The Camera Upgrade: A Hands-On Review

As I sat down to test out this new webcam, I couldn't help but think that it was about time for an upgrade. My current setup had been working well, but I knew that there were limitations to what could be achieved with a standard webcam. I was excited to see how this new device would perform and whether it would live up to my expectations.

First Impressions: Zooming In

I began by testing out the zoom capabilities of the camera. To my surprise, it was able to zoom in quickly and accurately, allowing me to get a close-up look at myself without having to move too far away from the camera. The autofocus feature also worked seamlessly, tracking my movements with ease. I was impressed by how smooth and stable the image was, even when moving around rapidly.

The Limits of Distance

As I experimented further with the camera, I found that its ability to track me began to falter at a certain distance. I estimated that it could accurately track objects within about four inches of the camera's focal length. While this may not seem like a significant limitation, it did mean that the camera struggled to keep up with my movements when I was farther away.

Gimbal Control: Smooth and Stable

In addition to its zoom capabilities, the webcam also featured gimbal control. This allowed me to tilt the screen down without having to physically adjust the angle of the camera, creating a smooth and stable image. The gimbal also helped to minimize distortion, ensuring that my image looked sharp and clear even when I was at an unconventional angle.

The Desktop Mode: A Game-Changer

One feature that caught my attention was the desktop mode, which allowed me to switch from the standard webcam view to a downward-facing shot. This proved to be incredibly useful for unboxings and other types of content creation where a more dynamic camera angle is desired. However, I did notice that this feature was not as effective on my laptop screen due to the presence of a keyboard and other distractions.

A New Webcam: Sold!

As I continued to test out the camera, I found myself becoming increasingly impressed by its capabilities. While it may not have been necessary for every content creator or streamer, I couldn't help but feel that this webcam was a game-changer. The ability to track me seamlessly and capture high-quality footage without having to move around too much made it an essential tool for my live streaming needs.

The VR Stream: A Demonstration of Tracking

One of the most impressive features of the camera was its ability to track me in VR environments. During a recent stream, I found myself crawling around on the floor and accidentally getting under my desk. The camera tracked me seamlessly, even when I was out of sight, making it an invaluable tool for immersive content creation.

Conclusion: Worth the Investment?

In conclusion, I would highly recommend this webcam to anyone looking to upgrade their live streaming or content creation setup. While it may not be necessary for every creator, its ability to track and capture high-quality footage makes it an essential tool for those who need it. With a price tag that's only slightly higher than a standard webcam, I think it's well worth the investment.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso I've been hearing a whole lot about this insta360 stuff lately especially since I watch a lot of car videos I've seen a lot of their 360 camera stuff on videos already but when insta360 reached out to me and said hey we have a 4K AI powered smart webcam are you interested in taking a look heck yeah I mentioned taking a look so today we're going to look at the insta360 link and their mini tripod to see whether or not this is something that is worth making it on your desk especially with live streaming and twitch popularity and all that today and YouTube live and all that and you know what to really put the camera to the test we got two of them and this video is being shot on one so regarding the setup we actually have our main camera here which is an fs5 which is what we shoot all of our videos on but we're gonna go ahead and use the insta360 as our a cam because I want to give you guys a really good idea of how it does with like YouTube compression and stuff um we are in a controlled lighting environment which is perfect for obviously any sort of webcam but with the popularity of you know live streaming services and stuff now uh We've watched a lot of videos about this and we really came to the conclusion that this would make an amazing main camera for anyone doing fairly stationary type of videos on YouTube or twitch or whatever platform maybe that you're creating videos for but we need to start with an unboxing here we got to see exactly what it comes with so the insta360 mini two-in-one tripod um it's just that it is a tripod that has foldable legs that you can also use and I didn't have a nice handy because you know thinking ahead of time is not how I do things it's got foldable legs on here so you can use it you know for any sort of small camera that you would be doing blogs or whatever with right there's no battery in the insta360 it does control itself through a USBC cable connected to a laptop or a computer or desktop I want to point out the cable that you saw attached to this right now the gray one is not the cable that comes with the the camera it's highly recommended that you use the cam cable that comes with the camera however this is a full data USBC that works perfectly with it we need a longer cable for this particular setup but the cable that comes with it is plenty long to be able to use attached to your monitor hooked up to your computer or whatever we'll show that with the unboxing but here is the mini tripod it's got the Fairly standard small camera mount you've got this guy which just snaps into there and then you've got the wing nut type of well clamping mechanism to clamp it tight so you can put it in any position this is just nice to have for any camera that uses a standard quarter inch thread whether it be a webcam or a small action cam because they do have action cams which are battery powered that is highly recommended if you're doing 360 videos of like an amusement park rides or whatever then this would come in handy but you can also use it as a mini tripod specifically for your you know your webcam and stuff so you can push the height up of the neck right there and then you've got a mini tripod to put on your desk to use in various meetings or whatever so that's everything that comes with the two in one mini tripod it's a nice accessory to have for your insta 360 cam if you're using a laptop or something and you want to get it away from your computer or you don't want to mount it to the top of your monitor in terms of the actual insta360 itself comes with everything that you're going to need to get up and running of course it comes with the camera it comes with the USBC cable itself it comes with USBC to a adapter in case you're using an older computer that does not maybe have a USBC or you don't have an available USBC Port um it comes with recognition markers four of them and that's specifically for the Whiteboard mode that I talked about which is where you can put the markers on the corners of the Whiteboard and when you enable whiteboard mode it's then going to frame the Whiteboard and track the whiteboard in view that way if you're doing say online lecturing online classes online teaching you see this isn't just a live streaming tool for entertainment it's also a business tool it's also a teaching tool and with all of the work from home learn from home and the amount of like from home stuff that we see now having something like this is extremely valuable to have so here's the camera right here on its gimbal Mount it's surprisingly weighty it's heavier than I expected it to be I mean obviously it's not too heavy it doesn't fold the laptop lid down or anything like that but if it's one of those things where if you're one of those people that's like wait equals quality well then this is quality right here and then you've got the accessories box inside we have our quick start guide we have our warranty information card it tells you the link to how to go install the insta360 link software um it also comes with their own USBC cable which again like I said is playing along for most setups if you have a monitor that has a USB hub built into it then all it needs to do is reach from the top of the monitor to the back of it which I've showed many times is a worthwhile way to do it it's a little less than one J arm span worth of length but it is USBC on both sides and then inside here you get a USBC a to USBC adapter so it'll work with any computer that has a standard USB a and then we have our whiteboard markers right here so you put these markers in the corner Each corner of the white board that way the camera knows where the Whiteboard is and tracks it I don't actually have a whiteboard to demonstrate that for you so you know it's one of those things that you basically would just have to take their word for it but I've watched some videos online of it already and it seems pretty awesome at tracking now that's everything that comes in the Box it's everything you need to get up and running and what we're going to do now is we are going to go ahead and get this guy set up and then we do need to do a firmware update the software is actually really intuitive and easy to use so let's get up and running so that we can you know show you guys all the AI features because that's where the real selling point of the insta360 is especially the insta360 link is well there's so much you can do with it and it's almost like having a digital cameraman if you're a one-man crew all right so we're going to take a tour of the insta360 link controller this is the software that's built in uh for being able to control your software now you are going to be able to use or be able to control your camera and they are going to be able to use this in your favorite streaming software whether it be OBS Studio or whatever other labs and stuff exist but there's a lot there's so much functionality in this I don't want this to be a long video but I want to give you some demonstrations of my favorite parts now first and foremost you might see an elbow popping the screen that's because Phil is filming the screen with our camera we're not doing a screen cap here because we are doing a screen recording using using the insta360 controller so what you're seeing in terms of the video quality and stuff is 100 out of straight out of camera and we are not doing any sort of like enhancements or anything to it we are using just the software and we do intentionally have very dramatic lighting here at my you light shining on me I'm wearing a black shirt black darker background because I really want to see just how it's able to handle it in fact what I think we should do honestly Nick going to come over here we're going to lower my key light here because it's way above me just to try and illuminate my shirt a little bit more so what I'm showing you here is how the camera is able to handle light go ahead and raise it back up slightly it's a little bit too low now there we go right there's good so we are in 4k mode it does do 720p 1080P and 4K and it's also an HDR camera although it's worth pointing out that it does not do 4K HDR it only does 1080P and 720p HDR it also does 60 hertz and 60 frames per second that way you can have nice smooth webcam imagery to go with your 60fps streams you have this d-pad here that you can use for like zooming and zooming it out you can also control the position right by using the d-pad there up yeah up and down obviously remember it is a gimbal mount it is not like digitally enhancing pixels so a lot of cameras have this quote-unquote tilt pan and zoom all it's doing honestly is enhancing pixels or blowing them up or cropping the image and then fake moving it around this is an actual gimbal that as I move it around on camera in fact if you if we show you guys with the fs5 here as I wiggle it around you can see the camera itself is moving see that it's an actual gimbal there so if I go back to my position watch if I click J I have these preset positions so if I click that that's where I'd already set it I have one for Phil so you guys can say hi Phil there's Phil actually filming the video and then I've got one for Studio which is almost like a 180 degree the other direction as you can see there's our light there's my the studio back there where we edit the videos and stuff and I can come right back to me so this isn't even the AI function of the of the insta360 it this is just having preset positions and I'm and you might think to yourself why would you need this if you've ever watched any of my live streams you know on Twitch anyway you know I kind of go back and forth between guitar practice and playing games and I have a very different seating position and like wide angle experience that I want to give you for when I'm playing guitar so you can see the fretboard and the and the picking hand and all that and then what I have to end up doing you guys might notice when I say okay I'm done now uh I'll put the guitar away I put on a pause like stream we'll be right back because what I have to do then is readjust the camera and get it all positioned back to my sitting position while gaming well now I could have my guitar position and I could have my sitting position and just have it literally be one click so there's Phil there's me and let's go ahead and make another one right now so you can see how easy it is so let's say this it's nice and zoomed in as like just ahead and you can by the way click the actual View Window here and move it around keep in mind it is inverted so left is right and right is left but let's say I wanted this extreme close-up I've seen some folks do this before too we'll do extreme close-up and we'll hit the plus and we'll call this right click rename extreme close-up just extreme close there we go so I could be like Doom like that and then we get like a raid like oh oh raid I don't know I mean you could you could get fill up Phil's no longer dying in the background he's now dying he's dying in the foreground I don't know that's all I could think of but uh for instance if it were a guitar position right that's not a guitar position but you could set it however you want it to be another instance here let's say you do you have a podcast and let's say you have multiple people talking and you don't want to sit there and have to like have a Double Split Image or a cropped image you could literally just have it be like okay Phil's talking blah blah blah blah blah blah blah actually I think that it's you know it it snaps pretty quickly I wish there was some control to slow down how fast it snaps that's one Improvement to the software I think you could have that way it's a more like controlled Movement Like a cameraman so before we talk about AI let's talk about image settings here you get a lot of control this is a half inch 4K sensor that's a fairly big sensor given the size of the gimbal remember the bigger the sensor the more the light the better the image now one of the reasons why I have it as dramatic looking as we do right here is because I wanted to look for things like noise now there is always going to be some noise even our very expensive fs5 creates noise and dark spaces there is a limit to every single sensor however webcams are notorious for being garbage in dark areas I think it looks pretty good considering the fact that we are not blasting a lot of light and I'm not being kind to it by having dark Furniture lots of Shadows and a dark black shirt on and even some light in the background there with our little LED light causing a lot lot for it the sensor to have to handle now you do get full ISO control and shutter speed with a range and it's it's going to go all dark right now but you're looking at the screen anyway now a range of 130th to 1 8 000. so if you were using this outside for any reason then you would be able to really stop down block out a lot of that light now you're going to lose a lot of depth of field when you do that but it is an F 1.8 sensor so it does give you a very good amount of depth of field the background's not that far behind me so you're not getting a huge depth of field there but ISO control from 100 to 3200 even at 3200 the noise isn't terrible I mean you can see there's obviously noise in the uh anywhere there's a dark scene but we're at ISO 3200 and a half inch sensor sensor which is actually pretty impressive now we're using what 640 right here for this shot not bad at all you do have an exposure curve that you can adjust so I'm not going to do that because I don't want to mess up our scene Auto white balance we have controlled lighting here so I'm not really using Auto white balance but you get from 10 000k to 2000k so you hit exposed for some pretty severe situations I'll put actually 5450 looks better than 5150 did see you can play around that's what's awesome or you can just go Auto in my opinion Auto with our lighting makes me look a bit too yellow so I personally like to adjust the white balance myself so we'll put 5400k brightness control contrast control saturation and sharpness you could really over sharpen if you want you can also really soften the image if you want so there's all of that now you can also save these as presets as you can see right there with the toggle button now let's go ahead and talk about some of the Auto controls right here so gesture settings we can do auto tracking we can do auto zoom we can do whiteboard mode whiteboard We're not gonna be showing today because like I said we don't have a whiteboard but what do these mean well turn on gesture controls we'll turn on auto tracking and at this point I should be able to put my hand up it is now tracking me so as I move around it's kind of crazy I mean look at that it's zooming in as I back up that is crazy look at that so the cool thing is that I can go right back to our preset positions but let's say you're doing Auto tracking you can go uh right off auto tracking back to your preset positions if you want it now tracking speed fast normal and slow now I like slow because I feel like it's a little more natural than having it snap so quickly but this look now let's talk about situations you'd use this one if you are doing any sort of VR live streams or any sort of streams where you are up and about and moving around there's a lot of live streams that use this type of of need now for instance when I'm up and moving around with the guitar and stuff I'm constantly having to fiddle with it so you guys can see it this would be awesome to be able to just adjust like how wide I want it to be and then from there just have it auto track what I'm doing now when I say how wide I wanted to be check it out we are set to the AI Zoom to follow my head you can also go half body which is going to by default start to zoom out even if I stand up which is not a very flattering angle there's my mic right or we can go whole body which will be hard for the location that it's currently at it's not able to zoom out enough because I'm too close to the camera but then there's head right or we can go back body it's I'm asking a lot of the camera right now because of the fact that I'm standing up at an upward angle of it but if I want to also zoom in check this out bring up my hand make an l and do it again zoom out zoom in and then track yes that's how short Phil is around yeah I know the audio is bad because the mic's all the way over there but check this out now watch this right the zoom function on this is really good now if I sit back down in my chair come back to my desk it's pretty neat you know what we're going to go ahead and try this now as an example of the guitar stuff that I would do like I said I don't know if the guitar is in tune right now but anyway it's just on auto tracking at the moment so as you can see right now it's kind of cutting off a lot of my body we're set to half body right now if I go whole body it's gonna be looking for my feet actually whole body's better look at that I'm in head dude foreign now I'm gonna go ahead and push the auto focus to its limits right now um I get you can see there with the guitar how it kind of had a lot of dead space above me that's where the rule of thirds were to really come in and at least allow you to Auto Center the subject where you want it and then have it track based on where you put the face as long as it knows where the face is it could track the way it wants I think that needs to be in a software upgrade anyway moving on we've got a white box here with uh you know I'm gonna go I think we're in a head mode right now yeah we're gonna go half body here which didn't really zoom out at all because I can't really see my body so yeah I I think I'm at the limits of where it can really track it the farther back you are that obviously the whole body will work better but we have light blasting and a white box with fine black print with autofocus on right now so let's see look at that fast look at that and it's smooth it's not like it's not hunting webcams are notorious for Focus hunting look how fast this is able to do it look at that so you got about four inches as a minimum Focus length look at that so there oh it's still dude wow what the heck look at the look how close this is to the camera on the other camera that's like nuts right there so now we're starting to go blurry so we're about our minimum Focus length right there of four inches Now watch how fast it finds me again that's actually pretty nuts now right now it's not tracking me as you can see um if I want to track me I put up the gesture for tracking but anyway it is also a gimbal so if I start to tilt the screen down check that out it's like holding that position which is pretty sick it's just not just suddenly tilting down towards the desktop now this is on a laptop so if we use desktop mode which is this button right here which is intended to take your webcam and turn it into a downward shot and then it manipulates the Distortion to make it look correct if you want to do like unboxings or whatever it'll make a lot more sense if you have this on a big panel the problem is it's on a laptop and there's a keyboard screen right here but if I click that you can see it points it down and now we have like you know this this downward angle but you notice what it does is it also flips it around the other way the problem is because we are so close to the table right here you can see there's like this Distortion effect on my arm and whatnot it's just not fair for us to be doing this on a uh on a laptop screen like this if it was on a desktop screen that was flat it would actually work a whole lot better but it's a smart feature that allows you to be able to use it for you know things like unboxings and whatnot that that way you don't have to feel like you have to have another camera I I felt like this was like a this was a full feature set of nice to haves but nothing that anyone really needs but this is this is my new webcam I'm sold on it because I if I just did one thing of never having to move on my my live streaming area then having a statically set webcam is fine but I move all around you guys remember the VR stream where uh we were playing phasmaphobia in VR and I was crawling around on the floor and accidentally like got somehow under my desk and then tried to stand up and was like bam guess what with tracking get the track if I were like down here crawling around on the floor hey what has seen me go ah but you saw how you know how quickly it was able to to fall follow the track game it's kind of nuts right so track me zoom in now we're set and now it's gonna track me at that Zoom range that's like Alfred hitchcocking again the gesturing works really well actually and then we can go back to gimbal control and just go right back to over here here's the J position actually I think I was like right here there's the fill position the studio position and the oh my God it's gonna be a live stream of me just screaming around with the camera all right guys I'll put a link down the description below you guys can check it out it is actually pretty incredible this is not something I thought I needed or wanted even and you know it I guess it's up for you guys to decide if you look at the price of this it's funny because it's not that much more than a than a stupid webcam that doesn't do any of this sort of stuff and you don't need it for just webcam we are using it right now as our main camera for this video and the thing is we think it looks fine perfectly fine I mean you don't need a six thousand dollar camera body or even a camera at this point hey Phil we find a way to make this work on our fs5 you're out of a job stop tracking oh it is tracking you hey you just stole the tracking good I'm gonna go back to my actual job nowso I've been hearing a whole lot about this insta360 stuff lately especially since I watch a lot of car videos I've seen a lot of their 360 camera stuff on videos already but when insta360 reached out to me and said hey we have a 4K AI powered smart webcam are you interested in taking a look heck yeah I mentioned taking a look so today we're going to look at the insta360 link and their mini tripod to see whether or not this is something that is worth making it on your desk especially with live streaming and twitch popularity and all that today and YouTube live and all that and you know what to really put the camera to the test we got two of them and this video is being shot on one so regarding the setup we actually have our main camera here which is an fs5 which is what we shoot all of our videos on but we're gonna go ahead and use the insta360 as our a cam because I want to give you guys a really good idea of how it does with like YouTube compression and stuff um we are in a controlled lighting environment which is perfect for obviously any sort of webcam but with the popularity of you know live streaming services and stuff now uh We've watched a lot of videos about this and we really came to the conclusion that this would make an amazing main camera for anyone doing fairly stationary type of videos on YouTube or twitch or whatever platform maybe that you're creating videos for but we need to start with an unboxing here we got to see exactly what it comes with so the insta360 mini two-in-one tripod um it's just that it is a tripod that has foldable legs that you can also use and I didn't have a nice handy because you know thinking ahead of time is not how I do things it's got foldable legs on here so you can use it you know for any sort of small camera that you would be doing blogs or whatever with right there's no battery in the insta360 it does control itself through a USBC cable connected to a laptop or a computer or desktop I want to point out the cable that you saw attached to this right now the gray one is not the cable that comes with the the camera it's highly recommended that you use the cam cable that comes with the camera however this is a full data USBC that works perfectly with it we need a longer cable for this particular setup but the cable that comes with it is plenty long to be able to use attached to your monitor hooked up to your computer or whatever we'll show that with the unboxing but here is the mini tripod it's got the Fairly standard small camera mount you've got this guy which just snaps into there and then you've got the wing nut type of well clamping mechanism to clamp it tight so you can put it in any position this is just nice to have for any camera that uses a standard quarter inch thread whether it be a webcam or a small action cam because they do have action cams which are battery powered that is highly recommended if you're doing 360 videos of like an amusement park rides or whatever then this would come in handy but you can also use it as a mini tripod specifically for your you know your webcam and stuff so you can push the height up of the neck right there and then you've got a mini tripod to put on your desk to use in various meetings or whatever so that's everything that comes with the two in one mini tripod it's a nice accessory to have for your insta 360 cam if you're using a laptop or something and you want to get it away from your computer or you don't want to mount it to the top of your monitor in terms of the actual insta360 itself comes with everything that you're going to need to get up and running of course it comes with the camera it comes with the USBC cable itself it comes with USBC to a adapter in case you're using an older computer that does not maybe have a USBC or you don't have an available USBC Port um it comes with recognition markers four of them and that's specifically for the Whiteboard mode that I talked about which is where you can put the markers on the corners of the Whiteboard and when you enable whiteboard mode it's then going to frame the Whiteboard and track the whiteboard in view that way if you're doing say online lecturing online classes online teaching you see this isn't just a live streaming tool for entertainment it's also a business tool it's also a teaching tool and with all of the work from home learn from home and the amount of like from home stuff that we see now having something like this is extremely valuable to have so here's the camera right here on its gimbal Mount it's surprisingly weighty it's heavier than I expected it to be I mean obviously it's not too heavy it doesn't fold the laptop lid down or anything like that but if it's one of those things where if you're one of those people that's like wait equals quality well then this is quality right here and then you've got the accessories box inside we have our quick start guide we have our warranty information card it tells you the link to how to go install the insta360 link software um it also comes with their own USBC cable which again like I said is playing along for most setups if you have a monitor that has a USB hub built into it then all it needs to do is reach from the top of the monitor to the back of it which I've showed many times is a worthwhile way to do it it's a little less than one J arm span worth of length but it is USBC on both sides and then inside here you get a USBC a to USBC adapter so it'll work with any computer that has a standard USB a and then we have our whiteboard markers right here so you put these markers in the corner Each corner of the white board that way the camera knows where the Whiteboard is and tracks it I don't actually have a whiteboard to demonstrate that for you so you know it's one of those things that you basically would just have to take their word for it but I've watched some videos online of it already and it seems pretty awesome at tracking now that's everything that comes in the Box it's everything you need to get up and running and what we're going to do now is we are going to go ahead and get this guy set up and then we do need to do a firmware update the software is actually really intuitive and easy to use so let's get up and running so that we can you know show you guys all the AI features because that's where the real selling point of the insta360 is especially the insta360 link is well there's so much you can do with it and it's almost like having a digital cameraman if you're a one-man crew all right so we're going to take a tour of the insta360 link controller this is the software that's built in uh for being able to control your software now you are going to be able to use or be able to control your camera and they are going to be able to use this in your favorite streaming software whether it be OBS Studio or whatever other labs and stuff exist but there's a lot there's so much functionality in this I don't want this to be a long video but I want to give you some demonstrations of my favorite parts now first and foremost you might see an elbow popping the screen that's because Phil is filming the screen with our camera we're not doing a screen cap here because we are doing a screen recording using using the insta360 controller so what you're seeing in terms of the video quality and stuff is 100 out of straight out of camera and we are not doing any sort of like enhancements or anything to it we are using just the software and we do intentionally have very dramatic lighting here at my you light shining on me I'm wearing a black shirt black darker background because I really want to see just how it's able to handle it in fact what I think we should do honestly Nick going to come over here we're going to lower my key light here because it's way above me just to try and illuminate my shirt a little bit more so what I'm showing you here is how the camera is able to handle light go ahead and raise it back up slightly it's a little bit too low now there we go right there's good so we are in 4k mode it does do 720p 1080P and 4K and it's also an HDR camera although it's worth pointing out that it does not do 4K HDR it only does 1080P and 720p HDR it also does 60 hertz and 60 frames per second that way you can have nice smooth webcam imagery to go with your 60fps streams you have this d-pad here that you can use for like zooming and zooming it out you can also control the position right by using the d-pad there up yeah up and down obviously remember it is a gimbal mount it is not like digitally enhancing pixels so a lot of cameras have this quote-unquote tilt pan and zoom all it's doing honestly is enhancing pixels or blowing them up or cropping the image and then fake moving it around this is an actual gimbal that as I move it around on camera in fact if you if we show you guys with the fs5 here as I wiggle it around you can see the camera itself is moving see that it's an actual gimbal there so if I go back to my position watch if I click J I have these preset positions so if I click that that's where I'd already set it I have one for Phil so you guys can say hi Phil there's Phil actually filming the video and then I've got one for Studio which is almost like a 180 degree the other direction as you can see there's our light there's my the studio back there where we edit the videos and stuff and I can come right back to me so this isn't even the AI function of the of the insta360 it this is just having preset positions and I'm and you might think to yourself why would you need this if you've ever watched any of my live streams you know on Twitch anyway you know I kind of go back and forth between guitar practice and playing games and I have a very different seating position and like wide angle experience that I want to give you for when I'm playing guitar so you can see the fretboard and the and the picking hand and all that and then what I have to end up doing you guys might notice when I say okay I'm done now uh I'll put the guitar away I put on a pause like stream we'll be right back because what I have to do then is readjust the camera and get it all positioned back to my sitting position while gaming well now I could have my guitar position and I could have my sitting position and just have it literally be one click so there's Phil there's me and let's go ahead and make another one right now so you can see how easy it is so let's say this it's nice and zoomed in as like just ahead and you can by the way click the actual View Window here and move it around keep in mind it is inverted so left is right and right is left but let's say I wanted this extreme close-up I've seen some folks do this before too we'll do extreme close-up and we'll hit the plus and we'll call this right click rename extreme close-up just extreme close there we go so I could be like Doom like that and then we get like a raid like oh oh raid I don't know I mean you could you could get fill up Phil's no longer dying in the background he's now dying he's dying in the foreground I don't know that's all I could think of but uh for instance if it were a guitar position right that's not a guitar position but you could set it however you want it to be another instance here let's say you do you have a podcast and let's say you have multiple people talking and you don't want to sit there and have to like have a Double Split Image or a cropped image you could literally just have it be like okay Phil's talking blah blah blah blah blah blah blah actually I think that it's you know it it snaps pretty quickly I wish there was some control to slow down how fast it snaps that's one Improvement to the software I think you could have that way it's a more like controlled Movement Like a cameraman so before we talk about AI let's talk about image settings here you get a lot of control this is a half inch 4K sensor that's a fairly big sensor given the size of the gimbal remember the bigger the sensor the more the light the better the image now one of the reasons why I have it as dramatic looking as we do right here is because I wanted to look for things like noise now there is always going to be some noise even our very expensive fs5 creates noise and dark spaces there is a limit to every single sensor however webcams are notorious for being garbage in dark areas I think it looks pretty good considering the fact that we are not blasting a lot of light and I'm not being kind to it by having dark Furniture lots of Shadows and a dark black shirt on and even some light in the background there with our little LED light causing a lot lot for it the sensor to have to handle now you do get full ISO control and shutter speed with a range and it's it's going to go all dark right now but you're looking at the screen anyway now a range of 130th to 1 8 000. so if you were using this outside for any reason then you would be able to really stop down block out a lot of that light now you're going to lose a lot of depth of field when you do that but it is an F 1.8 sensor so it does give you a very good amount of depth of field the background's not that far behind me so you're not getting a huge depth of field there but ISO control from 100 to 3200 even at 3200 the noise isn't terrible I mean you can see there's obviously noise in the uh anywhere there's a dark scene but we're at ISO 3200 and a half inch sensor sensor which is actually pretty impressive now we're using what 640 right here for this shot not bad at all you do have an exposure curve that you can adjust so I'm not going to do that because I don't want to mess up our scene Auto white balance we have controlled lighting here so I'm not really using Auto white balance but you get from 10 000k to 2000k so you hit exposed for some pretty severe situations I'll put actually 5450 looks better than 5150 did see you can play around that's what's awesome or you can just go Auto in my opinion Auto with our lighting makes me look a bit too yellow so I personally like to adjust the white balance myself so we'll put 5400k brightness control contrast control saturation and sharpness you could really over sharpen if you want you can also really soften the image if you want so there's all of that now you can also save these as presets as you can see right there with the toggle button now let's go ahead and talk about some of the Auto controls right here so gesture settings we can do auto tracking we can do auto zoom we can do whiteboard mode whiteboard We're not gonna be showing today because like I said we don't have a whiteboard but what do these mean well turn on gesture controls we'll turn on auto tracking and at this point I should be able to put my hand up it is now tracking me so as I move around it's kind of crazy I mean look at that it's zooming in as I back up that is crazy look at that so the cool thing is that I can go right back to our preset positions but let's say you're doing Auto tracking you can go uh right off auto tracking back to your preset positions if you want it now tracking speed fast normal and slow now I like slow because I feel like it's a little more natural than having it snap so quickly but this look now let's talk about situations you'd use this one if you are doing any sort of VR live streams or any sort of streams where you are up and about and moving around there's a lot of live streams that use this type of of need now for instance when I'm up and moving around with the guitar and stuff I'm constantly having to fiddle with it so you guys can see it this would be awesome to be able to just adjust like how wide I want it to be and then from there just have it auto track what I'm doing now when I say how wide I wanted to be check it out we are set to the AI Zoom to follow my head you can also go half body which is going to by default start to zoom out even if I stand up which is not a very flattering angle there's my mic right or we can go whole body which will be hard for the location that it's currently at it's not able to zoom out enough because I'm too close to the camera but then there's head right or we can go back body it's I'm asking a lot of the camera right now because of the fact that I'm standing up at an upward angle of it but if I want to also zoom in check this out bring up my hand make an l and do it again zoom out zoom in and then track yes that's how short Phil is around yeah I know the audio is bad because the mic's all the way over there but check this out now watch this right the zoom function on this is really good now if I sit back down in my chair come back to my desk it's pretty neat you know what we're going to go ahead and try this now as an example of the guitar stuff that I would do like I said I don't know if the guitar is in tune right now but anyway it's just on auto tracking at the moment so as you can see right now it's kind of cutting off a lot of my body we're set to half body right now if I go whole body it's gonna be looking for my feet actually whole body's better look at that I'm in head dude foreign now I'm gonna go ahead and push the auto focus to its limits right now um I get you can see there with the guitar how it kind of had a lot of dead space above me that's where the rule of thirds were to really come in and at least allow you to Auto Center the subject where you want it and then have it track based on where you put the face as long as it knows where the face is it could track the way it wants I think that needs to be in a software upgrade anyway moving on we've got a white box here with uh you know I'm gonna go I think we're in a head mode right now yeah we're gonna go half body here which didn't really zoom out at all because I can't really see my body so yeah I I think I'm at the limits of where it can really track it the farther back you are that obviously the whole body will work better but we have light blasting and a white box with fine black print with autofocus on right now so let's see look at that fast look at that and it's smooth it's not like it's not hunting webcams are notorious for Focus hunting look how fast this is able to do it look at that so you got about four inches as a minimum Focus length look at that so there oh it's still dude wow what the heck look at the look how close this is to the camera on the other camera that's like nuts right there so now we're starting to go blurry so we're about our minimum Focus length right there of four inches Now watch how fast it finds me again that's actually pretty nuts now right now it's not tracking me as you can see um if I want to track me I put up the gesture for tracking but anyway it is also a gimbal so if I start to tilt the screen down check that out it's like holding that position which is pretty sick it's just not just suddenly tilting down towards the desktop now this is on a laptop so if we use desktop mode which is this button right here which is intended to take your webcam and turn it into a downward shot and then it manipulates the Distortion to make it look correct if you want to do like unboxings or whatever it'll make a lot more sense if you have this on a big panel the problem is it's on a laptop and there's a keyboard screen right here but if I click that you can see it points it down and now we have like you know this this downward angle but you notice what it does is it also flips it around the other way the problem is because we are so close to the table right here you can see there's like this Distortion effect on my arm and whatnot it's just not fair for us to be doing this on a uh on a laptop screen like this if it was on a desktop screen that was flat it would actually work a whole lot better but it's a smart feature that allows you to be able to use it for you know things like unboxings and whatnot that that way you don't have to feel like you have to have another camera I I felt like this was like a this was a full feature set of nice to haves but nothing that anyone really needs but this is this is my new webcam I'm sold on it because I if I just did one thing of never having to move on my my live streaming area then having a statically set webcam is fine but I move all around you guys remember the VR stream where uh we were playing phasmaphobia in VR and I was crawling around on the floor and accidentally like got somehow under my desk and then tried to stand up and was like bam guess what with tracking get the track if I were like down here crawling around on the floor hey what has seen me go ah but you saw how you know how quickly it was able to to fall follow the track game it's kind of nuts right so track me zoom in now we're set and now it's gonna track me at that Zoom range that's like Alfred hitchcocking again the gesturing works really well actually and then we can go back to gimbal control and just go right back to over here here's the J position actually I think I was like right here there's the fill position the studio position and the oh my God it's gonna be a live stream of me just screaming around with the camera all right guys I'll put a link down the description below you guys can check it out it is actually pretty incredible this is not something I thought I needed or wanted even and you know it I guess it's up for you guys to decide if you look at the price of this it's funny because it's not that much more than a than a stupid webcam that doesn't do any of this sort of stuff and you don't need it for just webcam we are using it right now as our main camera for this video and the thing is we think it looks fine perfectly fine I mean you don't need a six thousand dollar camera body or even a camera at this point hey Phil we find a way to make this work on our fs5 you're out of a job stop tracking oh it is tracking you hey you just stole the tracking good I'm gonna go back to my actual job now\n"