1158 – Cool Camera For Your Videos: Tom talks 360 Degree Cameras

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion explains why 360-degree cameras can be powerful tools for entrepreneurs, content creators, and real-estate marketing. Unlike a normal camera, a 360 camera records everything around it using two back-to-back wide-angle lenses. You choose the actual camera angles and framing after you've recorded the footage.
📷 Why 360 Cameras Are Different
• No aiming required: The camera captures everything around it, so you decide what viewers see during editing.
• One recording creates multiple formats: The same footage can produce regular 16:9 YouTube videos, vertical Shorts/Reels, square videos, photos, close-ups, or wide shots.
• Acts like multiple cameras: Put one camera between two people during an interview and later switch between speakers, creating a multicamera appearance from a single recording.
• Invisible selfie stick: Properly positioned sticks disappear in the camera's stitch area, creating shots that look like another person is filming you.
• Excellent stabilization: Useful while walking, running, biking, driving, or riding motorcycles and ATVs.
🚁 Drone-Like Shots Without a Drone
Tom bought an approximately 10-foot extension stick. Holding it overhead can put his camera roughly 18 feet above the ground, allowing him to create aerial-looking real-estate shots without dealing with drone flight restrictions.
🏠 Real Estate & Business Uses
Real estate is what originally convinced Tom to buy the camera. He wants to create 3D walkthroughs of properties, particularly a rental house he's preparing to sell. Rather than continually paying photographers, he can create tours himself and use free software such as Zillow's 3D tools.
He also sees business opportunities including:
• Real-estate photography and virtual tours
• Tours of offices, medical practices, and other businesses
• Professional-looking social-media videos
• Selling 360 photography/walkthrough services
• Creating a visual inventory of your home for insurance documentation
💰 Cost
Tom estimates used 360 cameras around $300–$400, newer Insta360 models around $600–$700, with some competing cameras costing over $1,000. Insta360's editing software is free.
🔑 Key Takeaway
A 360 camera lets one person create footage that can look like it required multiple cameras or even a camera crew. Its biggest advantage is capturing everything first and deciding what the audience sees afterward. For entrepreneurs, Tom sees practical applications in real estate, business promotion, social media, virtual tours, insurance documentation, and potentially selling 360-camera services to others.

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Episode1158 - 360 Degree Cameras
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1158 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about 360 cameras, 360 degree cameras, and the cool things you can do with them. And related to that is episode 1157 that was on video gadgets. These are all the hardware kinds of things to make your life easier, shooting video and making better looking videos. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to episode number. Video gadgets was 1157, today's 1158 and the automation e-book is out, version 4.0 is out and it's going to knock your socks off. Download it at screwthecommute.com/automatefree, and you can either read it the whole thing or each chapter or almost every chapter has practicals at the end where you can just do the stuff and check out the software or whatever, you know, technique we're talking about. But the prose part you don't have to read if you don't want to, but there's a lot of good stuff in there too.
[00:01:36] All right, let's get into today's topic. 360 cameras. I just got mine delivered yesterday. I mentioned it on episode 1157, but I just got it yesterday. And first of all, you might not know what does that mean, a 360 camera? Well, it's a camera that has two Extreme wide angle lenses and their their back to back. Now, I want you to think of this like you had two bowls, like cereal bowls, and you held them together so that they made a sphere or a ball. And the place where the, the bowls touch is called the stitch area. So this camera takes a complete picture to, to the front and a complete picture to the back and then stitches it. That's the term stitches it together. So you see everything. All right. Now you can go ahead and publish the entire ball. Or one of the big benefits is this. You can take any slice of that whole ball you want horizontal, vertical, square, all that kind of stuff. And the software to do that is free. If you use the Insta360 brand camera, that's Insta360 Studio, you can download that for free and you can do it on your cell phone or your your desktop. All right. So what's the big deal about this? And plus these cameras are you can probably find a used one for 3 or $400, a brand new latest Insta360 around 6 or $700 or another brand called, uh, I think it's Ricoh or Roko KRIKOH is a little over a thousand, but the Insta360 is very popular and certainly can do the stuff we need to do. All right, so what can you do with these things? Well, and what's the the benefit of these. Well, one thing is you don't have to aim the camera, right. You don't have to decide where it's pointing because it's pointing everywhere, right? And you decide in your editing what part of the picture you want to use, or you can pick a whole bunch of different parts of the picture.
[00:04:13] So that's the first benefit. You don't have to aim it. Number two is it records. One recording can mean multiple views. So you can get, like I said, 16 by nine, which is YouTube type nine by 16 is YouTube shorts and reels and stories or square. And you can shoot pictures and video with these things. You can shoot super wide, you can shoot close up and I'm going to show you this other thing that I'm going to use pretty soon. I'll tell you that. Number six here. So anyway, one recording equals multiple videos. Number three is one camera can imitate several camera cameras. For instance, you could sit down to interview somebody, put this camera in between both of you, and it's shooting both of you at the same time. And then in editing, you just pop back and forth to whichever person is talking, see? So you can have multiple camera shoots. You can have, you know, I guess you could do it with 3 or 4 people sitting around the camera. See? So it imitates several cameras, which makes your production value look way higher. Number four, they have a thing that's called a disappearing selfie stick. So remember I just mentioned this stitch area where the two pictures are put together.
[00:05:47] Well that's kind of a blind spot where the the selfie stick when it's lined up properly will disappear from the picture. So it doesn't. People don't see you holding a selfie stick. If they're really slick, they can see the way you might be holding your hand, but they don't see the stick. It disappears from the picture. So it looks like somebody, a whole crew is walking backwards filming you if you're walking forward and things like that, but the stick disappears, that's very cool. And one thing you can do if you go on Google, you can see a lot of the cool ways people are using these 360 cameras, but one of them is if you're wearing a backpack or you don't even have to wear a backpack, you could stuff it down the back of your shirt, the selfie stick, where the thing's over your head, and it's then following you along like a camera person wherever you're walking. Okay, so just all kinds of interesting things that'll do. And it also has very good image stabilization. So you could be Walking or riding an ATV, or a bike, or a motorcycle or a car or running, and it smooths out the footage for you. And then one of my favorites that I'm going to use is, is number six. Here is a fake drone shot, or there's actually more than one kind of drone shot.
[00:07:20] So I'll talk about. So I bought the extended, it's like nine meters by ten feet selfie stick. It can be short or it can be up to ten feet. And I'm six foot two. And when I reach up with my hand, that also almost makes me eight feet. And then with a ten foot pole in my hand, that's 18ft in the air, and you don't have to aim, like I said, so I can go over near my, myself or my rental property and shoot real estate pictures as if the drone is and, and you might say, hey, Tom, I thought I heard you say in a different episode. You are a commercial drone pilot and yes, I am. But there's so darn many restrictions in this area where all the, you know, the naval station is and the jets are flying around. You got to jump through a bunch of hoops to get cleared to fly a drone. And it might say, okay, in two weeks, in this time period, you can fly the drone where you want to. All right. Oh, no. Not where you want to at that specific location you ask them about, say so in the populated areas. Sometimes you can't use a drone but 18ft. And then if you're adventurous and you got on a ten foot step ladder, now you're at 28ft in the air and you can shoot some crazy great shots like that if you don't fall off the ladder.
[00:08:50] That is now the way I got into this is because I could pay 3 or 400 bucks. You know, I'm getting this this rental house ready for sale. And I could. I was looking. You know, you get way more people looking at it if they have the walkthroughs, the 3D walkthroughs. And so I took a course on how to do real estate photography. And the guy says it's way easier to do real estate photography than regular photography, like weddings and stuff, because you just give the agent the pictures of the rooms that they want and the house and the yard, and they're happy. All right. But they did say that the 3D walkthroughs can really get more people looking at the house. So I when I figured out how much it would cost, and I have these other properties and all kinds of ways to use a cool video camera, I thought, I'll just buy the camera. And even the 3D software on Zillow is free also. So if you had this camera, you can make 3D walkthroughs of your house, like almost with your eyes closed. Really? And in fact, half almost always you have to hide while the thing is taking the picture because you don't want to be in the picture. See? So that's how I got into this.
[00:10:08] But I'm thinking for business, you know, tours of your, your, uh, you know, a lot of us do digital products. So there's not much to look at there. But tours of your day, you know, your day in and out, tours of your business, if you have any kind of business, uh, you know, dentists and doctors and, you know, there's all kinds of ways this to use this stuff. Now, another interesting thing is insurance claims. You could walk through your home and it's going to grab a picture of everything that's in your house. Then if you had a loss or a fire or something, you got proof that you had stuff there, see? So that's another thing. And then, hey, if you're really into it, you could make money with this by doing real estate pictures or businesses walkthroughs. And you know what to expect when you go to the dentist or the dermatologist. You know, all these people competing for business so you can actually make money with this. So that's a 360 camera. I'm going to have more examples of what I've been using it for in future episodes, because I just got it yesterday. So I'm learning how to use it and charging it up and all that stuff. You can just go on YouTube and put 360 cameras and you'll see, you'll see a lot of wild stuff, like people flipping over with motorcycles and, and jumping out of airplanes, but there's plenty of normal stuff that could really help your business with these unique shots that you can get.
[00:11:42] And especially just talking head people like us, you know, going out on, you know, instead of the regular selfie, it looks like you have a crew and you can turn the camera around. And it's a beautiful transition to what you're looking at and all, you know, it's all just walking down the street holding this thing. And then in editing, you can make it do whatever you want. Pretty much so. So that's 360 cameras. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingtraining.com. If you want help one on one. That's the way we do it around here. One on one. Me and my crew always work with you one on one so that you get exactly what you need. We don't lump you in with people more experienced or less experienced than you can make really fast progress that way. And then if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to my school. IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. All right, check that all out and I will catch you on the next episode. And maybe you will see a 360 picture of me. All right. Catch you later.