![]() ![]() ![]() The problem GoPro is facing is that they haven’t done anything innovative in a long time. Using the six 4k cameras in an Omni rig will give you a lot more resolution to play with than an all-in-one camera, and the product may just hit the sweet spot for the rapidly expanding VR video crowd, but in placing itself in this exact place in the market, the company is putting itself in a really scary place indeed: Not entry-level enough for mainstream, and not high-end enough for professionals. None of that might sound like a true challenger - $150,000 is a lot more than $4,500 - but the truth is that there are much more affordable solutions available - and they are dropping in price rapidly. You can easily spend $150,000 on a high-end off-the-shelf 360-degree video rig, and if you’re going the custom-built route, the sky is the limit: There are plenty of experts in Hollywood who will build anything you want. GoPro is going to be feeling the pressure on the high end as well. That makes them vastly easier and faster in a production environment: they don’t have the challenges inherent in multi-camera setups, and its operators won’t need to collect several memory cards, sync, stitch and render the video before it’s ready for editing. What all these cameras have in common is that they are all-in-one solutions that deliver video that’s ready to use. ![]() In addition to the incumbents, there are a host of smaller startups, including 360 Fly, the $800 Bublcam, the upcoming $1,000 Vuze camera, the $500 Allie Home camera, Sphericam’s $3,000 second-generation 360 camera and Giroptic’s $500 360cam. Got $150K handy? This 42-camera rig will give you a gigapixel worth of resolution. The problem with these solutions has been the synchronization between the cameras, both in terms of frame rate (ensuring that each camera is shooting video frames at the same time at exactly the same number of frames per second) and alignment (making sure the cameras are adjusted just so to create a seamless 360-degree experience is an exercise in fine-engineering or some seriously hard-core post-processing efforts). There are a lot of plans and guides available online for how to 3D print or build your own rigs out of metal, wood or perspex - with some solutions being more elegant than others. If spending $15,000 on a surround video kit doesn’t fill you with tingly sensations, there’s also been the other extreme: Building your own. Obviously, the target audience veers deep into specialist markets that require stereoscopic 360 video (the Omni “only” does monoscopic video). It comes with no fewer than 16 GoPro cameras and a bank-breaking $15,000 price tag. The device looks sexy as all heaven (if you’re into that sort of thing). Last year, the company announced a partnership with Google’s Jump platform in the form of the GoPro Odyssey. GoPro itself has been promoting its GoPro Spherical solutions over the past year, too, with special channels dedicated to its GoPro VR kit on YouTube and more spherical video featured on its Facebook page, as well. Omni was first announced at CES earlier this year, but is being demoed live for the first time at the NAB conference in Vegas in a couple of weeks - one of the biggest shows in video and multimedia content production.įull-surround systems for GoPro are not a new thing - there have been quite a few attempts to string together a ton of the GoPro cameras to create camera arrays.
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