World VLOG Navi #4: The Edit Is Done Before It Finishes Charging — The August Insta360 and GoPro Ran Opposite Ways

I'm the one always asking "have you seen this video yet?", but this month I want to talk about a camera instead of a video. On August 12, Insta360 released the X6, starting at $699.99. It shoots 8K/50fps in 360, with two Sony 1/1.1-inch sensors giving it roughly 33% more sensor area than the X5. The 2600mAh battery runs about 140 minutes of 8K30fps and charges to 80% in 24 minutes. The screen is a 2.32-inch OLED peaking at 1200 nits, and it's IP68 waterproof to 20 meters. It even carries around 47GB of usable built-in storage, which doubles as insurance for the day you forget your card. Honestly, a list of numbers like that just makes me go "huh, okay" (laughs). I don't really understand the engineering side, and I said from the start that I'm a watcher, not a builder. What made me actually say "whoa!" was what came after: there is a set built for motorcyclists, right there from the start.

A holographic speed dashboard overlay, an auto-looping dashcam mode, and a "Hidden Engine Mic" that cuts wind noise and picks up only the engine. Everything an onboard video needs is already in the box. Until now everyone was pulling speed from a phone GPS app and layering it on afterwards, or wrapping a sponge around a mic to kill the wind — and now that's standard equipment. The clincher is PanoMind AI Director. It analyzes your footage inside the camera rather than sending it to the cloud, and assembles a highlight reel on its own while the camera charges. Get off the bike, plug the camera in, take a shower, come back, and a video is waiting. Because nothing goes to the cloud, it works the same way in a place with slow signal on a trip. I've watched so many people who loved riding stop uploading because editing broke them, so cutting that waiting time to zero really is a big deal.

From here it's my opinion, not fact. In episode three I wrote that I had started asking "is this video real?" — the story about AI labels. Now I think the question shifts one step further, to "who edited this?" The reason I watch vlogs from all over the world every day isn't picture quality. It's that I want to see a person's line of sight, their pauses, their hesitation. The silent twenty seconds at a red light. The small click of the tongue when they take a wrong turn. The moment halfway up a mountain road when they decide "that's enough for today" and turn back. A highlight reel chosen by AI is probably going to cut those twenty seconds first. It will file them, correctly, as the part where nothing happens. The call is right — and that part is exactly what I love (laughs). The more the tools lift everyone's raw material, the more the world's footage starts to look alike. Ring Road 7 in Tokyo, a mountain road outside Taipei, a Los Angeles freeway, all lining up in the same color grade at the same tempo. And in a pile of footage that all looks alike, what survives as personality isn't what you shot. I think it's which cuts you chose, yourself, to throw away.

What's fun is that at almost the same moment, GoPro ran the opposite way. On its quarterly earnings call on August 10, CEO Nicholas Woodman said the Mission 1 PRO ILS will arrive in September: an interchangeable-lens camera that takes more than 300 Micro Four Thirds lenses, with HyperSmooth stabilization, at $699. A Mission Monitor app for iPhone and iPad is also coming to the App Store in September, with composition overlays and remote camera control. That's less a camera you strap to a bike than a tool for someone shooting a film. By the way, that same quarter's revenue came in at $105 million, down 31% year on year. They talked about a cinema camera on the day they posted a painful number. For nearly the same price, one is an all-in-one 360, the other is a box that makes you choose a lens. How much they leave up to the person shooting is exactly opposite. One says "you don't have to think about it," the other says "you decide." It isn't about which one is right — it's that which kind of video we want to watch quietly sorts us viewers too. Onboard footage shot on these two should start showing up around October. When it does, the first thing I'll do is switch the speed overlay off and watch. You probably learn more about what a person was actually looking at that way. Can't wait!