Insta360 x5 Starlapse

The Short Version

I ran the Insta360 x5’s Starlapse mode overnight on a camping trip in Oregon. I didn’t have a cell signal, so I couldn’t read up on it–I just set it and went to bed. The built-in star trails feature didn’t look great, but exporting the images and creating the time lapse in Glue Motion ended up being pretty cool. Next time I’d skip Starlapse mode and just go with the basic Interval function instead.

What Starlapse Mode Actually Does

I hadn’t done any research on the Insta360 x5’s Starlapse feature before I tried it. That’s pretty normal for me. I’d rather see how something works before I start reading about how it’s supposed to work. So on a recent road trip through Oregon, I threw the x5 on a tripod, selected Starlapse mode, and hit record with the default settings.

When you switch into Starlapse mode, the camera automatically dims the screen to cut down on light pollution around the lens. It doesn’t touch your actual exposure, just the display, but it’s a nice detail for anyone shooting in a dark campsite. Insta360 also recommends running it for several hours for a usable result, which means you’re supposed to plan around an external power source from the start. I did not do that.

Once I confirmed it was snapping away, I crawled into the GFC and passed out.

What Happened Overnight

By morning the camera was obviously dead. I don’t know when it died, but it captured enough to give me something to work with.

I have a general love/hate relationship with 360 footage. It’s cool to be able to frame the shot after the fact, but that gives me almost too many options. It was the same with the Starlapse. I exported eight different videos looking in every different direction, with and without “star trails” toggled on. They were ok, but just didn’t do it for me.

What I’d Do Differently Next Time

After playing around with the exports from the Insta360 iPhone app, I decided to dump all the individual 360 photos onto my MacBook and run them through Glue Motion. I did really like that export. It ended up being the full 360º flat image, but it ended up being the cleanest export of the bunch. The image quality was good enough to capture the Milky Way, but since I didn’t have it hooked up to an external battery, it died shortly after the Milky Way showed up.

Live and learn, I guess.

The star trails feature is kinda cool, but doesn’t look great once it’s exported. Maybe I did it wrong. The straight timelapse export was better, so I think I’ll stick to that next time. I did some reading afterwards and discovered that most people prefer to do star time lapses with the Interval function, so I’ll have to give that a try.

I don’t see myself using the 360 camera for every day shooting—reframing 360 video still takes longer than I’d like. But for time lapses, especially when I can just set it and forget it in the middle of nowhere and it manages to accidentally capture the Milky Way, I think I’ll keep it around. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go reframe an hour or so of dashboard-mounted 360 video.