I had the privilege to test the new “All-in-one” 360° camera –
The Pilot Era by Pisofttech company.
Here is the preview video I have prepared for you:
Pilot Era is an “All-in-one” 360° camera. It has one thing that is one of the main revolutionary live previews that is located on the camera itself, with 466GB internal storage you will not need to buy any SD cards. It stitches and processes all in the camera and you can use an external stitching program if you use the Unstitch video mode, the nadir patch is an automatic patch.
More online documents: https://pilot.pisofttech.com/Documents/PilotEra_doc_en.html
The different Pilot era settings modes are * :
(* The FPS can be variate from one shoot to another, for example, the 6K on stitch mode is marked as 15FPS but the file recorded is actually 13.36FPS)
Here are some 360° sequences samples:
- * I shoot at different light conditions, different mode settings, static and movement, all sound recorded by the camera itself, the audio is recorded only on one of the four cameras.
- * All sequences are scaled in the editing to 4096X2048 at 29.97, and the unstitch video mode was stitch with the internal stitching programme in the camera.
Those 360° samples I shot with this camera in different conditions so you can judge by yourself some of the modes you will need to use or not to use at all to avoid problems. One of the things that I saw when transferring these sequences to my computer was the extreme contrast/saturation the Pilot Era applies to every image. There is no way in this version to shoot in flat mode or any other color/contrast mode. On low light, as you can see on the sample video i made (just on the end) it is just impossible to shoot as it is so dark and the camera just pushed the darks even darker so even if you use EV +2 +3 you will not improve the results on low light. It is recommended to use an external audio recorder device.
Another option Pilot Era is giving is the 8K (actually almost 8K by the real size) at 20FPS in Unstitch video mode and the 8K on 7FPS on stitch video mode. These are very unusual numbers to work with if you like old look/animation funny movement look to your films. But in any case, when you edit it you will need to stretch it to the minimum 24FPS that every editing program uses and adapt the audio that is recorded on another bit rate.
I am sure it’s not the last word of Pisofttech and this technology have lots of potentials, It is quite impressive that this little camera can produce 6K at 30FPS and it will not get so hot for long duration shots.
Live YouTube test playback:
Updates from July 2019 :
- * Time Lapse option was addes
- * Update firmware for 4K stitching was upgraded
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