GoPro Fusion Review - Review 2022

The GoPro Fusion sets itself apart from other 360-degree cameras thanks to high-resolution capture (five.2K) and software that leverages those extra pixels to pan, zoom, and display spherical video in a traditional frame. GoPro calls this OverCapture. It delivers pro results when used with desktop editing software, merely the mobile feel isn't quite every bit polished as what we've seen from the competing Rylo. GoPro promises improvement in the future, and the Fusion'due south video quality is better, so we're rating information technology higher. With a piffling extra software polish information technology would be a most shoo-in for our Editors' Choice honor.

Design

The Fusion takes it aesthetic cues from the Hero5 and Hero6. It's finished in the same ii-tone dark greyness look. The outer material feels the same besides, a hard rubber shell that withstands drops and the rugged handling that activity cams are frequently subjected to. The Fusion is waterproof to 16 feet (5 meters).

The camera measures 3.five by three.0 by 1.0 inches (HWD) and weighs 8.0 ounces. At that place are two lenses, one on the front end and another on the rear, slightly outset from each other to amend stitch quality. Physical controls are express to Power/Mode and Record buttons. Yous can alter camera settings using the two to navigate the menu, which is displayed on a small front monochrome LCD, or connect the Fusion to your phone and change settings via the GoPro app, available for Android and iOS.

The Fusion ($199.00 at Amazon) doesn't have a hard drinking glass cover over its lens similar the Hero6, though. Each of its lenses needs to see slightly behind themselves. The fish-middle nature doesn't lend itself to extra protection. That said, while I didn't try to scratch the lens, I haven't been overly conscientious with the photographic camera either. A soft lens cloth does a fine job getting rid of smudges, and I reached for a disposable cleaning wipe later on one of the family dogs licked the lens. GoPro does warn that scratches can happen, and includes a protective case with a soft inner lining to utilise for storage and transport.

Information technology ships with a standard GoPro mountain installed on the body. It'due south removable, and when it'due south off the Fusion tin can sit upward on its own on a apartment surface. GoPro besides bundles a selfie stick/tripod combination with the camera, which is helpful. It lets you lot hold the Fusion farther away from your person when shooting, and ready it upwardly on its ain so you tin can roll footage to stay out of a shot.

There are a couple of doors on the body. One hides the USB-C port, which is used for data transfer and charging. Some other opens to reveal the removable bombardment and memory card slots. The Fusion requires yous to use two microSD cards, ane for each lens. You'll want to use cards with a Class 10 or UHS-I speed rating at a minimum, and we recommend using cards of matched speed and capacity to ensure that in that location are no hiccups during recording.

The removable battery is a higher chapters than y'all get with a Hero camera. We started at a full charge and ran it downwards to about 50 percent after recording 50 minutes of continuous 5.2K video. That just almost filled dual 32GB cards, and then you'll desire to invest in larger capacities if you programme to accept full reward of the 100-infinitesimal battery life.

I noticed that the Fusion gets very, very warm when recording longer clips. I was recording test footage in a room temperature office, and the photographic camera did not overheat to the point that it stopped recording. But if you're filming in very hot environments, be aware of just how warm the camera gets. We'll run some more long clip trials when we're able to get the camera into warmer surroundings—the northeast Us in winter isn't conducive to making cameras overheat.

Desktop Software

Desktop editing tools, bachelor for Mac and Windows arrangement, include a pair of GoPro apps—Fusion Studio and VR Actor—and a few plug-ins for Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

But before you lot work with footage in Premiere Pro y'all demand to stitch information technology together. That's where Fusion Studio comes into play. It recognizes both the front end and rear camera views captured by the Fusion and combines them into an equirectangular projection that'southward suitable for editing and uploading to hosting services that take 360-degree video.

You have a few options for output—H.264 if you desire to downsize footage to 4K, or CineForm 422 and Apple ProRes 422 for five.2K. There are presets available that tune output for dissimilar purposes—Editing, Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube. Yous can manually set the video resolution (5.2K, 4K, 3K, 2K) and choose between stereo or 360-caste directional audio. Yous can also enable stabilization when stitching footage, and y'all should. Despite being labeled every bit beta, it's staggeringly effective. (More than on that later.)

In that location is also an OverCapture option in Fusion Studio. It'southward pretty limited—you tin can alter the field of view of a clip and nowadays it in a fish-eye or Little Planet projection, but it's locked in for the duration of the clip. You can clone and trim clips to your heart'southward content, creating several views from a unmarried piece of footage, but animated movements using keyframes isn't an pick.

That's where the Premiere Pro plugins come in. Nestled in the Video Effects panel, nether the GoPro VR heading, are Horizon, Layers, and Reframe. Horizon is useful if you simply want to brand certain that your 360-caste video is centered and shows a directly horizon.

For best results in straightening footage you'll want to keep your eyes locked on the GoPro VR Player window that launches automatically forth with Premiere Pro. It simulates the view of a VR headset, and information technology'due south easier to get a straight horizon using that as a guide than Premiere Pro's preview window.

Layers is used to add text titles to video. Premiere has this feature built in, just using the GoPro distorts them and then they'll look correct when displayed in a VR headset or player.

Reframe is where the magic happens. Information technology's here you're able to zoom in and out of footage, transitioning from tight framing to an all-encompassing Little Planet look. And, by using keyframes, you can animate the movements. Prepare your field of view at one frame, enable animation for the effect you want to adjust, move downward the timeline to some other point, and make a alter. Premiere Pro will smoothly breathing the motion from start to finish.

I've but simply started to piece of work with Reframe, only constitute it to be very easy to use after a few minutes of fumbling effectually a few tutorials. And I'm non nearly as comfortable in Premiere Pro as a I am in Lightroom or Photoshop—if y'all're intimately familiar with Adobe'due south video editing suite, you'll pick it up in a snap.

Regardless of feel level, information technology is going to take some time to get results that are dramatic and compelling, like yous encounter in GoPro'southward marketing footage. Adding some other tools native to Premiere Pro, similar the ability to speed upward or boring downwards your footage, in conjunction with the Reframe animation, volition assistance to plough heads.

High Octane Computing

Working with the footage at its highest resolution is demanding. My 2022 MacBook Pro high-strung on playback within Fusion Studio. A 2022 Retina iMac, powered by a 3.5GHz Core i5 and loaded with 16GB of retentivity and Radeon Pro 580 graphics, took its sugariness time stitching footage—30 minutes per i minute of stabilized CineForm 422 v.2K video—and Premiere Pro estimated that information technology would take 5 hours to output a v-minute 5.2K clip using HEVC pinch and a 50Mbps bit charge per unit, with quality set to Loftier. (The Highest quality setting estimated thirty hours.)

I had improve luck with a more modern system. A 2022 Retina iMac, powered by a 4.2GHz i7 CPU, besides with 16GB of RAM, and more mod Radeon R9 M290X graphics, stitched video at a rate of 1 minute of footage every five.v minutes of CPU time. Exporting the same video clip at the aforementioned HEVC settings in Premiere Pro took about 3.5 hours. Thankfully both iMacs were able to play back the video without stuttering and stopping during editing, which is not the case with the aging laptop.

Nosotros also worked with the footage with Apple's newest desktop, the iMac Pro. The $v,000 handled footage hands, with silky shine playback in Premiere Pro CC and shorter consign times for our project. It rendered out the project in well-nigh 2 hours, a skillful hour and a one-half faster than the top-end configuration of the 2022 Retina iMac.

You'll want more than than consumer-level specs in your editing arrangement to handle the Fusion's video. Also be certain to invest in some big hard drives. Each infinitesimal of stitched CineForm 422 footage at v.2K takes upwards about 4.5GB of space.

Mobile Editing

It's not all nearly the desktop. Many are going to utilise the Fusion on the road, and GoPro recently rolled out the starting time version of its mobile OverCapture experience. It's inclued in the GoPro app for Android and iOS devices. Nosotros tested information technology out using an iPhone 8 Plus.

The beginning pace of editing on your phone is copying videos over. Information technology'southward washed via Wi-Fi, and takes about three minutes to transfer every minute of video. At that place's currently a bug that causes crashes when transferring longer clips in a batch, so you lot'll need to transfer videos one past i if you've got longer clips. GoPro is aware of this and working on a ready.

Y'all'll also want to make sure that your telephone has plenty of storage infinite available if you're doing any editing of longer videos. The Fusion breaks longer videos upwards into smaller files automatically, topping out at about seven minutes per file. But those seven minutes of video take upwards about 6.3GB of storage infinite and 21 minutes to copy to your phone.

Once you get the files over, you lot'll notice that the mobile app is best for extracting and sharing short clips, as you don't become a robust editing timeline like y'all do on a desktop suite like Premiere Pro. GoPro makes information technology very easy to zoom in, change the field of view, or motion to a Little Planet projection using the app.

To pan through the video you'll use the aforementioned gestures yous've grown accustomed to for using your phone in general. Pinching zooms in, moving your fingers apart zooms out. You can swipe to modify the bending of view, or tilt your phone to do the same. It'southward easy and intuitive, simply it'due south more of a quick-and-muddy method compared with the elegance of the keyframe animation options in Premiere Pro. You tin can see the editing action in the screen recording embedded above.

You lot need to do everything in real time with the electric current version, pausing recording tells the app that you're done and ready to export the clip. This ways that there'due south going to exist a lot of trial and error to set the field of view and brand your photographic camera movements.

I spoke to GoPro nigh the condition of the app and was told that improvements in the interface are coming. A spokesperson said, "The goal is to make it more than polished and more hands accessible, for a wider range of people. Then you tin can certainly expect to see large leaps in this infinite in our next few updates."

I'd love to run across keyframes and automated camera movements added. Rylo does information technology in its app, utilizing strength touch to set points of involvement in the frame along a timeline and letting you pause and scrub back and forth through footage. At that place's a flake of a learning curve if y'all haven't worked with animation before, but once you get the hang of it, y'all'll be able to do more with the footage. GoPro isn't completely behind, however—with the Fusion y'all can move in and out of Footling Planet in a single prune, something the Rylo software doesn't exercise.

Video and Epitome Quality

The Fusion sets itself apart from many other 360-caste cameras with its resolution. While nosotros've seen a large swath recording at 4K, including the Ricoh Theta V and Nikon KeyMission 360. GoPro went for 5.2K, with a 30fps capture rate and 60Mbps compression charge per unit.

Each lens picks up nearly 4K of resolution (7MP), but of class, in that location'southward overlap and black infinite around the circular epitome projected onto the rectangular image sensor. When stitched, video is 5.2K—12.5MP. Compare that with the Samsung Gear 360, which stitches together video that'due south 4K—viii.4MP per frame. The Fusion has nearly a 50-percent advantage in pixel count.

It's the extra resolution that makes OverCapture something that's a useful feature rather than a gimmick. The 4K Insta360 Ane has a like (simply non equally robust in movement or blitheness) crop option, but its cropped footage looks awful. Its video doesn't have enough oomph to handle it.

And it'due south the extra resolution that makes vanilla 360 footage, without any sort of OverCapture issue, look noticeably ameliorate than 4K models. GoPro'southward experience with video, and its ProTune organisation, which supports graded GoPro Color likewise as a gradeable Flat profile, are also part of that. Of course, the Fusion isn't the merely loftier-resolution option out there. Nosotros're currently working on reviews with a couple of cameras that shoot at 5.7K, slightly better the Fusion in resolution—the Garmin Virb ($800) and YI 360 ($500)—and will report on whether they better the Fusion once testing is finished.

Nosotros can't discount stabilization. The Fusion'due south is pretty fantastic. Information technology'due south non washed in-photographic camera, though. Just if you enable the pick in the Fusion Studio software, yous're greeted with footage that is incredibly smoothen and steady. It fifty-fifty passed our torture test, delivering stable video when mounted to the vibrating hood of a farm tractor. Other cameras we put to the aforementioned test, including the Ricoh Theta V, delivered noticeably shaky results.

Run up quality is mostly quite practiced. Objects very close to the lens are going to disappear, equally will the included selfie stick when extended—that'south actually a nice feature, every bit it could be distracting in the frame. For the nearly part, as long as you don't have something as well close to the side of the camera, stitching is seamless. I did notice some exposure differences between the lenses in some test shots, mainly when the sun was loftier in the sky. On grayer days and under blue skies without every bit much sun showing in the shot, exposure was balanced. At that place are some issues with chromatic aberration, only noticeable at parts of the scene toward the periphery of lens coverage. We see this with most 360 cameras, equally the extreme fish-centre lenses needed for the format suffer at the edges of coverage.

GoPro recommends a 1080p output resolution for OverCapture videos. The resulting footage looks quite good; better than I expected in fact. Close-upwardly details are sharp, and so if you've mounted the Fusion to a field of study you'll see conspicuously. Afar objects, which frequently appear blurry in 360-caste video, aren't deadly well-baked, but they're not distractingly soft—just don't wait to zoom in too far.

The storytelling potential is more intriguing to me than whether or not the branches of a distant tree look crisp. OverCapture lets you direct the action in the frame. You've got individual command over the field of view, yaw, pitch, and roll of the video, also as the ability to command how smooth transitions are. Yous tin can gear up keyframes far autonomously for slow, smooth changes in field of view, or closer together for quicker, more jarring adjustments.

You tin can push the camera to 60fps, but at a big price in resolution—it drops to 3K. That'southward going to evangelize video that looks soft to modern eyes. GoPro fans are used to high frame rates for insane dull-motion. We'll need much, much more powerful mobile processors to get there at the resolution needed for crisp 360-degree capture. If you need to shoot at 120 or 240fps, get a Hero6 Black.

The Fusion also shoots photos, stitched at xvi.6MP (5,760 by 2,880), in JPG or Raw format. We're looking at it primarily as a video camera, but yet quality looks solid to me. Yous tin can take advantage of the extra resolution offered by even so imaging for video, as long every bit yous're a fan of time-lapse, and also animate time-lapses in the same mode as standard video footage using the Premiere Pro plug-ins.

Conclusions

GoPro wasn't nearly first to the 360-caste camera space, but the Fusion breathes some life into the medium. Yep, there'due south the initial whizbang gene of 360, and VR in full general, but is it sustainable? Similar fads that have come up and gone—3D, I'1000 looking at you—it's wearing out its welcome. It's cool that you tin can capture the entire world around you lot in a single frame. But what does it add together?

In most situations, the answer is nix. You'll get a meliorate story from traditional video. GoPro's solution is a sound one. With the Fusion, shooting in 360 makes a bit more sense. Extreme sports fans, many of whom love the GoPro make, want to record and share what they're doing, but don't have the power to alter the camera angle in the middle of a stunt. With the Fusion you proceeds the power to zoom out to an otherworldly view, and motility tight to capture a specific bit of activeness, with shine, automated transitions—as long equally you lot edit on the desktop.

The mobile editing experience is a lot meliorate now than when Fusion launched, but still needs some work. At the fourth dimension of this writing you need to make all the camera movements in existent time when editing on your phone, which makes smoothen, conscientious animation a difficult proposition. GoPro promises to improve the software with updates.

The Fusion is an Editors' Pick candidate cheers to its overall video quality and build, but it's not quite there even so. We're still giving it a strong recommendation, especially for desktop editors. If you adopt a telephone-based workflow, you can go practiced results with OverCapture, but not the aforementioned refined, smoothen camera moves that you can manage with Premiere Pro. We'll update our evaluation as GoPro updates its editing tools.

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Further Reading

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/migrated-23753-video-cameras/18609/gopro-fusion-review

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