Hi there! So, I knew that between the late release of the DJI Osmo 360 and the start of my vacation, I wouldn’t have enough time to create a clean new VR180 mod. That said, I also wasn’t sure I’d even take on this one, because the lack of an “easy and user-friendly” editing software—or any kind of stabilization solution—would’ve been a dealbreaker for me, despite the obvious advantages this camera brings over existing models.

Anyway, for once, I started with the software side first. This little beast will actually have not one, but two editing apps! Why two? Well… it’s meant to combine the best of both worlds, so you’ll need to use one or the other depending on what you need: **Insta360 Studio** (either version 4.x or 5.x) for quick exports, near-perfect stabilization, but with an 8-bit limitation (at least for now), and **QooCam Studio** for handling 10-bit Log footage, though it comes with painfully slow exports (since it requires re-encoding) and… questionable stabilization (not to mention the awful translation—it randomly mixes English, Chinese, Portuguese, and French or Spanish).

If you’re okay with this stabilization on a modded Q3U, it’ll be exactly the same here. (By the way, I still need to share a sample showing Q3U footage stabilized with both Studios — it’s pretty eye-opening!)

You’ll see in the screenshot that it took 30 seconds to export… for a 4-second clip. Over 90% of that time is taken up by QooCam’s conversion, since it requires re-encoding to a different input format. Insta360 only needs to demux, which is instantaneous.

The code’s done, it seems to work on both Windows and MacOS (M series), even if for now my camera is not modded so... each eye is different obviously... But I'm now walking in a well known environment thanks to my previous experiments with both Insta and Kandao. Now it’s just a matter of modding to fix a few small bugs, polish the calibration process and/or adding options to let you, for instance, choose which format to use instead of processing with both. You can even apply an optional FFmpeg denoise preset during conversion if you want (longer process, as it requires a new encoding phase, but can be useful)

For those interested, stay tuned around September for the mod release on Thingiverse, or to get access to the software! The UI is still in development, but should be ready by late September or early October, I need to integrate this Osmo CLI interface. 

In the meantime, happy holidays to those of you taking a break!

VR180 export software is/are here for the next VR180 modded DJI Osmo :)