Insta360x3 camera

[Mixagon_imp]

Hi folks long time no post but here's my Insta360 x3 experience.

I've been on the fence a long time about buying one of these 360 cameras and watched a lot of you tube vids and finally decided to order the latest 360x3 with the bike kit and lens protector kit and two extra batteries and charger at the great expense of £577

All happy so far and it came well packaged and on time from Amazon.

Kitchen table full of kit and slowly learning the camera features etc. First thing put the lens protectors on because its hard to put the camera down without one lens being in contact with the surface its on and its not stable to stand on its end. The protectors come pre glued and stick on well but with these on the camera pouch and lens cover do not fit as the camera is now to wide

Switch the camera on to learn the menus and play around to find the recording function is locked and needs the 360app on my phone to unlock it ?
Easy I guess so try to download the app to be greeted with the message your 2018 android phone is to old for this app so download button is greyed out.

I did not want or need a new phone but to unlock, update, register and use this camera the app is needed so after much thought decided to buy a 2022 phone for a further £650

The camera is now unlocked, registered and updated and first ride planned with phone mounted on the invisible selfie stick in front of the bike so I can view forward and back and switch between me riding and where I'm going. I didn't set my helmet mic up at this time. I chose 3k not the 5.7k mode to save space on the memory card and tried to view footage on the small camera screen to see the message this needs to be viewed via the phone app. So blue tooth on, paired up and footage was visible ok. Tried to to do some editing via the app but was fiddly but yep could switch fwd & rear views easy but phone and camera got really hot and phone battery went down very quickly.

I always planned on using the free desktop editing studio from 360 so started to download to my desktop pc to be met with message this pc is not suitable with a list of minimum specs showing, mine was a long way short of these and a new pc was in the £1200 price range Looking at my laptop specs I was closer to the minimum and was hopeful if I upgraded the ram a little it would be ok, so extra ram bought and fitted and the 360 studio was downloaded.

I imported 45 mins of footage to play around with but the studio was very basic and laggy so I struggled but finished with 25 mins of footage to export to desktop, then the message popped up this will take 60 hours to convert and export due to low processing power
I did think about using a different editor but the 360 footage can only be used on the app or 360 studio and then needs to be converted to mp4 and exported for other viewing and editing. So the camera is fixed to the 360 software it seems until converted by it.

I've now sent the 360 camera back to Amazon for a refund and I would say to anyone thinking of buying one ... do not... unless you have a recent high spec phone and a top of the range gaming spec pc for editing.

I can make very good videos with my old phone and my desktop with windows movie maker so why did I bother with 2 weeks of 360 stress