GoPro's second-generation 360-degree action camera, the Max ($499.99), is a lot friendlier to use than its first effort, last year's Fusion. You don't have to fiddle with dual memory cards, the software tools to work with 360 footage are a lot better now, and the camera has a touch screen so you can more easily adjust settings. It costs a bit more than our favorite action camera, the GoPro Hero8 Black, but is worth considering if you're intrigued by 360-degree capture and editing.
A Smaller Fusion
The Max takes its basic design cues from the Fusion. It has the same matte gray finish with a rubberized exterior, built to withstand drops and go underwater without the need for an external housing. But it's smaller all around, and adds a color touch screen so you can preview the frame from either of its lenses, and adjust settings via touch.
The camera measures 2.7 by 2.5 by 1.6 inches (HWD), weighs 5.8 ounces, and is waterproof to 16 feet. It ships with both opaque lens caps and clear dome protectors, as well as a mounting foot and a pair of adhesive mounts.
Mounting clips are integral to the design, and fold into the bottom for storage. You can mount the Max on a tripod, like GoPro's Shorty (which doubles as a selfie stick), which is useful if you're trying to get a level shot on uneven ground. If you have access to a flat surface, but no tripod handy, the Max can sit upright on its own.
The camera sports six internal microphones, and my initial test clips show them to be of very high quality. GoPro promises that they're on par with shotgun mics in terms of directionality. They did a good job isolating my voice, while still capturing the ambient sounds of nature, but I've not yet had a chance to try recording clips under heavy wind or in a more crowded urban environment.
Video is recorded to a single microSD card, a welcome move away from the dual cards used by the Fusion. The card slot is accessible via the removable side door. The door also covers the USB-C port, which is used for data transfer (at up to 480Mbps) and charging. The battery is good for about 85 minutes of 360-degree recording, or 105 minutes of single-lens, 1080p (16:9) or 1440p (4:3) video.
Wireless transfer is included as well. The Max has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you can opt for a mobile workflow with the GoPro app, a free download for Android or iOS. I worked with a beta version of the iOS app to reframe 360-degree footage on my iPad Pro. The only real downside is transfer time, which is on the slow side—footage transfers a little bit faster than real time, so expect each minute of video to take anywhere from 45 seconds to a minute to copy to your device.
What to Do With 360-Degree Video
If you're buying the Max, it should be with the intention of using its 360-degree capture capabilities. That doesn't mean you'll use it to push video to VR experiences (though you can). Instead, GoPro includes software tools with the Max to convert the 360-degree video, captured at 5.6K quality, into flat video, with your choice of aspect ratio—16:9, 1:1, 4:3, or 9:16. When extracting 16:9 video, you end up with 1080p footage. How sharp the video looks depends on your angle of view—zooming in too far certainly softens things—but it looks quite good when you stick to a wider angle.
You can convert 360-degree video into traditional, flat footage using touch tools if you opt to use GoPro's smartphone and tablet software. The interface is definitely intuitive. You can use your devices's accelerometer to tilt the angle of the video on screen, or pinch to zoom in or out and swipe the screen to set the angle of view.
This gives you freedom to highlight different parts of your footage, play around with fun projections like the spherical Little Planet view, and the like. Thanks to the use of keyframe animation, virtual camera movements and transitions are smooth and even.
Keyframes are also quite intuitive—add one to set your starting frame and another farther down your editing timeline to get to the frame you want to transition to. The longer apart you set them, the slower the transition, and vice versa. If you want to hold a particular shot between transitions, it's simply a matter of switching the transition type to a jump cut.
Those are just the basics. You'll get them down with a little bit of use. There's also desktop software available. I found it a little less easy to play with views using my laptop's trackpad versus the iPad screen, but aside from some fumbling with gestures and keyboard combinations, it just about matches the tablet experience.
In addition to video, the Max can record time-lapse video using one or both lenses, as well as images. The ultra-wide angle of view adds a panoramic image mode, which captures an ultra-wide angle. Because it's done with a single exposure, it's useful for capturing moving subjects, unlike smartphone panoramic capture, which relies on multi-frame stitching.
It's a Single-Lens Camera Too
The Max is limited to 24 or 30fps when using both of its lenses at launch. But many who are used to using action cameras prefer a quicker frame rate, whether it be to better capture fast motion or for some flexibility for slow-motion playback. The Hero8 Black can push to 240fps at 1080p quality.
The Max doesn't net as high a frame rate when using a single lens, but you can push it to 60fps. (You still get access to 24 and 30fps, if you prefer.) At its widest angle of view, it matches a 13mm full-frame lens, wider than you can get with the Hero8 Black.
For less-extreme coverage, the camera also has a 16mm wide-angle, a 19mm wide linear that removes distortion, and a 27mm angle of view that's close to the view of a smartphone's main lens. All modes support very strong stabilization with horizon leveling—the camera captures an incredible amount of information outside of the frame, with some overlap, so there's plenty of information to use to keep video stable and level.
I'm disappointed that GoPro doesn't include the option to make your own video presets with the Max, as it does with the Hero8. You can edit settings at any time via the touch interface, but it would be nice to be able to save a few different recipes for different types of clips.
Capture Everything
GoPro took its time before jumping into the 360-degree camera space. It's a strategy that, I think, worked to its benefit. While competitors made mistakes, and consumers fiddled with and threw away plenty of low-quality 360-degree add-on modules for smartphones, GoPro watched what tools others—particularly Insta360 with its One, and later Rylo—were including in software.
The Max's touch interface allows you to easily switch between different capture modes, something that's been missing from competitors. Audio sounds quite good in our initial testing, which adds some appeal to it as a vlogging camera. And while it's not built to go deep under water, you can get certainly take it snorkeling.
The software interface is still in beta, but I was happy with what I was able to make in a few minutes of tapping and swiping away in the GoPro app on an iPad Pro. If you use other GoPros in your work, you'll be happy to know you can cut the Max footage into your QuikStories, though you will have to reframe spherical footage first.
We've only had a short amount of time with the GoPro Max, so we're going to hold off on giving it a rating at this time. For now, if you're considering the Max against other 360-degree cameras, the Rylo and Insta360 One X are its closest rivals in price and functionality. If you're simply looking at action cameras, the Hero8 Black will net higher-quality 4K video for $100 less, but it won't let you capture 360-degree footage.