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DJI Pocket 3 – How to capture more stars with less noise for astrophotography timelapses!
Want to learn how to capture more stars in your astrophotography timelapses with the DJI Pocket 3? In this video, I test a recommendation my viewers suggested in my previous video on the subject to go above the annoying the 1s limit.
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- DJI Pocket 3 vs Sony A7 IV // Can you spot the 4000$ difference? https://youtu.be/PDM9mLka-PA
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► CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:00 Introduction
00:44 What is the issue taking astrophotography timelapse with the DJI Pocket 3?
01:19 Manual astrophotography timelapse
02:53 Testing the "fix" (and failing)
05:24 Getting the camera & checking the results
07:36 Testing the "fix" for the second time (it worked!)
08:44 Final thoughts about astrophotography timelapses on the DJI Pocket 3
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- 0:00 Intro
- 0:44 What is the issue taking astrophotography timelapse with the DJI Pocket 3?
- 1:19 Manual astrophotography timelapse
- 2:53 Testing the "fix" (and failing)
- 5:24 Getting the camera & checking the results
- 7:36 Testing the "fix" for the second time (it worked!)
- 8:44 Final thoughts about astrophotography timelapses on the DJI Pocket 3
Good evening everyone. I can't believe it's already been 2 years since I did a comparison between the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 and the DJI Pocket 2 to take some astrophotography time-lapses. But there was one thing that was way better on [DJI Osmo Pocket 2] than the DJI Pocket 3. But a lot of people pointed out down the description how to fix that issue. And tonight is a night where I finally have time to go test it out and see if the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 can actually take some good astrophotography time-lapses. Let's go ahead to the dock and get started filming this. [Music] For those of you new to this channel, I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this art. The very surprising thing I found when I was testing the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 for astrophotography was actually I was taking worse photos because it had a max shutter speed of 1 second compared to 8 seconds on the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. A lot of you pointed out a very easy fix for this. But first, I want to test it out in the old mode so we can have a good baseline. And then we'll talk about what is this actual fix and does it actually work. Okay, so we're now ready to set up the shot on the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. And I've explained in other videos in depth how to take astrophotography master timelapse. So I'm not going to explain all the settings I'm choosing and why. If you want to learn more about that, I'll link the video so you can go see them. But if we come here, we're going to make sure first of all that we are on the motionlapse option. I do like being able to move the camera around. So that's going to be one thing I want to look at. Then we're going to go in the exposure. Make sure that we're on the manual mode, not the auto mode right here. And then we're going to go to the max shutter speed. So here the maximum on the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 is actually 1 second. Then we're going to go on the ISO and try and select the one that's the highest. So here 64,000 ISO to get as much information as possible from the sensor. Now, we're simply going to come here on confirm. We're going to make sure that the photos we have video plus raw right here just to make sure that we have the most information again to be able to edit it afterwards. And then we're going to come here, put our first point. Then we're going to go here, make sure we have a nice second point that points a lot more towards the stars here. Set this up and we're ready to go. It's going to start capturing the video right here. So, now I'll have to wait about an hour to see the first results of this shot. And then we're going to talk about what is a potential solution and if it actually works. [Music] [Music] By this point, there's about 15 minutes that I have already elapsed. And as you can see with my hat that it's on now, it got a lot colder outside in just that little time. So you should see that the results are not that great. We can see some stars. It's actually pretty impressive. We actually can see stars. But a lot of people mention that it could be even better than that. And the trick right here is very unintuitive. So if we go back inside of our settings right here and we go inside of our exposure, instead of selecting the manual setting, we actually want to go here and select the auto setting. Why this is, I don't really understand. I don't know why they allow us to have longer shutter speeds when we go in auto, but a lot of people reported that once they did that and they checked the metadata of the photos they're getting afterwards, the results are actually going up to 30 seconds of shutter speed, allowing to get much better results of the camera. But now we also have to fix another thing because if we leave the camera as it is, it won't actually take 30 seconds shutters. Because if we go inside of our settings right here and we go back in our motion lap settings and we look at our interval, it's only 3 seconds. So, it won't be able to go above 3 seconds for the shutter speed because it needs to move the camera every 3 seconds. So, what we want to make sure here is go up and select at least 30 seconds right here. So, now we have the proper interval set up. And if we come here, we're going to see that there's actually only a video duration of 1 second. I definitely want more than that. I probably want 15 to 20 seconds. So, we're going to have to go through here and we're going to realize that actually to take a 20 second time lapse in this mode will now require uh 5 hours. So, it's getting pretty late. I'm pretty sure I'm just going to set up the camera, go to sleep, come back next morning, and make sure it's looking good. I haven't moved the position of the camera. So, I'll simply press record here, and it's going to go ahead start recording the time lapse for 5 hours. And hopefully the results that we're going to see next morning are going to be much better than the ones we got right before [Music] It's now time to go get the camera. Hopefully everything went well and the battery didn't die in the middle of the night. Uh, I'm really curious to see the results and see if we're going to get better astrophotography time-lapses from the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. [Music] So, here it is. Everything seems completely dead. Uh, but the colours in the background here are beautiful. I didn't see that last night when we arrived here. Uh, so let's go inside and see the footage and see if it's any good. Hopefully, everything was saved on the camera. So, pretty big surprise. The DJI Osmo Pocket 3 is actually pretty full. Uh, it did deplete the battery pack I had connected to it. But, it's great to know that I was able to save all the files and everything. So, we'll really be able to compare to see if the results were good or not. Okay, so I'm editing the video right now and I decided to take a look at the videos and I saw it's a lot better than the original version, but it still doesn't look as good as I expected. So, then I took a look right here at the information on the file. So, if we look at the files here, we can see that they are 2.5 seconds, which is better than I expected, but still not as long as I would have expected it to go up to 30 seconds. And I realized when I looked at the comments from people that I actually have to set the ISO to something very low to 50 to 100 to really force the camera to bump up the shutter speed to go higher. Um, so I'll have to go back outside, reset the camera, do another time lapse tonight. There's still some stars, a little bit less than yesterday. And hopefully this is going to help get better results and prove that using the auto mode with a low ISO actually works. [ [Music] Okay, so I've just set everything up again. I made sure that the ISO now is at 50 to 100, so it keeps it very low. Uh, the shutter speed should be now variable, and it should go up to 30 seconds. So, let's try it again and see if we can get much longer shutter speeds this time around. Let's go another 5 hours to see if the results are going to be good or not this time around. [Music] It's now time to look at the results that we got from yesterday night. So, if we go here and we go in our videos and we select the clip from last night, we can actually see we see a lot more stars than we did in the previous clip. It also looks a lot cleaner. It's very nice how clean the image looks. Uh my bigger issue is that we still don't see as many stars as we did on the DJI Pocket 2 footage. Uh, I sadly don't have the DJI Pocket 2 right now, so I can't really compare it side by side to see if that's still true, but based on what I remember and the footage I have from before. It does seem that we're still missing some details inside of the stars. Um, so yeah, I think it's still very impressive that the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 can capture astrophotography time-lapses and it's still a pretty high quality astrophotography time-lapse. So, there's no denying that it's actually pretty impressive this little camera can do this. Uh, but I still think that I it would be really, really, really nice if DJI added the option to get maybe a 8-se second, maybe a 15 second uh, shutter speed inside of the camera when you're doing time-lapses, so you could get better results without having to rely on this hack using the auto mode. If you enjoyed this video, please let me know by hitting the like button below and definitely subscribe for more content on photography and film making. See you in the next one.
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What is this video about?
For the past couple of years, I've been wrestling with a frustrating limitation on the DJI Pocket 3: when shooting astrophotography timelapses, the maximum shutter speed maxes out at just 1 second, compared to the 8-second capability of the Pocket 2. This constraint meant I was getting noisier, less detailed shots of the night sky. But in my previous video on this topic, several viewers pointed out an unconventional fix—one I finally had the chance to test out.
The trick is surprisingly unintuitive: instead of using manual exposure mode, you switch to auto exposure mode while keeping your ISO very low (around 50-100). This forces the camera to extend the shutter speed to compensate for the reduced light information, allowing it to reach up to 30 seconds per shot. I have no idea why this workaround works or why DJI designed it this way, but the metadata doesn't lie.
Of course, there's a catch. Since the camera needs to physically move between each shot in motion-lapse mode, you also need to set your interval to at least 30 seconds—which means a 20-second timelapse now requires roughly 5 hours of shooting. I set up the camera overnight and came back the next morning to check the results.
The improvement was noticeable: more stars visible, much cleaner image quality, less noise. But here's the honest part—it still doesn't quite match what I remember from the Pocket 2 footage. There's still something missing in the fine detail and star definition. That said, I'm genuinely impressed that this small gimbal camera can pull off astrophotography timelapses at this level.
What I'd really love to see is DJI adding an option in the firmware to support longer native shutter speeds—maybe 8 or 15 seconds—specifically for timelapse mode. That would eliminate the need for this workaround and make the process far more intuitive. For now, if you're willing to commit to a long overnight shoot and follow this auto-exposure method, you can definitely capture compelling starfield timelapses with the Pocket 3.