How long should a walkthrough video be for a 3D tour

Because a reconstruction needs overlap. The camera solver works by finding the same corners, edges, and textures in many frames taken from slightly different positions. A 20-second sprint through a condo gives it a handful of usable frames per room, mostly blurred. There is not enough shared information to triangulate anything.

Sixty seconds is the floor on VOLUME. It is enough for a studio or a single staged room if you move slowly. It is not enough for a two-bedroom. Treat 60 seconds as the lower bound, not the goal.

These are working guidelines from the pipeline's limits, not measured averages from customers. They assume a slow walk at head height and no doubling back.

• Studio or single room: 60–90 seconds.
• One-bedroom apartment: 90 seconds to 2 minutes.
• Two or three bedrooms on one floor: 2–3 minutes.
• Two-storey house: 3–4 minutes. Stairs need their own slow pass.
• Large house, more than 250 m² / 2,700 sq ft: 4–5 minutes, and consider splitting into two tours (main floor, upper floor) rather than compressing.

If you find yourself at 4 minutes with rooms still to go, do not speed up. Stop, and shoot a second video for the remaining space. Two clean tours beat one rushed one.

Two reasons. First, reconstruction time and cost scale with footage. A 10-minute video does not make a better tour than a 4-minute one of the same house; it makes a slower job with more frames to reconcile. Second, long videos usually mean the walk included repeats, pauses, and wandering, which add frames without adding new viewpoints.

VOLUME's ceiling is 5 minutes on single-tour and Solo plans, and 8 minutes on Team. Files must also stay under 500 MB, which at 1080p is comfortable and at 4K/60 is not. If your phone records 4K by default, 1080p/30 is the safer export.

Coverage, not duration. A useful way to budget the walk:

1. Enter the room. Pause one second so the first frames are sharp.
2. Walk the long axis of the room slowly, phone level, letting the camera see the far wall approach.
3. Turn through the corners. Each corner should be seen from at least two positions.
4. Leave through the doorway you will use to reach the next room. Do not cut; one continuous take.

Hallways, stairs, and doorways deserve more time than their size suggests. They are where camera tracking most often loses its place. The deep companion on shooting for reconstruction covers these problem spaces one by one.

Only the ends. Cut the fumble at the start where you were finding the record button, and the walk back to the door at the end. Do not cut the middle; a jump between two shots breaks the continuous camera path the solver relies on.

Do not add transitions, music, titles, or speed ramps. Anything an editing app does to make the video nicer to watch makes it worse to reconstruct. Export the original frames at their original frame rate.