- This is your complete beginner's guide to the DJI Mavic Air 2. Whether you're a first-time flyer or you've flown drones before, this is gonna go through
everything you need to know on the drone, on
the controller, in the app and just some things to think about to be able to get better
footage out of this drone. (epic music) So first I just wanna go over the outline of what is in this video. First, we're gonna talk
about the drone itself. All the features on the drone, everything you're gonna find on the drone. Second, we'll talk about the controller then we'll go into the app and then at the end of
this video we're gonna go into some ideas around how to
get better looking footage. So I will talk about best settings, the settings that I would choose
for cinematic-looking video and then also I'm gonna go into some ideas around color grading and some things that you can do to make
this footage really pop. Alright guys so let's get
into the first section which is all about the drone itself. (psychedelic music) Now when you first get
the DJI Mavic Air 2, there's gonna be stickers
all over this drone, and so what you really need
to do is take some time, go through and pull off
every one of these stickers. You're gonna find them on all the arms, you're actually gonna find
them on the gimbal as well, on all the sensors. Just take some time and
really go over your drone because you don't wanna leave
any of these stickers on. Now to fold out the drone, you first wanna flip out the front arms and then you can flip down the back arms. Now on the front, you're
gonna find a gimbal guard. Now this is not to be
left on while flying, it doesn't protect your
camera from the elements. What this is for is to
protect during transportation, so this is just to be left
on while it's in your bag, while it's in your case, wherever you're taking this drone to. And then when you're ready to
fly you wanna pop this off. So there's a little clip on the bottom and you're gonna pop it forward, and now you're ready to go. Now on the top is where you're
gonna insert your battery so you're just gonna put it straight down and you wanna hear a click. Now to take out your
battery, you just press on the two tabs on the
side and lift straight up. Now if we look at the front of your drone, what you're gonna see is two sensors, these are your obstacle avoidance and then underneath that is
your gimbal with your camera and this should be free
moving in every direction. Now if we turn the drone clockwise, you're gonna see a little tab down on the bottom of your drone. You open this up and this
has a USB-C port in it. What this is for is if you
store on the internal memory or you just wanna transfer by plugging the drone in
directly to your computer, so you plug your computer in here, turn on your drone and then you
can transfer your data over. Now one question I get all the time is, "Can you charge using
this port on the side?" And you can't, this is
only for data transfer, you have to pull the battery out and use the charger to be
able to charge your battery. Now let's look at the back of
this drone and on the back, you'll see your obstacle
avoidance sensors as well. Now let's turn it one more time clockwise and you're gonna see another
little port on the bottom. This is where you insert your microSD card so you can fly using internal storage and you get eight gigabytes, however that's not gonna
last you very long. I highly suggest you get a
high-capacity microSD card, 32, 64, or 128 gigabytes. Now you can go bigger, however I like to not put a
ton of data on my microSD cards 'cause if something happens, A, you don't wanna have the card corrupt and then you lose our data and B, if you crash this
drone or lose it anyway, again you lost all your data so I like to fly with smaller cards so it forces me to offload everything, format the card, and then keep flying. So I'm constantly reminding myself to always dump the footage because the worst thing you
can do is have two weeks of amazing, epic footage
and then it all gets lost because your drone just
decided to fly away, it took a dip, it hit a tree,
or the card got corrupted. There's a lot of things that could happen, not saying that it happens that often but there are things that could happen. When I was in the Azores I had
the DJI Mavic Air version 1, and I was flying across a lake and I don't know if it
was the seismic activity because it was a volcanic lake but the drone decided just
to take a dip, just slightly. It dipped right in the
water and pops right out, which was pretty cool
that it actually survived. I was able to get it back but somehow it fried the SD card and I lost all my data from the
last three days of shooting. So personally you wanna offload your footage every day if possible. Now if you're on a trip and you have nowhere to
offload your footage, then just have multiple microSD cards so you can swap them out so you don't have a ton of
data that you lose all at once. So let's look at the bottom of this drone, you have your obstacle
avoidance sensors on the bottom. This senses where the ground
is when you're landing and you also have right in
the center, a landing light. Now this is awesome because
at night or closer to sunset, when you're bringing your drone back and you wanna land, this illuminates and it shows a pool of light so that you could see
where your drone is landing to make sure that it's
safe for it to land. I love that they incorporated this on this version of the Mavic Air 2. Now the last thing I wanna
go over is the propellers because you have two
different types of propellers. Now you have to make sure that you put the proper
propeller with the proper side. So on each propeller, on the top of them, you'll see this little
ring around the center, one is black and one is
kind of a white grayish, and so you wanna line
up the white grayish one with the white side and the
black one with the black side. This is because there's two
different styles of propellers and if you don't have it on the right side it's not gonna fly properly. So to put on your propellers, you line up the little tabs with the hole, you push down, and you twist. And then what you wanna
do is just hold the motor and give it a little twist. Make sure it's on properly, you don't want one of these falling off. Now what's cool about DJI is in the app when you start flying, they actually remind you of this. There's a little pop-up that
comes up right before you fly. You can turn this off however, it's just a good reminder
because you need to make sure that these are on properly before you actually take off and fly. Now the last thing you need to understand about the body of the drone is how to turn it on and to do this you basically
press once in the center and then hold it until you
hear the drone power on. So it's a press and a
three-to-five second hold. Okay so now that you understand
everything on the drone, now let's go into the controller because you need to understand
what all the buttons do on your controller before
we dive into the app. (gentle music) So let's start with the
front of the controller. When you look at it right in the front, you have four buttons, you have a little flip
switch in the middle and then you have your joysticks. So your joysticks actually live in the bottom of this controller so you're gonna pull them
out and screw them on. Now let's just go left to right, so up in the upper left-hand
corner, you have an Fn button. This is a function button and you can set this to do
a bunch of different things and once we get into the app, I'll show you where you
can actually set this to whatever makes sense
for your flying style. Now the next button is
your return-to-home button. So when you're out flying if you don't wanna manually return to home you just hold this
button for a few seconds and then the drone will
automatically go back to the start position. So when you launch your drone
it's gonna send a GPS signal and say, this is where I launched from, and then when you press and hold this button for a few seconds, your drone is gonna stop
whatever it's doing, it's gonna turn and it's gonna fly home. Now dead center you have this flip switch and Sport Mode is great if you really wanna get
your drone moving fast. Normal is just kind of like normal flying, this is your standard, and
then Tripod is super slow, so if you wanna get super
smooth cinematic shots, you're gonna throw it in a Tripod mode, and it's gonna be much easier to get that. Now next to that is your power button and it's just like your battery, you press once and then you hold-- (beeps)
until you hear the beep and then your controller is powered on and same thing, you click once
and you hold to power off. Now in the upper right-hand corner, it's gonna flip between
Video and Photo Mode. Now let's look at the
top of your controller, you have one jog wheel and
then you have a button. Now your jog wheel controls the gimbal so it's gonna control the
gimbal going down to up, super easy, that's all it does. Now on the other side is your
record or your camera button so when you're flying you
just click this button in the upper right-hand corner, it's either gonna start
your video recording or it's gonna take a photo, depending on what mode you are in. Now on the bottom of your controller, you have your USB-C port,
this is where you charge from and then on the top is
where you mount your phone. To mount your phone you
pop out this top element, and you can see that it moves to adjust to the size of your phone and then you'll see a little
cable when you look in. When you pop off for your left side, that's what connects to your phone and the right side is what
connects took the controller. And DJI supplies a bunch
of different cables depending on which type of phone that you're using the fly with. So you've mount your phone
so it fits nice and snug, you plug in the controller and then you're good
to go to start flying. All right, so now let's jump into the app. (upbeat music) So the first thing you wanna
do is put your phone in, attach the cable, turn on your controller, turn on the drone. Because we're just doing the setup and going through this together, I highly suggest taking off the propellers just so you don't have any issue where you might accidentally take it off, maybe you're inside, maybe you're somewhere where
you shouldn't be flying. So first things first,
let's get into the app. Basically what you wanna
do is hit Connect Aircraft in the lower right-hand corner, and you're gonna see that
there's the Mavic Mini and the Mavic Air 2. So you're gonna click on the Mavic Air 2. So the first time that you
connect to your aircraft, there's gonna be a whole
activation sequence that DJI sets up. Super easy to do, just walk
through it step-by-step, it's going to ask for your DJI account so if you don't have one yet, you're gonna need to set one up. Read through each screen
and follow the instructions. So there's gonna be
one screen that pops up that talks about your
joystick configuration. Just choose Recommended for now. If you wanna go through
later and change it up, you can do that in the settings, I'll show you where you can do that but everything that we're
gonna be talking about in this video uses the
recommended settings. Okay so now that you have
your activation set up, when you enter the camera view, this is the screen that
you're going to see. So we're just gonna go
systematically around the screen and we're gonna talk through
what each button does and we're gonna go into the menus and actually go through
what you need to know to be able to fly this
drone without any questions. So in the upper left-hand
corner when you hit this arrow, it's gonna go back to the main screen. Now it looks like I have an update so right here you're gonna
click the Update button and it's gonna go through
and update your drone. So I always suggest
before you start flying, before you go out to somewhere where you're not gonna have
any sort of WiFi signal that you make sure your drone
is completely up-to-date. So go in here, turn it
on when you're at home and check and see if there's an update 'cause the worst thing you
can do is get somewhere and then all of a sudden
it needs an update and for some reason it doesn't fly. So now let's go back to the fly screen which is the Go Fly, so we click Go Fly. The next button over
is what mode you're in, currently I'm in normal. So if I flip on the
controller over to Tripod, you'll see Tripod pop up and if you click over to the far right, you'll see Sport Mode. It also comes up with a flash right in the middle of the screen to tell you what mode you're going into. Next to that is the status of your drone. So right now mine needs
a compass calibration so you might pop up with this error where you need to calibrate the compass. So let me just show you
quickly how you do that. You're gonna click that button, click the red right on the top
and you're gonna calibrate. Just click the Calibration button, DJI is now gonna walk you through step-by-step how to do this. Click Start, we're gonna
rotate around this way and then we're gonna flip it up, rotate around this way and then it'll pop up with
either successful or failed. If it's failed try moving
to a different section of where you're at and do it again. So just now it failed for
me standing right here, I walked back to the back of my set and then it was successful. So you might have to play around with this to be able get your
calibration to work properly. Also it might just be the
way that you're holding it, so adjust your spinning
style, maybe rotate like, this sometimes takes a few times before it will get fully calibrated. So now instead of a red box, there it says Takeoff permitted, so now I know I can take off. So if you click that again you're gonna go into a preflight check. This is awesome that
DJI has included this. So first it's gonna give
you your notifications, this is where the calibration was, right now it's telling me my
lighting environments too dark because I'm in my studio
and it's super dark in here so it's just a warning, just
telling you what's going on. Now Auto RTH altitude, that means auto return-to-home altitude. So when your drone decides to return home it's going to go to this altitude from the point when you took off so it's not just that
altitude in the world, it's that altitude from the point where you took off and up, so 30 meters above where you took off and then it's gonna fly back. So you could set this higher or you could set this lower, it just depends on the situation you're in but 30 is a good place
to have it set for now. Just think if there's trees
around or something else, you might need to make that higher so that you're always making sure that you don't hit
something on the way back. Now underneath that is Flight Protection. So you have your max altitude
and your max distance. So you change these depending on the situation you're in and if you put it above the max altitude, it's gonna come up with
this little warning that says you might be in
violation of local laws. Now underneath that it's
gonna show you your SD card and your internal storage. So it shows you how much you have left. So right here you can
format both of these, and if you're following what
I was talking about earlier, you would offload all your footage and then you would format before you fly so that each card is just fresh and you're not just adding tons and tons of data onto each card. You wanna make sure that
you format your card in between flights obviously, after you've offloaded onto
your computer or your phone. And then on the bottom of that it's gonna show you Record Time Remaining. Now this is gonna change
depending on the settings that you use for your flight. 4K 60 is gonna burn up a lot more data than 1080p 24 frames per second, so just keep that in mind. Your remaining time
will fluctuate depending on the settings that you set. Now the next button over is
your optical avoidance sensors and this will show up red when
your sensors are turned off. The one next to that is
showing your satellites so right now I'm connected
to 14 satellites, it'll give you a warning
if you're not connected to enough satellites yet to be able to fly and use a proper GPS signal. Next to that is your
remote control connection, right now I have full
connection and it will tell you if it starts dropping as you're flying. And then the little battery next to that is the battery of your drone so right now mine is that 35%. I should probably swap out the battery but I'm not gonna take a flight, we're just in my studio
so for now that's fine, but when you're actually
flying next to it, it's gonna show your
estimated flight time left. So in the upper right-hand
corner you have a menu and this is gonna go through
a bunch of different options and we'll go into that next but first I wanna keep
going on this main screen. Underneath that is all
your camera settings, the big red button is your record, underneath that is your footage, so this is all the footage that's currently on my drone right now, and you can go through and play it, you can scrub through, you can download it to your phone. There's a lot of ways to be able to take this footage,
bring it into your phone, and do some cool stuff that you could share with social media. The little camera icon in
the lower right-hand corner turns it from auto to manual, and so when it's in auto
you have two options. You have exposure lock and
then you have EVF adjustment. So your exposure lock basically means that whatever your image
looks like right Now, it's gonna lock your exposure settings. And next to that is your
exposure compensation, so the EV basically means that it's gonna take the auto settings and bump it up or down
based on what you set here, so let's say I set +1, so what that's gonna do
is use the auto settings and add a stop of light to it. So if you're flying using auto and everything's looking dark, you would bump this up by the plus button. And the same thing if you're flying and everything looking very overexposed, then you bring this down and basically it's gonna
take the auto settings and adjust the baseline. So what it thinks auto
is it's gonna now make that a little bit darker. Now let's flip it into manual, so you click that little button in the lower right-hand corner and now you can adjust
your shutter manually, you can adjust your ISO and it's gonna give
you a little indication in the lower right-hand corner whether it thinks that it's
too dark or too bright. So this little M.M, the cameras metering what
it thinks the exposure is and then telling you,
you're 2.7 stops under what the camera thinks
you should be filming at. So this is just an indication to say, oh, I'm filming a little bit darker or I'm filming a little brighter than what the camera thinks
I should be filming at. Now dead center is a little indication of where the aircraft is in
relation to the controller. So I'm pointed towards you right Now and my drone is right here off to my left. And I love this feature
because when I'm out flying and I'm looking at what I'm filming, I could just be like oh my cameras at 11 o'clock and it's easy to find, and also when flying back I know which way to point the
joysticks to bring it back because I can quickly see an indication of where the drone is. Now next to that is your
distance and your height, so this is just your indication
of how high your drone is and how far away your drone is. Now in this lower left-hand
corner is your map icon, so when you click this, it's going to show where
the drone is on a map. Now on this full screen map you're gonna see indications
of where no-fly zones are. So as you can see I'm just
pointed over Burbank right Now and it's a crazy no-fly zone. L.A. is crazy, like, when
you look all around L.A., there are so many airports, so it's really hard to fly here, so that's why I have to
go places out of the city to be able to fly because there's a lot of
restricted zones here. So in the lower left-hand
corner you'll see your screen and when you click that it's gonna go back to full screen mode
but this is a great way to be able to just see
where your drone is on a map and you could fly using
that while still being able to see a little bit of your image in the lower left-hand corner. I'll flip back and forth between these and this is an option that
you can set on this Fn button, you can swap those quickly. On the right-hand side you have a bunch of options for this map. So on the top of it, you have your i and then this allows you to toggle on and off
all the restricted zones and warning zones. Now underneath that
will erase the fly data 'cause as you're flying, it's gonna draw lines
around where you're at. Now the button underneath that
will be where the aircraft is or where the home point is, so it's gonna center the
map around either of those. Now the button underneath that
toggles between true north and the direction that
you're actually pointed with the controller. And then underneath that you can go from Standard to Satellite to Mixed. So you have different
map options depending on how you wanna look at this map. Now underneath that is
a Find My Drone option and this is if you lost your drone. So you have two buttons on the bottom, one says Use Other Maps,
it's gonna pull it up into a different map option on your phone and then next to that is
Start Flashing and Beeping . So you click that.
(beeping) It's now flashing and it's beeping so if you lost your drone
and you're trying to find it, this helps you recover it easier. And then in the upper left-hand corner, you click that button, it goes back. Okay so now we're back at the main screen. So there's one more button on this screen and that's your takeoff
and landing button. You click this, it's gonna
ask you if you wanna take off, so it's gonna automatically
take off your drone and then it's gonna hover. And then the same thing
when you're hovering, you bring it down, you can click this and it will land the drone. Okay let's click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. Now we're gonna go
through some of the things that you have in your menu. Safety, that's the first thing. So you had some of this on
your pre-flight checklist but here's another place
where you can access and change these settings. So Max Altitude, Max Distance,
Auto return-to-home Altitude, you can update your home point here, underneath that is Flight Assistance. And you have two options, you have Obstacle Detection, so that's the sensors
that are around your drone to make sure you don't run into something, You're not gonna need a touch these unless it gives you a warning upfront, and it says you need to calibrate this, and it will pop up with that warning. Underneath that you
have your auxiliary LED, so mine's set to Auto. When you click the on button,
there it is, nice and bright. It's going to illuminate
wherever you're at and then you could set it to
Off if you don't wanna use it. I just left mine set to Auto but if you do wanna
switch it on and off here, this is where you can do it. Underneath that is an
option to unlock GEO zones. Now underneath that you have
your Advanced Safety Settings. So in this menu setting
you have Signal Lost and Emergency Propeller Stop. So with Signal Lost, this is
just telling the drone what to do if you lose contact
with your controller. I have mine set to Return to Home. However if your home is moving, say you're on a boat or something, then you might not wanna return to home, the better option might be to descend if you're somewhere where
you want the drone just to come down from the sky, because there might be
obstacles like planes and different things like that, and the other option is to hover. So if you're in a situation where you don't want it to return to home and you were flying somewhere where you can easily
get closer to the drone so you can return your signal, then you'll leave it on Hover. The easiest one is just Return to Home. Majority of the time,
we're in one spot flying and we want the drone to come back to us and by the time it starts coming back, you'll get signal back
with the controller. Emergency Propeller Stop, this
should be on emergency only. You can turn this on Anytime however if it's on anytime,
what will happen is if you put your sticks
in these two directions, the drone will fall out of the sky because the propellers were stopped and there are times where
I will maneuver the drone in certain ways where I'm
actually doing this configuration but it's just to make the
drone move a certain way and so you don't wanna have it on Anytime because then that would cause your drone to fall out of the sky. And the last option on the safety menu is Remote Identification. And so you have your options to add in all your information here. All right let's go into
the second settings which is your controls. So from here you can set
up from metric to imperial; Gimbal Mode, you have Follow
Mode or you have FPV Mode. Next is allow Upward Gimbal Rotation. So without this turned on, your gimbal is gonna stop at
horizons, dead straight ahead. If you turn this on, the
gimbal will start to go up. So if you want that little
bit of extra up angle, I would suggest turning this on. I fly with this on because there are times where I am down lower and I
wanna see just a little bit more of the tree line or the
skyline or whatever it is. A lot of times when I'm
out flying by mountains when you're flying you
don't actually see the tops of the peaks so this allows you to be able to tilt the
camera up just enough where you actually could see that skyline and it makes better shots. Now next is your Gimbal Calibration so if you need to recalibrate
your gimbal you can do that. You can hit Recenter Gimbal
right underneath that and it's going to center up your gimbal. Now the next under Control goes into your remote control settings. First is Phone Charging
so if you turn this on, what's gonna happen is your controller is now gonna be charging your phone while it's connected to it. Now we go into Stick Mode, this is where you can change up which Stick Mode you wanna be in. So if you wanna change up your
settings you can do it here. You have Mode 1, 2, or 3,
or you can set it up custom, whatever makes sense for
you and your flight style. The next down is your
button customization. Remember that Fn button
on your controller? Well this is where you set that Fn button and you have three options. And there's two ways
that you can activate it. I wish they would have done just all three because it doesn't make sense
that you have three options and two ways to activate
it but it is what it is. So there are two ways you activate it, is you click once or you double click it. You could have put a
triple click too, whatever. Alright so if you tap once, you could set it to Recenter Gimbal, Auxiliary LED, or Toggle Map/Live View. So typically I just have my click one on Toggle Map/Live View, that way I don't have to
actually tap the screen when I'm flying and then double-tap, I recenter gimbal 'cause it's really nice to have that option to be able to, oomph, bring your gimbal back. Now if you are flying later at night, I might go in and change the
setting to the Auxiliary LED just so you can flip
that on and off easily. You might be out flying and you just wanna see where it is, pop it on, boom, it's a
bright light in the sky. Now underneath that you
have your RC Calibration. You're not gonna need to do this unless you're having issues
with your controller. And then last on the control setting is your Flight Tutorial. So highly suggested if you're new flyer, you go through this flight tutorial, DJI's gonna give you some more information on how to be a successful flyer. Okay next menu setting
is all about your camera. So first is your format, whether you're gonna shoot MP4 or MOV. Next is your color profile, so this is where you swap
between normal and Cinelike-D. For me I always shoot Cinelike-D because I do color grading but if you're new to flying and you're not gonna do
that much editing in post or you just wanna share
quickly on social media, use the normal because that's
gonna be a baked-in look. Cinelike-D is flatter so it gives you more room to color grade. Now underneath that is your coding format, you can shoot on H.264 or H.265, you can have anti-flicker,
I just leave mine on auto. Underneath that is an option
to do video subtitles. Now let's go down to General. You have your Histogram,
so let's turn that on, go back to your main screen and it will pop up with this
histogram in the middle screen. So this is showing all
your exposure values from dark to light. So you could use your finger and move this around
anywhere on your screen or click the X and it will turn off. The next is your overexposure warning, so it's gonna show you
on the screen visually when you're overexposing. Now this is great when you
wanna get better looking footage because you don't want
your skies to blow out, you don't want them
completely bright white. And this is really helpful
when you're shooting on auto because auto might say
this is the exposure that I think is best but
the skies are blowing out so that would give you a good indication to bring your exposure compensation down to like a negative one or
negative two and then you'll see that the skies are no longer overexposing because you have this
overexposure warning on. Underneath that is your Gridlines, so these are different ways to just be able to frame up your image. I just turn on all three, so you have your thirds,
you have your cross, and then you have your center indication. White balance is auto and manual, so you can go in here and change
your white balance manually so if you don't want it fluctuating and you just wanna set your white balance, you go in here and you do it
manually or you click Auto. Now the next option is
to Auto Sync HD photos, that's gonna bring it onto your phone and then again just like
the pre-flight checklist, you have your internal storage here. And then cache While Recording,
so if this is turned on, basically, it's gonna be
recording another version of the video because all the
video's on the drone itself, so this cache recording basically records what the controller is seeing minus all of the controls
around the image. So this allows you store
a version of the footage that the phone has seen. And underneath that, you have
Max Video Cache Capacity. So what happens is once
it hits the max capacity, it's going to start deleting
the old files automatically. And on the bottom you
have Reset Camera Settings and this is a factory reset. Next menu option is
about your transmission. So you could do Definition,
Normal or HD, I fly with HD. Your frequency, you can
use 2.4, 5.8, or Dual-band. Underneath that you
have your Channel Mode, whether auto or manual,
I just leave it on Auto. And that's all you have on transmission. So if you're having issues
with your transmission, you can go in here and tweak
your settings a little bit but you know I've had no issues
with the factory settings so I just leave them as is. Now on the last tab you have your About, and this is all your
information about the drone. You could check for
updates for your firmware and your FlySafe Database and it shows your app version, it shows your serial
numbers and all of that. The last menu I wanna go through is right above the record button. So this is all your camera
settings and these are important so that you can get the
best looking footage out of your camera. So let's just go over photo first. So let's click it in Photo mode, a few options here, you have single, you have 48-megapixel,
you have a Smart photo, and you have AEB which basically
takes a series of photos, whether it's three or five and what that does is it
takes three different pictures at three different exposure values. Now underneath this is your video options. In your first menu, you have
Normal, HDR, or Slow Motion. So under Normal, you have 4K, 2.7K, 1080p, and then if you're in the normal setting, you can do your 4K 60 frames per second. Now if you go to HDR, now it's gonna limit you to 30 frames, 25 or 24 frames in all modes. Now when you go to Slow Motion, you only have a 1080p function and you can do 240 or 120. Now something to note about this drone is when you're doing
something like ActiveTrack, it goes to 4K 30 automatically and when you use Quickshots,
it's gonna go to 1080p and it's gonna put it into
your normal color settings, so you can't use Cinelike-D
in your Quickshot mode. Now the next option underneath
this is your Quickshot and this is where you're
gonna activate it. So when you're flying, I can't do it now because I'm not flying, but you'll click this button and it's gonna show all
the different Quickshots that you have, you're
gonna set your center mark and then it's gonna go through and do the quick shot
for you when you hit Go. Now the last option is
your 8K Hyperlapse mode. So you could do free which
is just go in the direction of wherever you point the sticks, you could do a circle,
you can do a course lock, or you can do a waypoint. So different options to
be able to do a hyperlapse and you've just got to figure out what settings work best for you. To use the ActiveTrack on
this drone is super simple. You actually don't have
to click any buttons, all you need to do is draw
a box using your finger on the screen around the
object that you wanna track. Now you have three different options in terms of your ActiveTrack. This middle option just points the drone at what you on a film but
if you move further away, it's not gonna follow you. To the right of that is your orbit, so it's gonna keep your subject centered and move around in either direction and you can tell the speed of the orbit by using this little slider
here and then hitting Go. And on the other side you
have your follow mode, which you could follow
right behind your subject and it will just follow
wherever the subject goes or you have the parallel option which will keep to the
drone off to the side and keep your subject
centered as you move. And when you wanna stop
tracking your subject, you can hit Stop and then you hit the little
X here on the green box. With any of these kind of features, I highly suggest taking
some time going out and playing with these and just
testing them out one by one. Really go through and
understand what each one does before you try to get in a
situation where you're like, hey I wanna get a hyperlapse
out of this really cool scene but you don't know which one's
gonna make it look the best. So really take some time and
practice with these modes because once you have an understanding of what everything does then it's gonna be much
easier to get better footage when you're out flying and you're in some really cool situations. (upbeat music) So a couple notes for your first flight, one, is you wanna have a
full charge on your battery of your drone and also of your controller, you also wanna have your
phone at full charge so there's no options
for something to drop out Now next is you're gonna
wanna put your propellers on correctly and make
sure they're all tight. Put your drone somewhere
where it can easily take off and land and then the first
thing that you wanna do before you even start flying
and getting those cool shots is take the drone up, let it hover for 30
seconds and then land it. Use the auto feature and also
just use the thumb controllers so if you push both controllers inward, it's gonna turn on the drone and then you push up
on the left-hand side, it's gonna take the drone off, that's how you do it manually. Auto, you go in the menu system, you click the Auto button
and it's gonna auto take off. Let it hover, now do the
same thing in reverse. Use the auto setting
to land it, okay great, now bring it back up, now
use your sticks to land it. To land your drone all you
have to do is pull down on the left-hand stick
controller, it's gonna land, keep holding it down and
it'll eventually shut off. So for your first time flying this drone, I really highly suggest going somewhere where you have no obstructions
anywhere around you. You wanna be somewhere that's big, open. You wanna make sure there's no warnings, there's no airports, nothing but nearby. You wanna have complete
freedom to just play around. Because the first few times
that you fly this drone, you really just wanna
play with the controller, play with all the settings, so if you're somewhere where
you're worried about people, you're worried about
restrictions about flying here, you're worried about the weather or the trees that are nearby, then it's gonna be harder
for you to learn the drone. So I highly suggest
find a big, open field. I like to go out to the desert
where there's no one around. I could sit out there for hours, go through multiple batteries
and nobody's gonna bug me. So let's go over a few things that I do to get the best looking
footage out of my drone. So first I fly with Cinelike-D and I fly at 4K 60 frames per second. This gives me the most
flexibility when I'm editing to be able to not only
shoot in a flatter setting but then I can slow down the footage and get even smoother shots. Now in terms of flying I
flip it into Sport Mode and I get my drone to where I
wanna actually start shooting and then I flip it into Tripod Mode. Tripod Mode's great to be able to get smooth cinematic-looking footage. Now to get the best looking exposure, I either flip it into manual
or I use my exposure lock. You don't want the exposure
adjusting as you're flying. And when it comes to white balance, the auto white balance works pretty well; however, if you've noticed that it starts fluctuating at all, I would highly suggest
putting it into manual and really setting it
but you got to make sure that if your situation
changes that you go in and you adjust your white balance. I wish the white balance
was somewhere a little bit more accessible than going
into the menu system. Now to get better looking shots, you don't always wanna do full force on the thumb controllers,
you wanna ease it. So I do a quarter or a half
in a direction in Tripod Mode and that allows you to get
slower looking footage. Now the right thumb controller,
when you push it forward, it's going to move forward. When you bring it back,
it's gonna move backwards, when you move it to the left, it's going to move to
the left to the side, and when you move it right,
it's gonna go right to the side. Now on the left thumb controller, when you push up, it's
gonna move up in the sky, and when you push down,
it's gonna bring it down. Now the left and right rotate the drone, so it's kind of like a pan on a camera. So for new flyers, what I highly suggest to get better looking footage
is to pick one direction and just do one direction to start. So just fly forwards
or just fly backwards, or just fly to the side,
one way left or right. Now you could do up or down or you could do a slow rotation around. This is a great way to
start getting good footage without a ton of skill. You just put it in Tripod mode and then adjust your speed based on how much you're
pressing on the joystick. Now once you've mastered
the skills of one direction, you start combining them. Now what you'll do is
use your left joystick and your right joystick
and use both of them to create these more
dynamic-looking shots. So for example, the one of the ones that I use all the time, I'll use the right joystick,
I'll point left or right and then I'll use the left
joystick and point left or right and create an arc around an object. Now yes, there are ways
that you can automate this but it doesn't always work as
perfectly as you will want. Now doing two to three motions at once is really getting into
some advanced level flying and it's one of those
things you really just need to practice, practice, practice. So get good at flying in one direction and then start adding
potentially two directions. One thing you don't wanna do
is just be flying willy-nilly and doing like this all over the place. It just doesn't look that good. One of the biggest tips I can
give you is avoid jerky motion 'cause any jerky motion
is gonna call attention to the camera movement And as soon as you call attention to it, it's not gonna look as good. (upbeat music) So let's dig into color grading and I'm just gonna briefly go through some ideas around color grading and if you wanna dig deeper into this, I'll put links down
below in the description to my full color grading tutorials. And I have a few that I've
done around the Mavic Mini that applied to this as well. You can do some pretty cool
stuff with the color grade. So when you're shooting Cinelike-D, you're gonna get a flatter settings, so that means there's less contrast and there's less saturation. So the first thing that
you're gonna wanna do is add contrast and then you're
gonna add some saturation. Now what you don't wanna
do is add so much contrast that your whites blow out. Ideally, when you're shooting Cinelike-D, the goal is to preserve your highlights but also preserve the darker
elements of your video. That way you can do some different
things with color grading so that you can see more of your image. Now just doing these tweaks
from contrast and saturation, your footage is gonna look great already. Now what you can do from here is add a little bit warmer
tones, some reds, some yellows, and that will end up giving you more of that warm feel to your footage. Now adding some warm tones will really give the
footage a different quality, it gives you kind of
that sunrise/sunset feel. And a note on sunrise and sunset, the closer you fly to sunrise or sunset, this is called golden hour or magic hour, you will get better looking footage. Try to shoot in ways where your sun is not
right directly in frame and if it is, try to do it when the sun is super low in the sky because you'll be able to
get better looking footage. When you shoot high noon,
it's right above you, it's like it's dead straight down, you're not gonna get the
best looking footage, you really wanna play with your shadows and the dark side of your subjects. So for example, I was flying
super early in the morning in the desert and you
have all the Joshua trees, I have my Jeep driving through the scene. Now when you look at this side and you shoot from where
the sun direction is, it's a very washed out looking
image, it's not very good. But if you shoot where the
sun is off to your side or a little bit behind,
you get more contrast, and it really makes your footage pop. So time of day and the direction in which you point your drone
are gonna have a huge effect. And then you use Cinelike-D and do a little bit of color grading and then you could really
make your footage pop. Now like I said I have a ton of tutorials on advanced color grading. This is just some quick
things to think about, so if you wanna dig
deeper into color grading, I highly suggest going
down in the description and checking those out. Alright so now that you
have a understanding of how to fly the DJI Mavic Air 2 and you understand everything about it, I highly suggest you check out
one of these two videos here. One of them goes into a
color grading technique that I love doing with my drone footage. It's using a gradation filter and the video underneath
that is the biggest mistakes that new flyers make starting out, and I highly suggest
you check that one out so you don't make any mistakes and end up crashing your drone. Alright guys, I'll see you over there.
