that I gave you some kind of perspective about the possibilities of the cameras, which might not be found on their web-site
I think, that this a really good camera for unusual mounting:
And it’s a really great option to shoot something we do for VRability project, as with two lenses it might work perfect to mount to a wheelchair and see a persons subjective shot from one side and himself from another.
We didn’t have a chance to test pc/mac app, but I hope that this software would give you more options for a better stitching. If not — go to Kolor. My experience with Kodak software showed me that pc/mac app is not doing its work great, but Kolor might be as close to perfect stitching as possible.
So, let’s see when this small guy would be around your shops and hope that it would make a difference in the quality of VR 360 films :)
