Lights on, blinds consistent.
The reconstruction reads light literally. A dim room with the blinds half-drawn becomes a dim splat with the blinds half-drawn. It doesn't fix ambience; it captures it.
Turn on every lamp — including the ones you'd normally leave off in the daytime. Match the blinds height across the whole home so exterior light reads the same across rooms. The single fastest thing that separates a good tour from a re-shoot is inconsistent light between rooms.
- Every ceiling light and table lamp on.
- Blinds at the same height in every room.
- Curtains open or closed — consistent both.
One slow, continuous walk.
Film like you're showing the home to someone nervous. No cuts. No jogging between rooms. No pauses to reposition. The reconstruction stitches your walk into geometry — if the camera skips, the geometry skips.
A good walk feels almost unbearably slow when you're doing it. That's how you know it's right. Half the re-shoots we send back are from agents who tried to be efficient with their time.
Overlap your path.
Re-enter each room from a second angle. Overlap is what the geometry is built from — the more angles per surface, the sharper the walls come back, the fewer soft spots in the render.
A rule of thumb: film every room from two doorways, even if that means walking a small loop that feels redundant. It's not redundant. The second angle is what makes the first one work.
Two to four minutes total.
Under 60 seconds we reject at upload — not enough frames to reconstruct anything meaningful. Over 5 minutes we also reject — extra footage is redundant and blows past the 500 MB size cap.
For a three-bedroom home, aim for three minutes. For a one-bedroom, two minutes is plenty. If you're going over four, you're walking too slowly or you're pausing when you shouldn't be.
- 60 seconds minimum, 5 minutes max.
- 3 minutes is the target for a 3-bedroom.
- MP4 or MOV.
Landscape, lens wiped, 1080p 30 fps.
Landscape orientation gives us a wider frame and a better reconstruction. Portrait works, but it leaves less room on the sides of every wall.
Wipe the phone lens on your shirt before you start. Shoot at 1080p 30 fps — not 4K. A three-minute 4K clip is often 2 GB, which won't fit our 500 MB upload cap, and MakeSplat gets no meaningful quality bump from the extra pixels. iPhone camera settings → Formats → "High Efficiency," Video → "1080p HD at 30 fps."
- Landscape · not portrait.
- Wipe the lens.
- 1080p 30 fps — never 4K.
- Under 500 MB total (2-min clip ≈ 200 MB).
If your walkthrough can't be reconstructed, you're not charged — automatically, before the tour would have been delivered. A failed capture costs you a day, not a fee.