360 Rig Reviews: Z2X - iZugar's two GoPro solution

iZugar - Z2X

Cost:

$1699 - Z2X Rig with 2 GoPro Hero 4 Blacks already modified

$159.98 - 2 64gb sd cards

$79.95 - 4 extra GoPro batteries (you could do a power pack instead)

$1938.93 - Plus tax and shipping and potentially customs. 

Don't worry, no one knows how to pronounce iZugar, so you're not alone.

First, I want to start by saying this blog may seem to bash the Z2X, but it is one of my favorite tools! You can easily take it and film in places that you would never get away with bringing a 50 gopro rig and you can save so much time in post production that it can almost make up for any of the issues with it. Just food for thought.

This company makes wider lenses for GoPro cameras and custom holders. They are based in Hong Kong and many people have complained about miscommunication issues, long ship times due to customs and lack of support, but most people who have them, really love them. The founder, KC Lai has always responded to me and I haven't had any issues with him personally, so my thought is perhaps there has just been a language barrier with some of his other clients. 

One of the great things about going with iZugar, is that you can use as little as 2 GoPro cameras, for the purpose of this article, I will use this as the base for comparison.

Shooting with wider lenses have pros and cons and these pros and cons mostly apply to any of the "wider than GoPro lens" rigs.

Pros:

Less cameras needed. Obviously this can mean lower cost of entry but don't forget about all the accessories like batteries, SD cards and ND filters, this really adds up quick! This can also be very beneficial if you plan to live stream.

Less cameras also mean that you can get the focal points closer together resulting in less parallax and easier stitching (in theory, not always the case in practice). 

Another big plus is that you can film a lot closer to subjects. Need to put a rig between a driver and passenger? Can't do it with other rugs, but with iZugar it's certainly possible.

Cons:

Some assembly required. They advertise that it's as easy as changing a light bulb, but beware because I have a friend who destroyed a gopro before shipping the others to have someone else mount the iZugar lenses.

Exposure can be problematic. Each camera has to expose for a much wider area. If the scene you are shooting is evenly lit, like an overcast day, this isn't a problem, but if you have a high contrast scene, like a sunny day with shadows you have a big problem. Basically either the sky would be over exposed or the shadows would be pitch black with almost no exceptions. If you look up any izugar footage, you can see for yourself exactly what I'm talking about.

Lens quality. Most professional cinematographers all agree that the lens is more important the camera. Now GoPro lenses are not Zeiss primes by any stretch of the imagination, but in my opinion they are definitely superior to the iZugar or similar rigs' lenses. Also, you have a lot more distortion and aberration.

Once you've modified your GoPros, or bought them pre-modified, you cannot use the waterproof housings that come with the GoPros. This is definitely something to keep in mind if you need/want to be able to shoot 360, but also need to be able to use the GoPros for other things.

Still image of "Kill the Deal" short film.

The picture above is a screenshot from a short film we shot recently as a proof of concept. There are many signs of the pros and cons of shooting with a 2 camera iZugar rig. Keep in mind, this is a rough stitch with no color correction.

First of all, there is extreme warping (pay attention to vertical lines). The person who stitched this is not a seasoned pro, but he did use the Kolor Straightening tool, and this was the best he could come up with. On another rig, those lines would come out straight as an arrow, and maybe we can make that happen with some more work, but it will probably take a trip to After Effects land, and believe me, that's one theme park you can spend a lot of time in quite easily.

I really choose this image to show you chromatic aberration. See the rainbow like effect at the stitch points? That is known as chromatic aberration and you don't get this extreme of aberration with the stock GoPro lens. To be fair,  this is the worst example we have. 95% of the footage we've shot with the Z2X doesn't have issues like this, but it's that 5% that keeps it from being something you can completely rely on, because you cannot know until you're trying to stitch it together in post production.

So right now you thinking, ok, then why shoot on this rig at all? Well, look at the actors, they are all sitting super close to the camera. the main actor in the middle is about 3 feet from the camera. If we set a 6 or 7 camera setup in the same place, there is no way we could make it work. In a perfect world, we would've used the 3 or 4 camera iZugar rig and then we would have enough overlap that we wouldn't see the aberration, and we'd still be able to have actors get as close to the camera as we did here.

Another good thing about this; after a brief training, someone who had never stitched before was able to use a pretty lousy computer and stitch about 10 shots in an afternoon. With the exception of this shot, the others turned out really good. With more cameras he would have had a really tough time stitching and getting his computer to respond, if it would've worked at all.

This is another still image from "Kill the Deal". Notice the warping and chromatic arberration are not as big of an issue, this is the case for MOST of the Z2X footage.

Bottom line:

Great rig and great tool to have. If you looking for an entry setup to vr, get their z2x, their 2 camera rig, looking for more resolution and flexibility, get the z3x or better yet, the z4x and if you want to get into 3D360, they have a 6 camera solution, the z6x3d.