How to – The Insta360 Titan File Management Guide
The Insta360 Titan should typically come with a USB hub that can accept all 9 of the MicroSD cards at the same time. The Insta360 Stitch software should then read all of the 9 MicroSD cards together and you should be able to import and stitch all of the footage seamlessly within the application, however, on the first occasion we hired the camera, it did not have the USB hub.
There is an alternative way of importing the footage by connecting an Ethernet cable directly between the camera and your computer, however, we found that this took a long time and was unsuitable for our fast turnaround time (it would take 3+ hours per 7-minute film!)
The logical approach was to manually copy each MicroSD card, one at a time and then import the footage into the Stich software. This is where we reached a stumbling block, but with some experimentation, we figured out the correct way to organise the footage so the Insta360 software would recognise each shot.
To take a step back, the Insta360 Titan has 8 built-in cameras, each capturing part of the shot onto their own MicroSD card. There is then a 9th MicroSD card that contains a ‘project’ file, preview clips, and a low-resolution stitch of the footage [NOTE: You WILL need this 9th MicroSD Card which is labelled as 0 on the camera].
To begin, create 9 folders labelled from 0 to 9 [each MicroSD card in the camera will be in a slot labelled 0 – 9].
Copy all of the contents from the corresponding cards and copy them to the correct folder. [So MicroSD card 4 should be copied to folder 4]. Try not to mix the cards up! Taking one MicroSD card out at a time helped to keep track of where we were.
Once you have copied all of the MicroSD cards to your Scratch disk, it should look like this.
Folder ‘0’ contains full low-resolution previews of each of the cameras, a fully merged preview of the 360 shot and the project file [these files are important!]. In all of the remaining folders, they will contain a portion of the full 360 shot.
We now need to merge folders so that we have all 8 of the full-resolution files, the preview file and the project file.
We found that using the ‘0’ folder containing the project file and preview file is best to use as the ‘master’ folder. You now need to move each file from folders 1-8 into the matching folder in ‘0’.
So in this example, the first shot is labelled VID_20230920_143622 and the folder within folder 1 contains a file called origin_1.mp4.
You need to move this file to folder 0 under the same labelled folder.
You now need to repeat this for all of the remaining folders until you have all 8 full-resolution files, the preview files and the project file in the same folder.
You should repeat this process until you have combined all of the files in their respective folders.
Now you can open the application Insta360 Stitcher. To import, keep the tab open for ‘Local rather than ‘Cam Files Manager’ and then drag and drop the folder containing your combined shots.
The application automatically keeps the combined shots within a drop down and you will be able to preview each of the individual cameras. To preview your shot, level the horizon and add a logo to the Zenith, on the right-hand side of the application you will see ‘Reference Frame’, click Set and Preview.
From this screen, you can choose a different reference frame to correct the horizon, add a logo to the zenith and if you have not shot in 10bit, you could make colour adjustments.
From the Insta360 Stitch application, you can change your export settings, trim what part of the video you want to export and change the stitching mode to match your requirements.