The Complete Beginners Guide to the DJI Mini 3
Hey folks, today we've got a complete beginner's guide for the DJI Mini 3 Pro. Now in this video, I'm going to take you from start to finish. Basically, all the parts you got in the box, getting out flying, up in the air, the fundamentals of obstacle avoidance, the video and photo modes, the vertical shooting, all the new features of the Mini 3 Pro.
Into the QuickShots, Active Track - I'm gonna walk you through every single one of those pieces, over the course of the next 30 45 minutes. You can use the YouTube Chapters along the bottom, right there, to find the section you want.
If you're a little more experienced you want to skip ahead beyond the take-off for example into some of the more advanced features now i've got quite a bit of experience flying drones more than a decade at this point so i'm going to give you tons of quick tips and practical things along the way a little tricks that i picked up including lots of little tips and tricks on the mini throw in particular cause i've used it for a bit now and i've got a pretty good feel for what works really well and where are some of the things to be aware of okay so that let's get straight into it
Now when you buy the dji mini 3 pro you've got basically three choices in terms of how you buy it the first one is to buy it without a remote controller that means you have an existing remote controller from dji that's compatible with it probably this one right here or you can buy it with the base remote controller in this remote controller you're going to go ahead and use your phone it's going to snap at the top right there just like most past dji remotes and that works
Great the second option you have is to go ahead and buy the new dji rc this is this controller right here this has a screen built into it so you don't have to worry about taking your phone everything's kind of consolidated it just works a little more cleanly in the past i would have said not to bother buying the fancy remotes they're just way too expensive almost a thousand bucks
In those cases but this one again is fantastic in terms of the quality the build the practicality the ease of it i really recommend getting this note that you do have to have some sort of remote control unlike dji drones from yesteryear you know three to five years ago where you use your phone you can't just exclusively use your phone to connect to the dji mini 3 so you will need to have some sort of dji remote control in order to fly it
The next piece is and the drone itself you can see it right here now it's got a battery hole in the back and then there's basically two different types of batteries depending on where you live so you have the base battery which has the 249 grams shown on the back of it right there keeping the weight under 250 grams helps in some countries to avoid registration licensing check which with whatever country you're in to figure out whether that applies to you
The second battery is intelligent flight battery plus this one right here this has even more battery time so about 46 minutes of battery time with this battery versus this one they are identical in size identical in shape only difference is literally the weight so with the heavier battery it pushes it above the 250 gram limit basically putting a different class for a certain country and then what i'm holding right here is the battery charging case so you see there's a little usb port right there also a regular usb outlet to charge an initial thing like the remote control you just simply snap the batteries into it and now you can go ahead and charge three batteries at once
Though technically they're sequentially so it charges one battery little leds inside there one battery to the next battery the next battery so it's not concurrently still it's a lot better if you just want to leave it there for the night let them charge up takes about an hour an hour and a half to go ahead and charge the batteries otherwise you can go ahead and put them into the aircraft and just charge it using the port in the back right there
Do ensure you don't forget to put a micro sd card in there though because it's kind of a sad deal if you've got to do that so with that i'm going to go ahead and take one of these batteries right there and i'm going to slide it into the case very simple go ahead and do that and i'm going to open up the wings slide it down like this slide it open again swing it down slide it open and now you've got the aircraft all unfolded now you're going to take the gimbal cover off this piece right there and then this is the gimbal itself now in a lot of ways you want to treat the gimbal kind of like a flower in the sense that it's relatively fragile
Like if you were just going to just use your hand and move it around a bunch you might break it i'm just touching it like this is not going to hurt it too much you'll notice the gimbal rotates up and down and essentially keeps the camera absolutely perfectly stable you might see today's a little bit windy right now uh thus it'll keep this thing perfect like there's no wind whatsoever and you'll see that as we get going it also allows you to move the camera around and control the orientation
Now you'll note there are four propellers on it one two three four the propellers do actually have slightly different configurations there's two different types of propellers and the way you can tell the difference if you look there's these two little markings right there that little black marking a little black marking
But it's not on these ones here if you do need to replace the propellers your kit would have included an extra set of props you just put a little screwdriver on the top just make sure you put them on the correct one otherwise bad things will happen basically probably flip over the aircraft it's not horrendous but it's not ideal way to get your flight started next we've got the optical avoidance sensors this is new on the dji mini 3.
back in the days prior to the mini series what was called a spark there was actually obstacle avoidance sensors now they're back again there are two front row facing ones these two right here there are two downward facing ones these two right here and then there is two rearward facing ones right there
Uh the front ones and downward ones have a little bit more power in terms of range and horizontal as well as vertical viewpoints so think of it like a giant camera so it's not just straightforward it's actually more like this and it's more like this so it allows you a lot more range in terms of what it avoids and the same is true of the backwards ones just with a little bit narrower field of view
Finally there's the button to power it on i press it once and let go and then long hold it again you'll see it lights all the leds up and you might have heard of this and now watch the gimbal we'll go ahead and rotate around just a second there's a little boop saying it's alive and the game will lock itself in place and then we'll go ahead and make sure all of its self-test checks are done this chain was true now for the remote control
I go ahead and i just see this middle button right there i press it once to see the led status at the top that's my total battery and then i can just press it again to go ahead and turn it on now for this video i'm going to use the dji rc there is absolutely zero difference whatsoever between the dji rc and this controller here in terms of everything
I show in the video and in terms of things i don't show in the video the only difference is that the dji rc on the bottom has two function buttons that are customizable regular rc actually also has ones you can customize up in the top corner there now if you've got the base dji remote here go and just pop your phone in the top there and then use a little included cable to connect it to your phone you'll want to install the dji app that's an app on android or ios
That allows you to control the controller and the drone everything like that at that point you're ready to fly now when it comes to choosing a takeoff spot you want to choose somewhere that's relatively clean and free so in this case i'm going to put it right there the reason i'm choosing that is that it won't go ahead and hit the grass so i put it over here like this the props will hit the grass and it might stop it also don't put any sort of metal surface like the top of a car for example or a sewer grate that will go ahead and interfere with the compass inside of it and it will probably
Throw an error message but it also might confuse it and screw it up for later on in flight next you'll see on the roll controller right now that it offers me to do a beginner tutorial beginner flight tutorial i'd recommend doing that in this case though i'm going to skip that because i'm going to basically do it for you go confirm ignore that and now you can see what the drone itself is
Showing the very first thing i want to do though is to double check a couple parameters so go ahead and choose a dot dot at the top so this little option right up here in the corner there uh and now validate that obstacle avoidance is enabled in my case i have a set for bypass break means that instead of going around something it's just going to simply stop out right
That's something we can talk about later on next if we slide on down in the options here i always validate that the max distance and the max altitude are set the max altitude is something that you want to validate it's not going to go above that in most countries you're looking at 400 feet to about 120 meters or so so that's what i set it for there from like a regulatory standpoint and max distance can again depend on your country but in my case
i'm mostly doing it so if the aircraft goes somewhere shouldn't i know i can at least find it so it's about 1500 meters away and then also you can set your automatic return to home altitude that's the auto rth you see right there return to home means that if it loses connection with the controller or something happens where it can't connect to you anymore
it'll automatically turn to this exact same spot in this case i want to do that relatively high about 100 meters that way it's going to avoid anything along its path and 100 meters around here means it's going to basically avoid well pretty much everything next thing you want to do especially absolutely this is your first flight with this drone is ensure the firmware is updated
it should have prompted you by now to do this but you tap the about button right there and go down there under aircraft firmware and just do check for updates and that'll go ahead and check and make sure there's no updates available that's super important on dji drones because they will be made months ago at this point and that firmware won't even have half the
features i'm talking about like it literally will not have things like 4k60 all the quick shot modes those will be missing uh so you definitely want to ensure that your firmware is updated to at least the level you see right there before you get started finally validate up in the corner there that you've got a full battery so you see 96 right there you see that the rc status has a full signal
You see right next to that the optical avoidance is enabled there's no red you're just basically looking for no red on the top of your controller uh you see i've got 30 satellites available right now which is incredible and then when i first power it on it'll say home point updated the home point has been updated once it has about 12 satellites do not take off before it says home point updated or that has all of its satellites if you do it will not be able to find its way back to here
Additionally if you take off before all the satellites it won't necessarily be very stable in flight so that let's go ahead and just simply take off uh now there's two ways to do this one we can press this button that's located right here uh let's see if you can see it right there this will go ahead and say take off just simply hold this for a couple seconds it'll spin up the props and it'll automatically
Take itself up up to about two meters meter and a half or so and now you'll see it's gonna go and stay put there once it gets in the air it's using its ground sensors basically pointing downwards of the ground to maintain its exact position in concert with the gps side of things i usually press record at this point so i don't forget to do that later on in fact i usually try to do it when i get in the ground right there and what's notable is that while the aircraft is kind of tilting at the side because of the wind
Right here the actual image that you see in this is perfectly flat so i'm going to get the aircraft up in the air higher usually to get up in the air and out of the way pretty quickly to do that i just use the left controller and go up like this
This gets it up like that and then i can go ahead and rotate it left and right rotate the camera basically about its axis by turning like this you can see it just rotates the camera the entire aircraft to the right now in the case of a drone like this you're rotating the entire aircraft so you aren't actually just changing the camera angle so you can see it goes all the
Way around and then i can go ahead now and go up again like this and then go down by going down and then i can change left and right and go to the left by pressing my stick over here this now puts me over the water to the left and then i go the exact same way like this the other direction and now i can go forward by pressing the sticks forward like this and then again back like this now one of the things i should have checked before i got in the air is that i'm actually in the correct mode
So you see there's three mode selectors at the top here c and an s c is cinematic mode that basically just slows everything down in terms of the moves and makes it theoretically more cinematic i it again just slows everything down it's all it really does and then n is normal mode and s is sport mode be aware in sport mode though it turns off all the obstacle avoidance sensors allows you to fly a lot faster more angular things like that but i wouldn't recommend it unless you really know what you're doing i will show at the end of the video though
Now it's super important to note a couple of safety options here the first one is this button right there this has two features to it one is to pause whatever you're doing so if you're doing an automatic flight shot or something like that you can just press that button to instantly pause it but you can also always take your hands off the controllers so if i'm flying like this i'm going somewhere and i'm just concerned i'm gonna hit these trees
Just let go just literally let go and it instantly stops what it's doing so again let's say i'm going down and backwards and i'm like oh no i'm gonna hit the water just let go and it stops the next option is to long hold this button right here with the h on it and that will return it to home you see it's automatically gonna go and fly back to its return home location and you see it's automatically going back you can cancel at any point in time if i have something x right there and you can see now it's going to go ahead and go down to its exact spot that it took off at
But way saying i want to cancel that you just press this button it pauses and the reason i want to do that is because if you look it's pretty close to landing in the bushes and almost the water there so the return to home location is generally pretty close but not precisely there so this particular takeoff location wouldn't have been like ideal for a beginner i might want to put it somewhere else that i have more flexibility in case it has to rth without me necessarily present
Next while we're here at the very bottom you see the map right there now in my case i don't have any connectivity for this controller from a cellular standpoint or wi-fi standpoint i could hot spot this controller to a wi-fi access point to my phone but i'm not doing that right here if i tap this though it'll go ahead and expand it out there we go and i can see the tracks of where i am and normally i can see a map right there if you're on your phone using the real controller with your phone then you'll see a live map of this updated
I can go tap that window at the bottom and get back to this and i can go ahead and remove this all the way down out of the way by pressing the very bottom left-hand option there so now i'm going to fly this out of the way i got some people coming up here so i'm just going to go ahead and turn it and then get it out over that field over there
Simple as that now a lot of ways to treat a drone kind of like you would a camera in a locker room or a bathroom in a sense that be aware that people might be afraid of the drone so in my case anytime i'm near people i'm going to move it far away these people here are clearly curious about they're looking up they're checking out they might even ask me about it but i don't want it anywhere near them both from regulatory standpoint as well as just from like a general being a good human
Perspective okay now before we get into all the video and photo modes one of the most important things to understand about this drone as well as any drone is how it's going to handle obstacles so i'm gonna bring it back down here real quick and there's a tree over here and i'm gonna go run into that tree and here is a tree so i'm gonna bring it down pretty low into the tree in fact i'm gonna turn my little camera right here so you can see what's going on there we go i'm gonna position it right in front of the tree moving the gimbal up we'll talk about the gimbal in just a second now you can see right away it shows the very bottom of the screen downward 3.
2 meters meaning the ground is within 3.2 meters of the bottom now as i creep forward right here i'm just going to point it at this i'm going to creep forward and you're going to see that it's going to show me information
You can hear it beeping and it's starting to go up automatically i'm not doing anything let me show you this again with the hands on the controllers so right here i'm going to back up there we go i'm going to go down some equal to the tree itself and go right so the tree is taking up my entire frame right now right and i'm gonna go and rotate forward on the controllers
You see it's automatically going up and over it that is called apas or the advanced pilot automation system or automated pilot advanced system it's basically dji's automatic uh obstacle avoidance system that goes around objects now there are two different levels of that on the mini three and it's important to understand the difference so i'm gonna bring this back real quick again here and show you the difference so in this case if you notice at the very bottom those are kind of paying really close attention a little bit further back here that my frame rate down there is 4k 24.
i'm going to stop my recording real quick and i'm going to change the frame rate to 4k 60. so i just swipe on the bottom there there we go again we'll cover this portion in just a second and now i'm gonna start recording again now in this case i'm above 4k 30 the key being the 30 frames per second
So when i go forward watch what's going to happen it'll go forward and then it'll stop you hear its errors or it's all warnings the red on the screen there indicating that it's got an obstacle in front of it uh and it's upset it's beeping a bunch and you can say it's bitcoin it's not going to go any further forward the core difference between that what i just showed you a moment ago is with apas and blow 4k 30 or 4k 30 and below it will actually go around or above the obstacle
But not in the case of 4k 60 or the higher frame rates it just simply stops now to demonstrate those rearward facing sensors i can go ahead and rotate this aircraft around so we're going to rotate 180 degrees now it's basically looking forward and the tree is behind it i'm going to go back into the tree again just controlling straight back and you hear it beeping and now it's showing the red at the bottom there indicating there's something behind it and it won't fly into it
The key thing to understand with this drone is there are two scenarios where it will fly into something being from the side and up from the top meaning that in this case there are no sideways obstacle avoidance sensors so if i were to turn the drone like this and go ahead and rotate and fly straight into the side it will do that it'll fly straight in that tree and it'll crash will it break probably not it's just going to hit the tree and land well in the in the little canal water thing there but if any other portion of tree it it wouldn't necessarily die um the other thing to be aware of though is going up into something that's where you're probably going to kill your drone is if you're flying below trees and go up into the tree because there is no optical avoidance sensor on the top however what dji does here is something clever with that front obstacle avoidance sensor it's got a really wide field of view like this so we can generally see things upwards at an angle so when it goes around that tree over the top of it it knows that's clear because it's looking above at this high angle i'm going to go back to 4k 30 which takes us right into the video mode section of this flight so there we go back to 4k30 i'm just going to back this up here take it away from the tree so i don't listen to that thing anymore and look at this pretty little boat coming through here so at this point you can go ahead and tap that little film strip icon on the upper right hand corner right there uh and now you'll see there's a couple different options one there's normal in slow mode and then you have photo master shots etc we're going to start off in normal mode right there and then if you look at the bottom i see i have the res and fps down at the very bottom right there as i change my resolution you can see 2.
7 k i got additional frame rates up to 60 frames at 1080p i also get 50 frames you're wondering why aren't the 120 frames per second there that's because again those are back under the slow-mo option so the top there tap slow-mo under uh video and now i see these options down here for one ap at 120 frames per second and again if i go back to normal mode there i can go back into 4k at the high resolution which i prefer to keep it in generally speaking when it comes to video and resolutions you should shoot the higher the better even if you're not gonna necessarily use that in terms of frame rates though the reason you might want to max out of 30 frames per second on this drone is it'll shoot hdr video at 30 frames per second also as you saw you have more flexibility for obstacle avoidance when it comes to things like active track that's only limited to 30 frames per second so i'm gonna generally shoot 30 frames per second unless i have a reason to go to 60 frames per second the reasons being you might want to slow something down if i want something to maybe look a little more cinematic i can take 60 frames per second and then slow that down in post-production to basically be twice as slow or even three times a slower to start recording i just press that record button right there and that allows me to record now we have a couple of actual physical buttons on the controller that are useful for video modes the first one is the gimbal control up here this little wheel that you see right there now when i move this wheel it's going to rotate the gimbal down like this all the way down to 90 degrees straight down or most interestingly all the way up to 60 degrees up this means you can in this case literally see the sun as it were or you can go ahead and look upwards a tree i mean some incredibly cool angle options there bring it on down right here though and the next option is to zoom so i'm gonna go ahead and turn rotate the entire aircraft towards the windmill right there i'm gonna get it in the center of my frame a little bit and now the zoom option is this wheel over here so if i just go and rotate this wheel forward you'll see it'll zoom on in there and you can see that zoom at one point so all the way up to 2x i can also just simply tap that on the right hand side back to 1 and 2x the thing to understand is that when you zoom on this drone or really any drone it's reducing the overall resolution basically just cropping in that's all it's doing so at this point when i'm fully zoomed in here it's equivalent to about a 1080p picture as opposed to the 4k picture and this can be useful when you don't want to deal with doing this after the fact like for example something quickly going up onto social media but in general again just shoot at 4k in crop after the fact so you can go ahead and play with that if you want to in post-production as opposed to doing it on the controller itself now let's say this window's a little bit too dark which it is i can tap on this and then tap on that little sun and then go up like this and increases exposure to frame obviously way over exposed now or down to the bottom and be way underexposed like that or back to the middle i can also increase the exposure um down the bottom by choosing the ev so that's that little option at the very bottom right hand corner there and now i can tap this and i can say up a third of a stop for example or seventh and so on now in addition to changing the resolutions you can also change the recording file formats so in the top right hand button there choose a little dot dot dot and then you go into camera and you see a format mpv or mov uh color normal or d cinelike and then the recoding format 264 265.
in general you're going to want to shoot in 265 unless you've got a really old computer that maybe doesn't support that but you're going to get basically smaller file sizes in 265 and it's gonna be more efficient you get more stuff on the drone from a storage standpoint from a color perspective i'm gonna choose normal the vast majority of the time that means i don't to do post-production of this video file if you look right now so let me just point away from the sonics we're kind of shooting towards the sun a little bit get something there to go some clouds there there's cows and a bar and everything looks great right looks nice and pretty i'm going to show you now if i change it to d cinelike this will remove all the colorfulness but allows me to go ahead and grade it in post-production so if you're familiar with color grading and post production great you might love this if you have no idea what i'm talking about don't do this it's just going to add a lot of time and effort and i don't ever do this like i will very rarely do this if i got some majestic incredible once in a lifetime shot that i want to grade afterwards and i'm only going to do that after i've already shot it in normal mode because more than likely dji is going to do a better job of getting that color right than i am so again here's what it looks like if you're looking at a full res version of this and then here is what it looks like if i go back and change over to the normal mode now one quick thing to note here is that all the stuff that you're seeing on the screen recording is a screen recording at a lower resolution so in the case of the dji rc it has a screen on itself of 1080p but the screen recording is actually a little bit lower than that so it's going to look a little bit pixelated and blocky to you to me on the screen that looks really nice and sharp but the screen recording that it does is lower than that and of course the actual camera recording of the camera itself is 4k which is roughly about four times the resolution of 1080p okay so now this should kind of show some basic moves here i'm gonna go ahead i'm gonna rotate this way i'm gonna go up a little bit of altitude just so we got a little more perspective i'm gonna go towards our windmill right there uh and now i'm gonna go forward so i'm going to push the stick forward and i'm going to go ahead and then rotate the gimbal down as i do that so again slowly doing that a little bit too fast because my timing wouldn't have had me arrive at the windmill on time but again you see the point here being to go ahead and do this i can now go the other direction so now i'm kind of going ahead and opening up and you see the windmill as i arrive at it so kind of cinematic there if you wanted to and now we're closer to the windmill itself now as i mentioned earlier on there's a couple of custom buttons that you can set these are particularly useful for the video and photo modes so if you choose the top dot dot at the top there you go to control you go on down here you see button customization c1 and c2 you have re-center gimbal and follow and fpv so i can choose what to do for one of these things i can go ahead and say this will increase the ev or decrease the ev i can reset the gimbal i can go into hyperlapse mode these are useful if you just want to quick action things resetting the gimbal is a good example of that so to show what that looks like now is i've got this custom mode custom one in the bottom i'm first going to put the gimbal straight down at some wonky angle of 58 degrees you can see there and i just press the c1 and boom it's straight back to level again so now seems like a good time to talk about the photo modes so i'm going to put this down a little bit so just a prettier picture look at i'm going to stop my recording and i'm going to change over the photo modes so you see that film stream icon right there i then choose that and choose photo and now i have more photo options i've got single 48 megapixel aeb burst in time shot i can take a single picture just by pressing that little single button like that and boom it takes a picture see it takes a couple seconds to do that i can then press this again go to 48 megapixel you'll notice it looks darker at first it actually turns out the fine the same turns out great after the fact and once you press this button and it changes that and there's a 48 megapixel photo at the very bottom you'll see that it says the number of photos remaining 11 or 1164 as well as the format if i tap on that right now i've got jpeg or jpeg plus raw for me as a photographer i'm always going to shoot both just because i just want to have the flexibility of a raw photo after the fact if you don't care about that you can choose jpeg but i would really always choose both if you want to you then have the exposure options and then you also have where it says auto you can go ahead and change all of those photo settings right there so the shutter speed the f-stop uh your white balance iso etc i can tap on any one of those things and go and tweak them so as soon as i do this goes and changes the scenes i can change my iso obviously this is looking like crap at this point but just to show you what you could do or you can go ahead and on the left-hand side there you can change your white balance so you can rotate off of auto and then you can go up and down obviously it's not going to look super ideal you can go back to the normal mode by pressing the pro option there at the bottom and going back into auto you can see it looks a little bit darker there a little darker than i prefer exposed down towards the bottom that's a little more clean now back into the photo options you see there's auto exposure bracket or aeb basically you take a series of photos one after another either three photos or five photos that are underexposed uh right in the middle and then overexposed and to combine those together if i do this right there it takes those go ahead and you see a processing basically taking three photos in a row and all these photos are on the sd card after the fact if you want to do your own combining and processing yourself again tapping that you can do burst you can take three five or seven photos not a ton of photos but you know if you're trying to catch some sort of uh quick moving thing that might be useful but that's pretty low in the grand scheme of burst photography and then there's time shot time shot is gonna go ahead and do this on a preset interval so all the way down from two seconds all the way up to 60 seconds this is actually super duper useful in my favorite modes when i want to capture action of myself or group people without the controller in the view uh primarily from a photo standpoint so i may take the two second photo like that go ahead and press this then put controller behind my back picture in the sky great it's good to go same sort of thing if your regulations allow in your area to put the controller on the ground do whatever move you want to do you can do that we'll go back up to this photo option and then we'll go down all the way to pano these are also photo modes there but not under the photo section you've got sphere 180 degrees wide angle or vertical so if i do the wide angle right now what it's going to do is a series of photos so i'm going to press this button and you'll see it'll move the camera automatically and it's going to do this and right hand side you see the percentage there so 16 22 and so on and it's going to take this whole set of photos at high resolution and stitch it together into a giant high-res photo now this works reasonably well on a day like this where it's relatively sunny there's not a lot of movement there's no clouds up there uh if it was a windier day than this and there's a lot of clouds you see now it's actually doing the stitching itself then it may not be as great because those things are going to overlap and be kind of weird the same if there's a train over there coming through and it takes photos and different spots it might look pretty weird as well so you can see there's that train just uh passing off the distance wouldn't be as ideal there now let's get into one of the coolest features of the mini 3 uh which is the ability to have vertical video and vertical photos now of course there will be some peers that are like vertical video is horrible and that's cool but the reality is that if you're on instagram with a platform it's like a social media standpoint you're probably shooting and using a lot of vertical video video so on the mini 3 the entire gimbal can rotate itself so you see that little option above the 1x under the record button that'll rotate the whole gimbal so boom it just rotated the gimbal and this is what it looks like in front of the camera you can see the whole thing rotate up now i can recenter my frame there i can still use the 1x and 2x and i can record just like normal most of the things work in the video mode but not everything for example the active track function does not work in this mode so you don't quite have everything it does sound like what dj i say and their goal is that everything will eventually work in the vertical mode and you can use this for photos as well as video so again i can go now into the photo mode here go to photo and do the exact same thing i go to single photo i don't need a whole bunch of stuff and there we go i've taken that single photo and it's good to go now the main benefit of shooting vertical versus horizontal is that if you plan to use it in vertical which i know sounds obvious but if i'm going ahead and taking a landscape photo and cropping it into vertical i'm losing a lot of context of the photo in this case i know it's relatively similar to the aspect ratio that i'm going to upload to instagram or any other social media platform or simply just using it as like a portrait like that's just a this is probably a better portrait shot if i bring this in a little bit closer like this down like that it's just a prettier shot and vertical than it would be horizontal now i'm going to rotate this back here for the next bit i'm going to pull it back a little bit more like this i'm going to take it off of the 2x now let's talk about some of the automatic modes so right now i'm going to go ahead and just simply tap this window i'll make a circle around it i'll tap it like i'm sorry square around it and you see it brings up this menu at the bottom so i just use my finger to draw that around there i would show you that on this camera right here my battery has now died on this so that's good put and i've got three options at the bottom active track spotlight or poi so active track is when it's gonna actively follow you somewhere we're gonna get to that in just a second spotlight is essentially the same thing it's gonna keep the camera locked on something but you're gonna fly it around so if a boat comes by here i can go ahead and lock it on that but i want to fly it around and get different angles so if we do this right now i'm going to choose spotlight there we go now at this point it's going to lock it on this so if i choose my right joystick it's going to automatically rotate around that windmill or at least what somewhere near the windmill you see right there it kind of moved away from the window that little marker is not on the wimble anymore meaning it's not quite perfectly centered anymore that can happen occasionally where the object recognition isn't quite right go and just cancel that and then circle the window again you might want to choose a smaller section of it so that might be too big so really just kind of narrow down on this little piece right there see if it finds it there we go and again now if i just rotate to the right it's going to go ahead and keep it exactly centered in the frame i can also increase altitude so all my same controllers are still available here so i can go and increase the altitude like this uh i can go ahead and move back further away by pulling back on the stick now it's going to go kind of zoom out from it and now sometimes it moves away from the object if i get too far away like i can't recognize it exactly perfectly anymore again you got to kind of play with this i'm pretty far to this point from that object at least a couple hundred meters away just to keep away from the people that are there uh and again it looks a beautiful shot and i'm not doing any fancy flying i'm literally just holding the stick like this and it's going around the window and keeping it relatively centered but i can accomplish a lot of those same things using pois instead i'm going to move forward to get a little bit closer to this windmill i'm going to put my gimbal down you can change the gimbal by the way as you do this there we go i'm going to highlight the windmill again see if it locks back on perfect now i'm going to choose poi and i'm going to choose go and now it's going to go ahead and rotate around to the direction that i said so in this case i'm going to rotate faster this way and you can see now it's a little bit faster because i'm so far away from it it's going to feel slow at this point but you can see that it's uh doing that i can then change the direction the other direction if i want to and you'll see it'll stop here and rotate the other way like this and again if i was much closer it would do this faster so let's go back to me just so you can see what this looks like i gotta press the little x on that up there i'm gonna purposely keep the aircraft above any trees nearby so if i just look out here i'm not gonna hit those trees if i go sideways or not gonna hit these trees over there if i go sideways and the reason is remember there's no side obstacle void in sensors so if i were to go ahead and go sideways and do the poi and rotation stuff and there's a tree to the side of me it's going to run right into it okay poi and go and now it's going to rotate around me and now i can speed up and you can see it'll move a lot faster now because it's pretty close to me and i can see this aircraft above me i can see it's well above any trees in this rotation here because again there's no side obstacle avoidance and it would happily smash into something and we'd be out of drone and i can then rotate the other direction if i want to by just swinging that around and at this point it says low battery rth so when it reaches 20 it's going to automatically return to home unless i cancel it so it's going to go ahead and start to return home process i can cancel that though by just pressing this little button right there and it'll cancel that what i'm going to do now though is land this one time quickly and then we'll switch off and do the active track so let me show you how landing works i'm gonna go forward and i'm gonna bring it myself down close to me i always prefer to land facing myself i just kind of like my thing in life i don't know i just do now when it gets really upset like this so i got my camera up so you can see the landing here since my other camera is dead so i'm going to go ahead and move it over a little bit try to do this there we go like this and i'm going to slowly bring it down by just pressing the down arrow now you can see right now land on the bushes which isn't ideal go over a little more like that and now i press the little uh land icon there home icon hold this down and it'll go straight down and land automatically this case is going to land on the grass it's probably going to stop the props probably be slightly upset about that it's no big deal these props are fine to land in the grass like that and you can see there we go boom made a little upset sound as it hit that and now we're landed so let me just swap the battery out real quick and we'll get back up in the air again now we've got a couple areas left we've got quick shots we've got master shots and active track and i'm actually going to active track to me on this it'll be lots of fun uh so stay tuned for that so starting off with quick shots i then press the little film strip icon again and i go down to quick shots quick shots are exactly what they imply there are quick little shots you see dronie right there in the illustration of what it's doing uh rocket circle helix boomerang asteroid is new for the mini three in the past the mini series actually had quick shots but no obstacle avoidance so you still to be very careful into what you're doing but at least there's a little bit of a safeguard there so in this case you'll see it automatically recognized me i see a little plus right there i tap that you can then tell the distance you want it to go let me tap that at the bottom there rotate along we'll choose that and then we just choose start now normally you start this a lot closer than this but let me just show you what it's going to do now it's going to go ahead and fly away from me now this is where if you were going ahead and you had for example like some epic sunset behind you or epic scene you would go ahead and probably put the controller out of you so you don't see that and you have that countdown at the very beginning there to do that you can always press the pause button up on the controller itself or the stop button on the display there and that will stop that after this is done it'll return a home again the main thing to be aware of with all these quick shot modes especially the ones that rotate around you is there's no side obstacle avoidance sensors so these modes are here with the assumption that you are paying attention to what you're doing for a dronie like this because it has the backwards optical avoidance sensors it's a relatively safe mood to do but as i go ahead and look at the other ones here i'm going to show you like the helix for example where it rotates and goes upwards in a spiral that's something i've been more careful with there we go we're back i'm now going to choose a different one i'm going to choose the helix and you can see it's going to kind of rotate around i'm going to get a little bit closer to me but again above all the trees that are nearby i then tap myself i can choose which direction to go in so we go tap myself the maximum radiance again obstacle avoidance be aware of that and then start and it's going to go ahead and get that countdown this is where i might hide the controller and be like yo no controller here it's all good you can see it's going to start to rotate around me and i'll just give you the kind of quick little version of what this looks like as it goes ahead and finishes it up now quick shots are great for just getting one-off quick shots like that it takes about a minute or so to finish but if you want like a whole pile of options or a whole pile of shots you choose master shots here uh it is probably one of the coolest features out there even for like pro drone folks and the main reason why is master shots give you a two to three minute b-roll extravaganza it basically takes all those quick shots and a few other things and just does them one thing after another and gives you this two to three minute just raw b-roll file or it gives you an edited little short video depending on what video length you want so to do that we're gonna go to the webmill because that's like the place to do this so let me find the windmill over there so i'm gonna draw an object around this or sorry a square around this so now that's the object the estimated flight time for how long so do i want the medium width medium length medium height uh how high do i want to go et cetera so i can change that to be small or high we're going to medium height there we go and then the estimated length so if i were to choose a medium or long length sorry you'll see it'll increase the flight duration because it's got to fly further so now 220 and i'm going to press start move my map out of the way and now again watch first running obstacles now it's just going to go through all these i'm going to stop this because i forgot one thing i just remembered i did not change my resolution up to 4k don't want no garbage there now i'm going to choose start right there and ready to go now one way you make three minutes here so i'm going to speed this whole thing up and you can kind of watch what it's going to do so the first one right there is the dronie that it's doing it's going to show you each one of these shots one after another now when it's done with its master shots it's going to give you basically two things the first is this two and a half minute long file this is just all those shots strung together this is full resolution and also if you want to take this and put it in some sort of other projects just kind of cut up the pieces that you want but if you tap on this that'll open up in the bottom right hand corner you see a little magic wand this allows you to create a quick master shots edit so you can choose some templates here there's a bunch of them they all have different times of them and then within those different templates they have music associated with them as well as kind of different cut sequences and effects so for fun here is one of the ones that you can choose this is the 20 second or so edit including it's all music completely done by master shots right to you next up we've got hyperlapse now hyperlapse is essentially a way to go ahead and create a time lapse but in the sky the main difference between time lapse and hype lapse is that you're moving somewhere with the hyperlapse so i'm going to choose that option in the menu there again the film option then down to hyperlapse and on the side you've got a couple core different options you've got free circle course lock or waypoint you probably won't use free because that means you have to manually move the controls which will not generally come with a good result uh then you've got circle which means you're going to rotate around an object like the windmill there you've got coarse lock which means it's going to go ahead and keep the same heading that's a really useful one and you've got waypoints in the case of waypoints i can set individual waypoints for example following the curve of the river right here and i'll go ahead and follow that over the course of a given set period of time so i'm going to choose a lock course to begin with actually prefer that one i'm going to go back a little bit further here first just manually controlling it there we go and then i can go ahead and i can lock my directions i just tap that now the direction is locked i can set how often to take the photo in this case i can set a two second interval i can set the length this is how long i want my entire hyperlapse to be at the end of it so in this case five second long hyperlapse because it's shooting 125 frames and it'll take me four minutes to do that four months and 10 seconds and then i can choose the speed of how long i want or how fast i want the aircraft to move so i can choose this one right here five uh kilometers six kilometers an hour and then i go ahead and i press the record button and off it goes you can see it's gonna go ahead and move itself along showing the number of frames as it takes each individual frame and at the end of this entire thing i've got a hyperlapse that costs a given section of time in this case i got three minutes and 56 seconds remaining for this particular hyperlapse to finish i can add time to it though at the bottom you see that plus 1s this means to add one second of final video time so previously i had a five second long video by time it completes if i press the one s button right there you'll see it'll add uh 50 seconds worth of shooting duration to it to get that one extra frame per second of final video time now in this case as exciting as this particular hyperlapse will be it's not that exciting because there's not much movement in this scene it's basically just a slow moving frame again if i had a clouds moving or boats or all sorts of cool stuff it would be really cool so a better example this here's the hyperlapse i took last week admittedly i don't have any great hyperlapses here but you can see how the boats are moving quickly also notice the traffic in the upper corner there again as the camera moves long the traffic just flies past it's worthwhile noting at the bottom though before i get away from this that i can change the settings so see where it says 4k raw that basically means that one it's going to shoot in 4k the end resultant video that it's going to output and then two it's going to give me the original photos that it goes and takes to make that uh hyperlapse so you see at the bottom my original option is off don't make any photos at all two to do jpegs or three to do raw if you're really into photography and you want to go ahead and take all of those photos which are much much higher resolution than 4k this is super useful because now you can go ahead and do zooms and stuff like that after the fact at a much higher resolution again more advanced features that you can do in my case i just have the backup there i'm almost always going to just use the exported 4k file as a video and not necessarily worry about the photos but if i do want to do something that's kind of cool to have that option and it's time to do some active track now this will be a very basic after track example i've got an entire active track video up in the corner up here somewhere that you can go ahead and check it all out now the first time you do after track i recommend like starting the football field and walking in circles don't don't try doing on a moving platform and don't try doing with trees around but the main thing remember just like again i cannot emphasize this enough if you fly sideways it's going to fly sideways into these trees so in my case i'm going to keep it just actually above the tree line here so in case there's any errors at worst it'll just fly above it so now i'm behind me right now there we go just like this and i've got this photo mode out of the way all i do is simply highlight myself but first time i get this bike so i'm gonna go ahead and highlight myself just like this and you can see when i do that it gives me the active track option so when i tap that i've got two options trace or parallel trace means to follow me from behind parallel means to be at my side again parallel is kind of dangerous unless you have nothing around you in this case i could get away with parallel if i've got it above these trees right here but it's really best for like the desert or beach uh for example here's a beach shot of me running on the beach i did that in parallel because it's not going to run anything there's no problems there as long as it stays a certain height i'm going to tap myself again choose active track choose go and now it's going to hang out behind me it's as simple as that i can just pedal along like this and you'll see it'll automatically follow me as we go down this path pretty cool right i can speed up has no problems keeping up with me on the bike at this point and it's using the obstacle avoidance sensors in case you see something there we go pretty scenic stuff this is super useful for following someone else as well as just following yourself doing this you can actually buy bike mounts and things like that for controllers i have one for the regular controller hopefully they'll soon be available uh one for the uh smart controller here sorry the dji controller dji rc the official name of it so i can keep on going all the way down this path if i wanted to but i want to show you what happens when i turn around because it's really something you need to be aware of if you're flying so in this case i'm going to turn around right here there we go and then watch what it's going to do it's going to slowly kind of back up there now when you see when it backs up you want to be aware of what it's doing because it's also going to do a little bit sideways backing up isn't a huge deal per se just going to give it a second it's keeping me tracked and it's going to eventually rotate out to the side once it finds its spot here see if it'll do it come on maybe usually it does rotate out to the side it's got me tracked and so at this point it's a little bit risky in the sense that if i was closer to trees or something like that it might not go ahead and avoid those trees you can see now it's totally the side of me no problems because there's no trees in the way it's still tracking me hasn't lost me yet and now it's starting to pull its way back behind me so it creates this kind of like j-turn if you will behind me and then it's good to go again and this is where you really want to kind of understand how the drone flies and i have many years of understanding active track and what it is or isn't going to do and so i can kind of predict these sort of things but it's that churn where if you're not comfortable with it you might want to stop before it goes ahead and makes that turn we can go all the way down this direction out here and no problems at all now i'm going to show you parallel mode real quick so again i'm going to highlight myself right there see if it finds me perfect i'm going to choose active track i'm going to choose parallel i'm going to choose go subject is too far away so fly a little bit closer again active track parallel go there we go seems reasonably happy about that now and now we'll get going here and it should stay just the side of me i'm pretty confident right now there's nothing in the river plus i can see what's it's about to fly into above all these trees and now i've got this kind of nice sideways shot there uh you can see it kind of kind of stop and go a little bit as it tries to figure out things things are in the way like these little reeds and whatnot but it's a pretty cool shot like this and again if i was more confident in the area i can go even lower if i wanted to so i can bring this down like this again right on the river itself and get a really cool kind of profile shot as i go past the trees or sorry i passed everything and this is an awesome shot to get again you have to really trust what you're doing though and know that it's not going to fly into anything in this case i'm over a river there's really nothing to fly into except those trees right there the reeds but it's got the obstacle avoidance sensors on the front to avoid that i'm going to press stop so i press that pause button because it's not necessarily seeing these small reeds right there uh these kind of twigs and stuff if you will so i'm gonna bring that up and now i'm clear of this and ready to roll okay we're gonna get back to our starting point right now and uh go from there so i'm just gonna go kind of full speed here full send if you will doing about 26k right now cruising along i actually kind of like the framing that it shows right now it does generally keep the it does generally go ahead and uh rotate to the center point but oh by the way some of you are probably wondering right now what the heck it is that i'm riding in this is the cargo bike here in the netherlands this is super common effect it's incredibly common this particular model is called the urban arrow uh but it basically allows me to carry my whole family three kids a dog my wife and i can all fit in this one bike if we want to uh and go anywhere i want in town it's it's a blast this is us the only thing i have remaining right now is sport mode so to choose into sport mode to go into sport mode i go ahead and move my selector right there from n over to s in this mode i no longer have any sort of obstacle avoidance i can go ahead and get up out of the way here just so i'm not worried about anything and sport mode moves quick so just kind of understand this it's way faster than it was before so now you can see i'm moving along super quick at this point got some rc signal interference not really sure what that's from but no big deal we'll just get a little higher usually that solves it you can see as i move around it's a lot quicker to respond that's not as smooth anymore uh versus if i'm in normal mode it's much smoother but this allows me to go much faster this can be useful when you want to get back from somewhere far away after doing a hyperlapse or something like that so i'm just going to fly right towards me right here again there is no obstacle avoidance so just keep that in mind so like that tree right there you want to ensure that you're not you can hit that tree in my case i manually controlled over the top of it you will see those obstacles show up on the menu so you see right there the red but it'll fly happily right into that to get back in normal mode again just simply toggle back to normal just like this and now you're in normal mode and now if i try if i go down here on purpose if i try to fly into this it's just going to automatically go up and around it like that how cool is that it just just works now for this last thing i want to show you hand catching a drone i think it's an incredibly useful skill to have and it allows you to get yourself out of the pickle if conditions change so you can always go ahead and land using the return to home option or the buttons on there or even just manually flying it to the ground but there are many scenarios like out in a boat maybe in deeper snow or in the beach with lots of sand or you don't want to put the aircraft near the sand or hand catching it is way better for the aircraft's viability and lifelong durability so to hand fly it's all you do to hand catch it all you do is go ahead and bring it down somewhere away from you so in this case i'm you know two meters away from it i'm gonna bring it down right here i prefer to bring it down to roughly head level uh and the reason is that i wanna be able to see what i'm doing if i bring it down like this i'm likely gonna hit my hand on the props in this case if i'm at head level it's super easy once you got it right there then walk towards it stay about a meter away like this two meters away now once you have it like this you're gonna reach under you're gonna take the drone hold on the drone and simply flip it over just like that the moment you flip over a dji drone it will turn off it is as easy as that and now you can stop a recording if you want to but again just by simply reaching up grabbing the drone from underneath you won't hit the props you flip it over like this with your hand you're done you can do this for every single one well not like the inspire series but all the dji consumer drones you can do this and this is how i land virtually every single one of my drones because i find that the safest option for the drone and honestly on a drone like this even if you do hit the props with your hand it's it'll hurt but it won't won't cut blood in most cases so before we shut this off though i want to quickly show you downloading some of those photos and videos so on the right hand side you've got a little gallery play button right there just simply tap that it'll load up all the stuff that's on your drone i've got a bunch of stuff here you can scroll down to find what you want so here's the day that i shot this tutorial you'll see that each one of these clips has a slightly different icon on it so these top three there the top left hand side are video clips then there's some quick shots there's the master shots up to the left there up to the right sorry you can see there's the pano there's photos in here so if i open up this 48 megapixel photo right there i can then choose to download it by tapping the lower right hand button then my option is to download the phone album or download to the dji app album i'll choose my phone album in the lower right-hand corner you can see the progress bar it's almost done and it's done it's as quick as that i can do the exact same thing for a video here is a 17 second video this is a vertical video in this case so you can see that i can play it right now if i wanted to um or i can just simply download not a lot of action in this video but that's fine and i can download it and choose the phone album or the app album in this case it's using the controller to download it from the drone you can also use the wi-fi direct option between your phone and the drone if i go and unplug the controller you'll see the icon in the right-hand corner there and i can go ahead and refresh that and find the aircraft nearby and then download that way instead this way is a whole lot faster to download things and does not require the controller be powered on just your phone and the drone okay hopefully you found this video interestingly useful uh if so definitely drop a comment down at the bottom there's another area that you want me to cover i'm happy to do that or press the like button it really does help out this video in the channel quite a bit and i i really appreciate it again consider subscribing i got plenty more kind of cool things to cover on this all sorts of nuances and in fun areas that i just like exploring oops and apparently does this does too anyways have a good one
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