Test of Insta360's "InstaFrame" Mode

Tophat Fiddle

Active Member
Second test of the camera, this time trying what it calls "InstaFrame" mode. There are written directions that explain what all these modes do, but they're written so poorly that I am forced to try them and see what I get. There's a way to fix the fisheye here too, but I couldn't find the menu screen that has that button on it. I'll keep messing with it. Here's the video and a still shot of how I have the camera attached (and yes, it is attached) to the bike. Mmm-hmm.
 

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Tophat Fiddle

Active Member
Very nice. I have been interested in this exact camera and seeing these vids now I am really really really thinking about getting one.
Yeah, I'm liking it so far--it does a lot of stuff that it's going to take some time for me to puzzle out. I'll have another clip from the ride I just finished to post shortly....
 

Tophat Fiddle

Active Member
Yeah, I'm liking it so far--it does a lot of stuff that it's going to take some time for me to puzzle out. I'll have another clip from the ride I just finished to post shortly....
Well, crap. I just rode 10 miles with the camera mounted on the pole and ziptied to my back rack. I turned it on--now, when you turn it on, it comes on and is in one of its many "modes," all of which do different things. As far as I can tell, the precise "mode" of about 10 or so that it assumes when you turn it on is completely random, and hard to see on the screen even when you're not in bright sunshine. The "mode" indicator only appears on the screen for a couple of seconds. In bright sunshine, it's very hard to see it or read it on the screen.

So I rode out to the start of the trail and turned on the camera, squinting to see what "mode" it happened to open up in. I really could not read the screen at all in bright sunshine--the symbology they're using to indicate "mode" is totally nonintuitive and the word label that identifes the "mode" is positively microscopic.

I selected what looked like to be the "InstaFrame" mode so that it would record my ride on the trail. But when I got done and transfered the video to my cellphone, it turns out that the camera wasn't in "InstaFrame" mode, it was in some sort of time lapse mode. What I got was 10 seconds of totally unusable single-frame shots, it looks like the camera took one frame every few seconds the entire time I was bicycling.

I get the feeling sometimes that the people who design these devices don't ever take them outside and actually try to USE them under outside conditions. So the only thing I have to post is a whole bunch of single frames, none of which have any particular relationship to each other. Here's one of them. This one is interesting in that you can see the shadow of the "invisible" selfie stick, and you see that the camera edits out the stick itself.

And people will say "Oh, well, you have to know what mode you put the camera in...." Bullshit. It should not be something that *I* have to puzzle out! And now, I'm never really going to be sure as I'm pedaling along whether or not the camera is actually capturing the ride or whether it's decided to be in a "mode" that I did not intend.

It's a great camera, but this is precisely the sort of thing that makes me want to take it back--and maybe I will....


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