Review By Expert: GoPro Fusion Complete Review

Review By Expert: GoPro Fusion Complete Review:

Review By Expert: GoPro Fusion Complete Review

GoPro has long been a ruling competitor in the action camera space, but lately the company has been fight's with Poor sales and has also left the drone market Place. VR is a new vertical for GoPro, and is betting heavily on GoPro Fusion, its new 360-degree camera. The Fusion went on sale internationally late last year, and although GoPro has not yet made it available through retail channels in India like their other cameras, you can send a unit here. With a price of 600€, which does not include shipping, is Go Pro Fusion worth the high price? Find out in our review.


Review By Expert: GoPro Fusion: Design and Quality:

Fusion's design is quite different from what we're using to see with the company's Hero line of cameras. To begin with, it is larger than the typical rectangular GoPro Hero models, and it is heavier. The whole body has a rubber finish so it should be able to handle minor falls.

It is also water resistant up to 4.88 m (16 feet). There is an 18 megapixel sensor with a fisheye lens on the front and back of the Fusion to capture 360 degree images. These lenses are protruding and have no scratch protection, so you'll need to be very careful when handling the camera. GoPro sends a briefcase with the Fusion for the same reason.

There is a small backlit display on the front that shows you the current shooting mode, battery level, number of remaining shots and other details. It's not a touch screen, it's a step back from Hero6. This means that you will have to navigate through the menus with the Mode and Shutter buttons on the camera, as you do with the Hero Session camera series.

There are red status LEDs on the front and back to let you know if the camera is recording or capturing an image. There is a bracket on the bottom with mounting fingers that can be used to connect the Fusion to any GoPro mount, but it is removable so you can keep the Fusion in a vertical position by yourself.

The GoPro Fusion receives a much larger battery than the Hero6, at 2620mAh, and is inserted from the right. There are microSD card slots on either side of the battery, and both must be occupied for the Fusion to work. The reason for this is that the material captured by the two sensors is stored separately on the individual cards.

Only when you copy the footage to your phone or PC and use the GoPro software, the 360 degree images and videos will be merged. Naturally, this has a cost on the device you're rendering on, but we'll address it a bit. GoPro recommends cards of class 10 or higher, and the maximum capacity it can support is 128GB (per slot).

There is a smaller flap to the left of the camera that protects the USB Type-C port. Finally, there are three microphones at the top and a speaker grille at the back. Such as any other Go Pro camera the Fusion detect premium and well form. Its size makes it quite eye-catching, but it is still manageable when mounted on a bicycle helmet, for example.

The Fusion comes with a good starter kit. In the box, you'll find two adhesive holders, a C-type cable, a camera bag and a multi-purpose handle called the Fusion Grip. The latter can be used as a tripod or selfie stick, and its telescopic arm can be extended to give you more flexibility. Fusion Grip's quality construction and finish are great. It feels strong and well done, even though it is mainly made of plastic.


Review By Expert: GoPro Fusion Performance and Battery Life:

To test the Fusion, GoPro sent us two 32GB Lexar microSD UHS-II cards for this review. It's best to use two cards with identical capabilities in the Fusion, because if one of them fills up before the other, you won't be able to record any more shots. This also poses another potential problem: if one of the cards gets corrupted for some reason, it will only have half of the camera's images. Ideally, we would have liked to have a little integrated storage, especially considering the cost here.

You'll be familiar with the menu system if you've used a recent GoPro camera. You can use the Mode button to cycle through the shooting modes and the Shutter button to start capturing. In video mode, you can take spherical images at speeds up to 5.2 k (4992 x 2496) at 30 fps, or 3 k (3000 x 1504) at 60 fps. In photo mode, you can choose between auto, burst, and night photo settings.

With the latter, you can adjust the shutter speed and field of view. In most shooting modes, you can activate a function called Protune that allows you to manually set ISO and exposure compensation values if you need more control over lighting.

Fusion works just like any other GoPro. You can sync it with the GoPro application on Android or iOS via Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth to watch live video from the camera, just like a viewfinder. You can also change settings, such as GPS status and screen brightness. You can use voice controls, verify free space on the card, and update the camera's firmware as well.

Nevertheless; the list of mobile phones that support Fusion is not un limited. For iOS, you will need an iPhone 6s or later, and only a few recent iPad models are supported. For Android, the support is a bit gloomy at the moment, as there are only a handful of first-class devices that can work with Fusion. You can see the full list of compatible devices on the GoPro website.

We tested the Fusion with a Google Pixel 2 XL and an iPhone 6s Plus for this review. While the Pixel 2 XL managed to play the live stream and sew 360 degree videos without getting too hot, the older iPhone 6s Plus had trouble keeping up, and this caused it to warm up very quickly. Speaking of heat, the Fusion itself heats up even when inactive and gets very hot when recording videos or timelapses.

360-degree images can be shared only on Facebook, while videos can be trimmed for YouTube (up to 90 seconds) or Facebook (up to 30 seconds). You can also capture a 360-degree frame from the video and share it. Images and videos downloaded from the camera reside in the GoPro application, so there's no way to access them through your phone's gallery or share them through other media.

If you want to extract the 360-degree image and video files, you'll need to use the desktop application called Fusion Studio. The software is available for Windows and MacOS, but it takes a lot of work. In Windows 10, the program would simply refuse to detect the camera despite multiple attempts, and initially we also had the same problem on a Mac, although in the end the persistence paid off.

One solution for this is to manually copy the files from the microSD cards to your PC and then import them into Fusion Studio. This is a bit annoying, but at least it works. After doing this, you will have to wait a long time while the software generates a preview by combining the footage from both microSD cards.

Once processed, you will see all your clips in the left panel and several options to represent them in the right panel. The longer videos are saved as multiple clips of seven minutes each on the cards, but when you see them in Fusion Studio, they appear as one big video clip. Once selected, you can trim the video, adjust yaw, pitch and roll, and adjust color properties.

You can even try to stabilize the video if you need to before generating the final result. At this stage, you can choose the type of codec (H.264, CineForm '422 High' or ProRes 422), the resolution and the audio format (stereo, audio 360) you want.

Overcapture in iOS allows you to crop standard-looking videos into 360-degree footage for easier sharing.

The Fusion has a genius trick up its sleeve, and that's the Overcapture function. It's currently only available in the Fusion Studio desktop application and in iOS, allowing you to create standard looking videos from its spherical footage. You can choose from multiple aspect ratios, including 16: 9, 4: 3 and square, and even set the projection type for Little Planet or Fisheye for some very interesting effects.

Rendering a 16: 9 video clip using Overcapture is fast, but if you want to render a 360 degree clip, your waiting time will depend on the power of your PC or device. In our mid-2015 iMac with a Core i5 CPU and 16GB of RAM, a five-minute 360-degree clip rendered in 4K (from 5.2K) took over an hour. Our iMac may not have the latest specifications, but this is still an impractical time.

On a Windows 10 laptop with an 8th Gen Core i7 CPU, previews were faster, but exporting the same five-minute file with the same settings as on the Mac took about 45 minutes. Fusion Studio is also extremely inaccurate and imprecise.

He hung himself a lot of times when it came to watching sequences, and going through the timeline wasn't very sensitive on the longer clips. The program often stopped responding, and we had to force it on the Mac.

The processed images look good, and the stitch lines aren't visible for the most part. Objects that are placed too close to the camera appear a little deformed when sewn, but as long as you have the camera away from you or the subject, it should be fine. When using the Fusion Grip, most of the pole is invisible because it's just below the two lenses, so it looks like your hand is holding a handle that's not attached to anything.

The image quality is good in daylight, and Fusion does a good job of measuring the scenes. The colours are also very saturated. Under direct sunlight, a portion of the sky may look a little burnt but everything else is very legible. In low light conditions, there is some visible noise, but in general, the level of detail is still quite good. Burst and timelapse modes work the same as with other GoPro cameras.

The video quality is also excellent during the day and the stitches are handled well. In low light conditions, the details get a little success, but the quality is still decent. The video can be played back with the Fusion VR player application, or if you have Windows 10, the default video player also supports 360-degree video playback.

Note that if you have Fusion mounted on a helmet, the area around the helmet will appear a little deformed as it is too close to the lenses, but everything else is well rendered. The video is fluid and may add more stabilization in post-production.

Sewing videos consumes a lot of resources on the device you are using. Again, our Pixel 2 XL didn't get too hot, and a seven-minute video took approximately 16 minutes to process. However, the iPhone 6s Plus often could not import videos longer than two minutes, and it would get very hot.

Still images and videos are saved in JPEG and MP4 formats respectively, and you even have the option to shoot in RAW format, although this increases the time needed to save the shots. The 360 degree images are eaten through their storage space quite quickly.

We fill our 32GB cards with a combination of photos, burst shots, and an amount of material up to 5.2K, which amounts to about 50 minutes. A seven-minute clip capture at a typical 5.2K resolution is approximately 2.8GB in size per lens.

We found some bugs in the current Fusion firmware. For example, the red status light on the front would remain on when the Fusion was turned off, and sometimes random conversations would activate voice commands, causing the device to switch modes or start recording.

Despite its large battery, we managed to get only one hour of continuous use by recording at the highest resolution. This was with Wi-Fi enabled, but GPS and Protune were turned off. Charging the Fusion takes approximately three and a half hours using a standard wall adapter. As with other GoPros, even if the camera is turned on but idle for a while, there will be a noticeable decrease in battery life. Fortunately, Fusion shuts down after seven minutes of inactivity.


Review By Expert: Conclusion:

The GoPro Fusion is the company's first attempt at a 360-degree camera, and while it captures very good images, it is not the easiest camera to use. First, there is the need for two microSD cards at all times. Then there's the software, which has a long way to go, especially the Fusion Studio desktop application.

Don't forget you'll need a powerful desktop and smartphone if you want to work with the footage this camera captures. Support for the Android app is limited to a handful of flagship phones right now, and Overcapture, which is a crucial feature, has not yet reached Android.

This puts it in the same stadium as other 4K 360 degree cameras such as Ricoh Theta V and Nikon KeyMission 360. GoPro tells us that it plans to sell it through local online and offline channels, but for now, this is the only way to get your hands on one.

Right now, Fusion is too expensive for what feels like an unfinished product. The hardware is solid, but the software has a lot to recover. It would made feeling to wait a small and look how things better with software upgrades in the coming weeks or if GoPro has a follow-up version of Fusion planned for 2018.

Pros:

• High quality 360 degree footage
• Resistant and waterproof
• Bundled Fusion Grip is practical
• Excessive capture works well

Cons:

• Fusion Studio software is glitchy
• No built-in storage
• Android support is bleak (for now)
• Costly
• Processing 360 videos can be cumbersome

Ratings (out of 5):

• Design: 3.5
• Performance: 3
• Value for money: 3
• Overall: 3