DJI Mini 4 Pro: The Complete Beginners Guide

today you've got your complete guide the complete beginner's guide to the DJI Mini 4 Pro but it's not just for beginners it's for advanced users as well that want to understand all the features of the Mini 4 Pro and how they actually work in this guide I'm going to take you through the parts you got in the Box as well as which remote choices you've got into getting it up in the air all over the flying features and modes the fundamentals of obstacle avoidance photo modes Advanced modes active track access track 360 sport modes waypoints hyperlapse you name it I'm going to cover it all in this video from start to finish now I've got quite a bit of experience flying drones more than a decade at this point somebody give you tons of little tips both Pro tips and just like simple practical tips that may not be super obvious if this is your first drone haha the lady is ran directly over the Drone okay with that I'll just get straight into it when you buy the Mini 4 Pro you've got basically one big choice to make which remote controller do you want uh you have two basic options here you've got What's called the DJI rc2 versus the other controller here is called the DJI rcn2 and that one requires your phone be in it it will charge your phone though if you want that so you don't worry too much about battery life but I personally find just having everything all in one here leaves me free to use my phone like a phone call comes in or text message or something like that I can still do that without having to sacrifice uh the Drone operation in the sky from a functional standpoint outside of the obvious screen in the rc2 they're pretty darn similar the biggest difference is on the back of the rc2 there are two custom buttons that you can customize for a couple different operations uh for example changing the gimbal It'll point straight down instantly or things like that and there's also one additional scroll wheel at the top here again not a huge deal for most people but just something to be aware of now the next question then becomes whether or not you want to fly more combo kit is a general wolf some I find most combination kits for most companies are a waste of money they're just upsells to get you to buy stuff DJI is the rare exception has been for a long time in that category of actually being useful in particular if you want the extra batteries so the fly more kit comes with the rc2 here the DJI rc2 and then in it it has this charging Hub and two additional batteries so you've got three batteries in total plus of course the Drone as well as a bag and a bunch of extra props so that is pretty handy and I prefer and I really like having extra batteries I don't know if you need three batteries but I think you know having the extra battery at that point you you're not that much different in price so you might as well just kind of go with it the standard batteries for the DJI Mini 4 expected about 30 minutes but there's also a Plus Battery a bigger battery at 39 minutes that larger battery is not available for sale in the EU and the way you can tell the difference by the way between those two batteries is that the ones that are the standard batteries have 249 grams listed on them versus the ones out of the plus batteries I have nothing on them that way when the drones looked at it knows whether or not it's actually 249 grams or not the cool part though is if you do manage to get yourself a Plus Battery that works just fine here in Europe there's no problem with that there's no locking system in place it's just a matter that they do not sell these here and to be clear there's nothing legal about using the larger batteries here it's just that in most cases that requires a different license category so in my case I have that but if you didn't have that category then you might be in a pickle if you were over the 250 gram weight limit which is of course the main selling point or one of the big selling points of this drone is that in many jurisdictions you don't need additional licensing that depends on which country you're in and all that kind of stuff for me the more practical aspect of it's just really really tiny like when I'm cycling I can fit this in my back Jersey pocket the controller kind of fits in there too the same goes for out trail running that kind of stuff it's really nice and lightweight and it still gets that longer battery life meanwhile for the charging Hub that's like my favorite thing on earth so it's got a USBC connection on the side there it's also got a regular USB for charging other things so you can basically plug USBC into this and then charge the remote control Etc you can also charge the drone on the back using the USBC Port that you'll see there all these methods work pretty well for charging I just find this really handy because I can just plug all these things in it will charge them sequentially so not concurrently until it finishes charging all of them if you have any Mini 3 batteries they're fully compatible with the Mini 4 no problem they're same true for the charging case itself of course but the controllers they are not compatible so they look almost identical but internally they're different and they're somehow not compatible between the three and the four so just kind of keep that in mind anyways with that all set let's talk about the Drone and getting up in the air so it comes with this little basically clamp that keeps all the props from flying around if it's in your bag I find this clamp really horrible to be honest a DJI makes Incredible drones incredible Hardware Etc when it comes to like things that strap and props on they've always really struggled in there I bought this like one for like two bucks on Amazon I'll link it down below there it just simply straps on it just works way way better than that so you've got that on there to keep the Flop props from flying around then you need to unfold it so unfolding is pretty straightforward you're gonna go to pull the front legs out out like this then the back leg and then rinse repeat the other side pull the front leg get the prop out of the way put it leg there and then now you've got it opened up then you've got the gimbal guard on the front I always always always use the gimbal guard when you're traveling with this and it's in your bag the gimbal is the most sensitive part on this drone like I can take this drone throw it right now over there it'll be fine but if the gimbal gets a head-on smack it might not be so fine so we got this gimbal guard off right there the thing about the gimbal is you can touch it it's all cool as long as the Drone is power off think of the gimbal kind of like a flower it's it's fine when the wind's blowing out and all that but uh if you just go and like rip it it's it's not so good so you can touch it no problem but once that power's on do not touch the gimbal on your drone now the mini 4's big claim to fame is obstacle avoidance in 360 degree obstacle avoidance in particular versus the Mini 3 had more limited obstacle avoidance so there are two core sets of obstacle avoidance sensors here there's the front set that you see right there and they're on an angle on the side what this means that can base see everything like this way the side the front above it Etc and the same is true for this one and then there's two more in the back there doing the same thing effectively creating this bubble around it then on the bottom there's additional obstacle avoidance sensors as well as basically ground detection sensors when it comes down to land how close is the ground otherwise you know if it comes down like this going really fast it'll plunk the ground you'll see as we do some Landings when it comes down close to the ground it'll slow down and very very slowly inch towards the ground and have a nice smooth Landing okay now let's get the Drone turned on to do that you're going to press this button here once and then press it again like that and this will turn it on oh you heard a little beep in a second there we go and now it's turned on or turning on I'm going to place it down on the ground right there I'll show you where to place it in the grand scheme of beginners places is probably not the best place but I don't have a lot of options as you can see right here it's mostly grass don't try to take off on grass and never ever ever ever ever take off on Sand uh you take off on the sand you might as well take off in the water it's it's just horrific for the Drone uh it'll Attract it it's it'll be everywhere for the rest of that drone's life and eventually will die so take off something like this just ensure the props aren't going to hit anything when you go like that easy peasy then we'll turn on the remote control for this tutorial I'm going to use the DJ rc2 uh just because there's no particular good reason in fact I'll actually switch for the active track section to this one because I have a remote control bracket on the bike here to show you that so we'll do that later on but to power this on the same concept you press this power button once short and then press it long like that and you hit the trip chirp and it trips on I do ensure that the antennas are up you'll feel those got a natural click position right around there that's the point they're supposed to be in otherwise they're folded down like this fold in like that for travel now if it's your very first time turning on the Drone do enjoy sure you do the firmware update the way it works for DJI drones and most consumer electronics is companies build this stuff months ahead of time months ahead of launch they stockpile it and then they they ship it all out on the day of launch I would do that all at home uh General good practice is basically just do that in the living room turn on the Drone make sure everything's connected and then also make sure you can record to the SD card that's in there I will link down below the SD card that I use I use the same SD card on every action camera every drone uh 256 gig Ultra also you may wonder why there's an SD card slot at the bottom right there that is for doing screen recording for example if you want to or you can even copy basically a low-res version of the footage onto that SD card you don't need it to operate the DJ RC in the case of the phone based one uh basically it's just going to write that information to your phone instead okay with that all set we're going to tap that go fly button right there and get into the screen to fly the Drone the very first thing you want to double check when you're doing this is that your max distances are what you want them from a safety standpoint tap that dot dot dot in the upper right hand corner and then basically this brings up the safety screen I'm going to scroll down here so you see the auto return altitude until you see flight protection Max altitude and max distance so max distance I like to set usually bring this down to just a couple thousand meters give or take so basically if something goes really wrong with the Drone then I know it's going to be within about 2000 meters of here the max altitude you can see I can adjust that anyways with that all set we're gonna go back here and we're going to double check a couple things at the top number one we see our battery percentage that's at 90 percent right next to that we can see our recording time we haven't started recording yet next to that you see the RC at full signal strength next to that that red stuff is the optical void and sensors because we're on the ground it hasn't engaged those yet so that's totally fine next to that that 27 is the number of GPS satellites I always wait to have about 13 to 14. at that point it'll change from Orange to White uh below that you won't get an update of the home point so it updates the home point so that if something happens where the Drone gets lost through the signal Etc it'll always fly back to you and I'll show you that in just a moment and on the right hand side the bottom we we've got a bunch of photo video stuff that I'll talk through in just a second now to take off it's pretty easy you'll see on the left hand side that take off button we're going to tap that once and then we just go ahead and long hold down the take off button and it'll take off the Drone you see how it spins up and it'll take off to about a meter and a half or about four or five feet so you can see it's hanging out right there hey quick note as I edit this you're looking at the screen recording which is a much lower resolution here and there I will show you a full 4K video files and I'll label that in the corner but that's why things look a little bit low resolution and blocky because it's a Live recorded session from the controller so you can learn as part of the tutorial make sense good and normally as soon as I take off I get the Drone up and out of the air so I'm gonna do that now by pressing the upper left hand button to fly up like this so I'm going to go up so I'm doing just getting up out of the way out of the way from people and things like that and now let's briefly talk about the controls you can practice them yourself at like a nice big football field or something like that but I'm just going to kind of go through them really nice and easy on the left hand side here if we go forward it's going to go ahead and go higher in the Drone so you can see that now increasing the elevation and we go down like this it's going to decrease the elevation there we go meanwhile if I press to the left you'll see it's going to churn and rotate the drone on basically access it's not moving anywhere else it's just simply rotating like a top right now in circles and the same is true of going this way rotates right the further I go the faster it rotates so all the way to the right and I kind of go halfway and then it slows down Etc on the right hand side here we've got how to go forward so I press this to go forward you see now it's going towards the trees and then I pull it to go backwards just like this and I see it's going backwards and then likewise I can go now press to the side over here and it's going to go laterally to the left so it's just basically sliding like a sliding across the Dance Floor to the left and then the same here is true for sliding to the right in the middle we have the mode selector by default even if your mode structure is in the wrong place it's always going to start off in normal mode so you can see right now my mode selector is actually slid over to C which is a cinema mode yet on the screen you can see it clearly shows normal mode so that's a good thing it's to keep you from accidentally taking off in sport mode so there's normal Cinema and Sport a cinema essentially just slows everything down it basically like makes it so everything feels slower when the controls are are reacting to it so you can get more cinematic moves normal is what you're normally flying in and the sport mode allows you to a lot faster but critically it turns off all obstacle avoidance sensors so sport mode here is not like for sporty stuff like you know chasing a cyclist or whatever the case is although it can be it is for going faster the Drone it's basically a holdover for many many years ago when DJI was trying to be more sporty with their drones but just keep that in mind now if you tap the battery indicator right there it'll show you kind of three numbers one is the first number until we turn to home rth so rth basically means that it's going to return to its takeoff point and usually within about a foot or two at that point which is pretty handy uh number two is until forced Landing so at that point basically it's going to start Landing the Drone slowly you can mitigate that to a degree by holding the up sticks and moving it around but it's eventually going to get to the ground it's going to force this way there and then until the battery is fully empty and so those are kind of three things to keep in mind by default if I were to put this down right there it'll actually come back and land itself at the end of the day so once it gets to that 16 minutes left or so it'll automatically start a countdown and then from there it'll come back and land unless I cancel it out so with that said let me show you one more thing which is what to do if something's going wrong so let's say you're you're moving around you're flying like this you're like oh no I'm gonna I'm gonna go down into the the canal there all you do is let go like literally just just let go anytime you're not sure just let go and everything stops the Drone stops exactly in in place it's as simple as that likewise if you just feel like it's having a bad day and you want to get it back to you as quick as possible or at least as efficiently as possible you just long press this button up here and that's going to return to home and you'll see right now that green pipeline or Green Path there that's showing you the basically an augmented reality version of how it gets back to its starting point in this case it's just going straight over here and straight down but you will see cases where it may have something in front of you it's going to go up first and go over that and so on uh it's pretty cool we can cancel that any point by simply pressing the cancel button left hand side likewise that same little pause button up there that is if you're doing a move like a quick shot or Master shots Etc like I'll show you later on and you just need to stop really you stop right where it is right then and there just press the stop button that pause button it just instantly stops the Drone in the sky and pauses and lets you figure out what you need to do next now at the bottom left hand side of the screen you're going to see a couple things see that little map icon and to the right of that you see where it shows the height 19 meters so if I go up it'll increase there we go and you see above that my vertical speed is basically increasing or staying at the same amount 18 kilometers an hour and if I go down you'll see it decrease Etc and then the right of that is my distance if I go forward you'll see it basically is increasing my distance and my speed is showing above that as well if I tap this map here I will see a map in this case I haven't downloaded anything so it's pulling off of Wi-Fi on my phone but you can download Maps ahead of time that way you can download the area you're going in case you don't have any cellular signal or connectivity there now at this point I want to talk about obstacle avoidance so I'm going to walk over here and we're going to fly into the trees now one thing I want to point out is that by default to DJI sets this to be break versus bypass if you go to the settings option under safety you'll see the option to set it to bypass check that so it goes around the optical as opposed to stopping for the obstacle so you can see the Drone out there which I hope you can see it anyways you should be able to see it right out there and you can see the trees over here let's get a little closer and as we get closer you'll see that there's a yellow showing up on the screen solely right now it's the downward obstacle avoidance so that's because there's Spacey stuff within about three meters of it downwards actually four meters as a threshold but it doesn't quite pick up stuff out there in front of it I'm going to go down a little bit lower on purpose here so you can see me going lower and now I'm just going to go straight forward towards the trees and you can see it automatically rotated right around to the right of the trees the same is true also if I try to go to the side so watch now I'm gonna go try right into the side and then say nope it's going to go over the top of those trees automatically once it's clear to them it's going to keep on going pretty cool right the same is also true for going backwards I'm going to go now backwards into the trees here we go just going straight back and I should go right over the top of them there we go straight over the top uh without any problems at all and that is that 360 degree obstacle avoidance the same is also true if I try to go up into something okay I'm going to tell it to go straight up which should hit these tree branches up here but you'll see it moves backwards to get out of the way now this works great especially when it's very green like this because it's still you know early fall but if you're in the winter especially late in the afternoon or if it's a dark overcast day be aware that it will not pick up small branches you can see this in my after track video I'll link that in the corner there where basically those branches have already lost their leaves and a little plunk into those tiny little twig like branches and potentially take your drone down Okay so let's talk about video now and video recording on the right hand side you basically have your options for choosing video modes so tap that little film strip icon right there and you can see normal night and slow motion you also see to the right of that photo video Master shots quick shots hyperlap and Pano hyperlapse and Panna so Master shots and quick shots and even hyperlapse to a certain degree are all technically video modes but they've separated them out this way so in the normal mode right there we've got that selected now I'm gonna go down to the very bottom you see resin FPS I'm going to tap that and this is where I change that resolution do remember to do this because by default it'll be a lower resolution that's kind of like a Sad Panda moment so you know you bought this expensive drone used a resolution so in this case 4K is what I'm selected and you can choose the frame rate down the bottom right there I'm going to choose 60 frames per second just so I've got that at the the full frames per second right there and then to the right of that you see the ability to change my exposure compensation so I can go ahead and do that by just tapping these options right there and right now it's exposed quite well so I don't need to do that it's a nice sunny day in fact one could even argue go down a third of a stop but I think we're we're fine where we are and then you've got that record button to the right of that so if I tap that right there that'll start recording you hear the chirp that means it's recording there's also recording buttons and shutter buttons on the top of the controller uh so you can see this right here that recording button I can simply tap that to record something and I can also tap this to stop recording so press that once it stops recording now looking back at that film strip icon there if we go down to slow motion you'll see these as slow-mo modes so basically slow motion modes means it's just going to record more frames per second so if you go down the bottom now you see the resin FPS I can do 1080 at 200 frames per second or I can do 4K at 100 frames per second now keep in mind that generally speaking uh most shows Etc most YouTube all the fun stuff is generally playback at 30 frames per second I know there's you can debate that all you want but just for simplicity's sake 30 frames per second so that means that in the case of 1080p at 200 frames per second I could slow this down 200 frames per second divided by 30 eight and a half nine times give or take that means it'll appear eight and a half and nine times slower when I play it back at that normal speed and in fact you can see this right now I think there's some boats or whatever got slow motion on the screen for you just to kind of look at the way that looks when you slow things down uh we're not shooting this I would not shoot in this mode all the time though by the way just shoot in this mode when you need to because there's other trade-offs we made for example you can't do active track in this mode and things like that so I would go back and just shoot in normal mode unless you're trying to shoot something that you want to look epic once it's slowed down next we've got the Gimbal and the gimbal allows you to rotate the camera up and down to see things below you or above you Etc it also allows the camera to rotate entirely for vertical shooting mode that I'll talk about in just a second to control the gimbal you'll see the gimbal wheel in the top of the control here I just simply rotate it and now we're going down we're all the way down to 90 degrees so we'll go down all the way down down down down down and now we're pointing straight down if I were to go back over the top of me so I'm going to scoot back right here you should see this in three two one there I am right set up like that and then I can go back forward by just pressing the other action what's cool though if I go like this is the C1 custom button there by default will actually rotate the gimbal straight level or straight down so I've tried to tap it once boom straight back to level so I'm going to sit there and like slowly adjust that you can change the speed of the Gimbal and all the controls in the settings and then choose to gain an expo tuning option and you can tweak that as you see fit for all the different things there I wouldn't do that unless those other modes don't don't fit your your fancy if you will I find it just fine kind of the way it is what's notable is that the gimbal on the mini 4 can go up to 60 degrees up so watch this if I go all the way up like this you may be asking yourself why would I want to shoot the sky and the answer is that sometimes you want to start out below something and rise up with it and basically change that orientation as you go you can see the shot I did yesterday uh this windmill I'm far away from it so don't worry but basically where I start my flow and then slowly rose up and adjust that gimbal so basically it was you know slowly going down as I went up Etc uh something you might do for a skyscraper whatever the case may be so that flexibility is there if you want it now in lower right hand corner you've got the ability to adjust more for the video settings so if I tap this Auto button there you'll see now it goes into Pro mode and I can change different settings so I can change for example the white balancer if I untap the auto I can change white balance I can scroll down I can do color from normal to hlg to D log M just to demonstrate the difference if I go from normal where it normally is into d-log you can see it becomes much more dull and flat this is if you're doing color grading so D log M isn't quite full log format it's pretty good but it's not full log format if you understand what I'm talking about then you probably know the nuances already if you don't understand what I'm talking about then don't shoot in D log M this requires you to color grade after the fact otherwise your footage won't look that good and it's going to take you many many hours to color grade most footage for any sort of video so just shoot in normal mode or hlg mode if you want a bit of that that higher dynamic range look to it if I tap the right hand side of that menu now you can see I can change my ISO so I can turn that on or off I can also change my shutter and then again adjust the exposure I saw at the bottom there just to tap again again the pro back to Auto gets you right back to where you were where you can simply adjust the exposure compensation if you need to adjust that next I want to show you vertical video no place better to do it than a brief field trip to the lighthouse if you look to the left of the recording button on that full right hand side there there's this little rectangle that rotates the entire gimbal so the whole gimbal actually rotates it's a unique feature of the Mini 3 and Mini 4 Pro and I can zoom in a little bit more in this basically it's my full resolution now in the vertical mode so I can hit record and now I'm seeing this basically the entire gimbal being rotated the entire camera system being rotated and this allows me to get vertical footage this is better than cropping in because you get the entire sensor range as opposed to just a small portion of it this is also available by the way in other modes so you can see here if I go to slow motion for example I can do vertical video there I can do it in photos Etc even active track supports and vertical video mode uh it's unfortunately something that's not available on the higher end drones with the zoom cameras and whatnot but still it is great to have that vertical video option when you want it so for example this shot here really primarily works best in vertical video because that dock going out or the pier going out behind it the waves Etc uh this shot if I was to crop in probably wouldn't look as good normally versus I'm shooting for a full uh you know landscape horizontal mode then I'm going to shoot like this because it has the entire width of that picture because you're not likely viewing it on a phone additionally another area I wanted to show you here is zoom right now I'm at One X Zoom you see on the right hand side there but if I tap this it'll zoom into 2X and then again to 3x and basically this is just zooming in digitally so it's simply cropping the image it's not like the actual Zoom that you'd see on the air 3 or the mavic 3 Series so again just tapping that in once again just simply manually zooming that in and again I would probably just do this afterwards I wouldn't necessarily crop in here unless you're in a case where you know that this is the exact thing that you want and you can't get there for some reason or it's not safe to get there either people Etc then in that case sure but otherwise I would go ahead and just kind of leave it as is and crop after the fact and post production you can also use zoom to do stuff like this watch as I tap from the 3x out to the 1X it's going to zoom out in that image so it's kind of cool it gets the windmill not the windmill the lighthouse in there and I can tap in to zoom in again now I'm really far from the sailboat since I don't know the guy so that way I'm not uh interrupting his life zoom in again the 3 accent does that nice smooth transition which cool so we can just see that low battery turn to home it gave me a 10 second warning I'm going to cancel that right now you see that at 20 I'm going to do quickly the photo mode then we'll land it and I'll show you how this all works so photo modes are virtually identical to the video modes and again we're getting into all the advanced modes in a second let's just go to the primer of how things work so in the case of photo modes I tap that film strip there then I trap tap the photo button there we go takes a second and now I have single aeb so Auto exposure bracketing if you want to manually do HDR photos afterwards or automatically do them too time shots and burst so to take a photo and get rid of these uh low battery prompts there we go to take a photo use the right hand top button take a photo simple as that or you can just press that button on the right hand side right there notice at the bottom it shows the number of photos remaining 7034 and the format uh in my case I've selected jpeg plus raw but you can choose just jpeg or just raw my general preference is to shoot JPEG and RAW so if I want to just quickly grab a photo I've got the JPEG but if I want to work on it and add more more flavor to it later on in Lightroom or something like that I can shoot with Ross I've got both of those there at all times the same custom options are there as well so you can see changing the exposure compensation or I can go press the auto button down the right hand side and change basically all the settings I could on the other side of things now at this point it's upset about my battery situation you see we're going through uh 15 right now it's going to start beeping and then eventually it's going to land where it is so one of the things to be aware of that first time when it asked me for a return to home it'll basically fly back to me but right now it's not quite over the river it's over the bushes Etc it would land right there when it starts to land at I believe 10 percent or so so you can see if we tap that battery icon in about one minute and 10 seconds it's going to start to land but I'm gonna go and go land it by itself so I'm going to use the return to home option on the left hand side there we go tap this once come on and then return to home you just got to hold it down for a second and now it's going to fly back to me automatically and return to the point it took off from and I just want to show you how close it is uh to that point so put that there for a second and you can see the way this is working is the drones up above us and we're going to see if it'll land in the exact same spot or not and I'm ready to press the cancel button if I need to because you see it's not quite the exact spot it's very very close but in my case it would be off the path which isn't super ideal but let's see oh maybe I'll get back it's like half a foot oh is it gonna find it it's going to use this downwards camera sensors to find the exact spot we'll do it by itself oh no I just got a aircraft under uh area under aircraft unsuitable for landing so I've just got to land it by itself no big deal I'm gonna go forward a little bit and press down and you can see I'm pretty close I've got a little bit of props in the grass there no big deal again the props are pretty durable but if they hit a rock or something then they might need to be swapped out so I'm going to swap on the battery super quick and easy I'll show you how that's done I'm gonna go back here do remember to stop recording if you were recording anything and then we'll go back and we'll turn off the Drone by pressing it once and then pressing long hold again it turns it off now to take a battery out you're going to press these two buttons on the side and just pull the battery out of the back and put that down in here so I know which ones are which and then we'll press these buttons right here grab this and we'll toss this one in I'm going to toss actually the longer one though this is the Plus Battery so you can see it all fits in there easy peasy and now I'll press it once and press it again long hold to turn it on and I'll go put it back on our takeoff spot there we go up we go and now I'm gonna go and resume our little photo Journey okay so back in photo mode right here we tap that photo icon again and we can see there's the auto exposure bracket and time shots time shots are useful when you want to go and take something on a certain interval so you can see interval down to two seconds or every two seconds it takes a photo this is actually really handy if you're trying to capture something where you just wanted to keep on going over and over again so sometimes I'll use this if I'm trying to capture like cycling up a certain area if regulations allow me to put the controller on the ground it can be handy for that so basically I just ride through the frame normally I would just use video mode and take a screenshot or a basically still from that video but sometimes you really want the flexibility of having a JPEG or sorry a raw image after the fact again tap them upside there you got burst mode and you can see the options right there same thing applies here in almost every scenario you're going to want to use either slow-mo or video at 4K resolution to capture that exact moment better seven frames in a second is pretty low to be honest for burst photography but again it gives you that flexibility resolution wise if you need that if we go back on the right hand side there we can go into the Panorama modes scroll down to Pano there we go and these different modes you've got so you've got sphere at the top 180 wide angle or vertical so we're just going to shoot a 181 right there and we can choose our format option of output being either jpeg or raw I'm just going to keep jpeg for now and press record button you can see it's going to automatically start taking a bunch of photos and it'll Stitch these together so it's pretty straightforward if you're doing a sphere would be a lot more photos than it does before it stitches that together and this is true of all the other photo modes or all the other panoramic photo modes as well so you can see the 50 up to 100 is actually the stitching portion versus that first 50 is the taking of the photo portion so we can actually already start moving while it's finishing that I'm going to go over the windmill here okay so let's look at quick shots so tap the right hand side and go down until we see quick shots quick shots is one of the best ways to get little Snippets of videos with kind of perfectly done shots so you see those options there I got droney rocket Circle Helix Boomerang and asteroid these haven't changed in in recent uh DJI memory we're just going to choose the Drone you can see a little image of what each one does so I'm going to go down a little bit closer here to the windmill there we go just like this and I can either draw a square around it or a rectangle like this there we go okay and I can then choose the distance from the bottom there come on pop up and choose the distance of how far it's going to go we'll say 50 meters and then press that start button and there's a second option for how to recognize objects as well that I'll show you in just a second now it's going to do this movement for you automatically you can see on the right hand side there the progress you can see that slowly zooming away from it obviously if I was close to the windmill they're probably more dramatic shot but right now I'm just doing kind of the simple shots right here and it automatically turns as well by the way when it's done you see it's returning to a start point I can tap the X if I don't need it to do that now there's the other quick shot modes as well they all have about 15 seconds or so of time for each one of them however what's really cool is Master shots Master shots is probably one of the neatest features DJI has done in the last few years and it's something that's just way overlooked which is really too bad because what it does it gives you three minutes of perfect b-roll so essentially three minutes of b-roll for whatever you want so in this case I'm going to say we want this windmill right there and then I will highlight the windmill again just like this and we see estimated flight time so I can change this to the bottom there I can say I want the medium with the medium length or the medium height in other words imagine a box around this how far is the Drone going to go around that particular box within that box around this object and so we're going to see that all as is and then press start and what's going to happen now is it's going to go through a whole set of moves basically movements essentially a bunch of those quick shot movements and Stitch them together into one big long two minute in this case video if I'd selected some of the other options there you would see it increase the time to 220 or 240 or 3 minutes Etc depending on how much range I gave it to do stuff with now you can see it iterating through each one of these right now it's doing a drony move first and when it's done with that it's going to go to the next move and on and on and on and now what most people focus on with Master shots is that the DJI app at the end of the day will create this cute little video with music and all this kind of stuff and that's cool like that's great if you just want to show the windmill in 15 seconds of windmill Fame and I'll show that at the end of the video but in particular it's great if you're a professional that wants b-roll of the windmill it has two minutes to do it because there is no drone pilot on this planet that can be as perfect with the shots as this is doing right now in this time efficiency in other words there's nobody out there that can get these 9 or 12 or so shots in two minutes done exactly perfect every single time and this is what this does so it's great for that you take this footage you've got 4K beautiful footage as is and you're good to go and again at the end of the video in the app section I'll show you how the app takes all these shots together and makes this cute little movie from it so next let's talk about hyperlapse so I'm going to tap the X there because we don't need to kind of wait any longer on that I'm gonna go point it towards this direction there we go perfect and I'm going to tap the master shots icon and I'm going to scroll on down to hyperlapse I know hyperlapse is essentially a moving time lapse it's going to take the Drone and it's going to fly that away or whichever way I've set in the menu options here so you see the options are free Circle core stock or Waypoint so Circle would be great on a day like this where it's actually relatively windless to do a hyperlapse around that window where I just go all the way around over the course of say 20 minutes and then watch the sky whatever else is behind it it's doing its thing in my case I'm just going to go straight across so I'm going to use course lock instead but you can also see Waypoint Etc and this is again over longer periods of time so I'm going to use course lock I'm going to lock the course if I press that little lock option right there that locks my heading and then now below that you see how many frames and kind of different durations I want so the interval I can change the interval so I can say every X number of seconds we'll keep it two seconds so the length is my final output length right now it'll be five seconds long and it'll take me four minutes and 10 seconds to shoot that and you can see my speed here I can just that I want to be fast because fast is always more fun there we go that'll work just fine 10 kilometers an hour I'm going to go up a little bit higher okay just a little bit higher and you know what I'm gonna do I'm actually gonna turn around on second thoughts because there's trains there So eventually we'll see some trains whiz by uh which will probably be cool in the shot there we go now five seconds long and hit the record button and off we go and now you basically just wait for that uh four minutes and six seconds to do its thing all right now what you'll see there is an option there that allows me to expand that out so if you know you're going along and go you know what I need an extra second of end State footage all right there's something's about to happen like I see a train coming I go oh I want to capture that train in the shot you just press that little plus one second and it adds time to it so you can do that anytime you want until the end of it obviously to add extra time to that hyperlapse the thing to keep in mind about hyperlapse is you want movement in the shock uh if you're just flying across empty Fields without any movement it's really not going to be that exciting like the shot probably won't be very awesome uh versus if you've got other things happening like a busy Harbor et cetera that's what a hyperlapse is best for or if the clouds are moving all that kind of goodness now it just gave me a warning right there that's got 30 seconds remaining so if I want to add that extra time now is a good time to do it also note at the bottom there's two different export options I've got 4K and jpeg meaning that it's going to Output every single one of these still photos but it's also going to give me a completed video file as well so I'm gonna cruise on there I don't think I need to add any more time we got to that particular train flying by I could wait long get more trains but I think you get the point on how this works perfect video is done let's get back over to my windmill uh and let me just see this right there see that H that is actually the augmented uh basically reality AR of my home point I didn't mention it earlier on but that's showing where I am so if I just you know go to the right like this or to the left uh you can see it's got that little dot of where it thinks I am it's right now putting me a little more in the field it's not quite perfect but it's uh it's close enough to get me back if if I can't see my drone when it's that close I've probably got probably got more issues at that point so we're gonna get on back here and we go over here we're going to shoot our waypoints okay so what waypoints allows you to do is to create a course that'll be repeated over and over again this is particularly useful if you want to show the progress of something like a construction site this allows you to go ahead and have it Fly that same route repeatedly so tap the right hand button here and reverse go into video mode so we're just back into regular video mode first give it a second there we go normal mode and the left hand side you see that little like squiggly snake looking thing over there there we go we'll tap that and that pulls up the Waypoint menu and you can see plan Waypoint flight I'm gonna go up a little bit and I'm pointing down the river somewhere towards me you can see me way out there where the H is and I press the C1 button to add a waypoint so I'll press the C1 button once or you can just press the bottom right there as well if you have the regular remote control and it's going to add that Waypoint I'm going to tap this option there come on there we go and now you can see that first Waypoint being added even a little picture of what it looks like next what I'll do is I'm going to move forward down the river a little ways okay like this I'm going to add the next Waypoint okay pass you can press the little button down the bottom there or press the button and we'll control at the back and now I'm going to go and change towards the windmill kind of keep it I'm going to keep away from this person over there the general rule thumb by the way is keep away from people just be a good neighbor people don't understand drones and sometimes you know they'll be super interested in drones every time about Her filming people walk by they've always like wow what are you doing even like 70 80 year old people um the same thing but just uh keep that in mind go ahead you're good you're good so we'll add this next Waypoint right here there we go and now I'm going to go increase in altitude and kind of go this way I'm going to change my gimbal Direction a little bit just down like this by the way if you hear the airplanes those are about 8 000 feet above me right now so not a big deal yeah it's like a tutorial of sorts of how to use the the Drone so yeah thanks have a good one so like I said everyone is super friendly out here just be friendly just don't put a drone in someone's face that's why I always get drones out away from people as soon as they come by so now we're gonna add this next Waypoint here there we go and we're gonna add one more out over here and I'm kind of rotating around so these are it's gonna remember everything about the shots gonna remember the camera angle it's gonna remember uh position the altitude Etc one of the things to keep in mind as I put on sport mode I'm gonna change it back to normal mode so I'll get in trouble one of the things keep in mind about this though is that it's a little bit finicky when you get really close to things so if you're thinking about like weed Foods freeze in this mode it'll tell you to stop so so don't try that with all that all said I got my five-way points you can add a bunch more waypoints we'll just go with five you can see the duration the distance up there but if we tap the dot dot dot to the right we can change the speed and watch as that duration decreases so 45 seconds that's what I want at the end of that I want to return to home uh sure Sigma loss return to home again these different options I can change what to do if something happens and then start at Waypoint one there we go and then we'll press go and I'm going to start my recording now because just I don't want to forget later on and then we'll go basically back to the starting point and then you'll see that countdown timer there and as it ticks through the different waypoints what's cool about this is that it saves this flight after flight okay it's getting ready to start here so there we go we can see it's now started on that and it's going to iterate through this now it's moving pretty quick as you can see right it's doing its thing uh flying and I was slowly rotating we'll see it go to Waypoint two in just a second here and it's going to kind of smooth out those edges a bit so now it's into Waypoint two and so on so it's cool this is something you can save by the way so you can do this you know time after time again uh the same exact set same exact route now it's flying this so again depending what you want to use it for I'm going to show you the next feature which is the ability to do Spotlight which gets into active track modes and so on so we're going over to our favorite little windmill right here here we go we're gonna go out of the Waypoint mode I'm going to turn that off there we go I'm going to save it there we go save and exit for next time and then we've got the film strip back on our normal mode okay I'm gonna record this so I don't forget later on and then what we can do now is we can highlight the windmill just like this we're just in regular mode we're not in master shots of quick shots we've highlighted Windmill and the bottom we see three options active track Spotlight and POI so starting off with POI first what this allows us to do is to go ahead and move around this particular Waypoint a different speed so it's basically just going to rotate around and go fast press the Go Button and it's going to create a big old orbit around this you can do the same orbit as you probably saw in the quick shots mode the difference here is that you can actually have this being a moving object so you can see from this video I shot yesterday where I was cycling it's orbiting around me while I'm cycling so you can be any sort of moving object as well it just does that orbit I'm going to stop that though for a second here and you see I'm now back into Spotlight mode what Spotlight mode does is it keeps it focused on the windmill so now I'm in control of the drones I'm going to say I'm going to go up like this I'm going to go left and it's going to keep the camera basically in some way shape or form on the windmill this is useful if you want to control the movements around something but you want the camera to be roughly focused on the windmill again this also works with moving objects so if you're chasing a car or a person or whatever the case may be maybe you're not like an amazing drone pilot this is like a really great cheat because it'll keep the camera focused on it and you can control the altitude and all the things that you want from a kind of scene standpoint which then gets us to the next piece of this which is act a track for that I'm going to show you that in real time we're going to swap the battery one more time and then we'll do a live active track so you can see how that works [Music] the lady just ran directly over the Drone like straight up over the drone on the thing I did not see her coming obviously my fault but uh we may be using our DJI care stuff here holy cow is it still alive oh shoot me she just ran her bicycle straight over the middle of the Drone like literally over the middle of the Drone God holy cow cow like it feels a bit squishy we're gonna fly with it we're gonna see if it's good once I pick up my bike it seems a little unhappy I'm not gonna lie Peak signal yeah I'm sure it's weak signal you got your your brain smashed in just to understand what she did to reenact it this is her bicycle she hit it Dead on like this straight over it and just both Wheels and it just it popped like it didn't even snap otherwise but uh clearly it's broken okay with all that drama sorted out it's time to show you after track I know it's a bit Breezy out here today it's about 40 kilometers an hour about 25 miles an hour wind but no big deal for the Mini 4 Pro uh I would go up to about 50 kilometers an hour 55 kilometers an hour without any major concern but that's me but I just kind of want to show you it out here and I'm gonna get it up in the air and I'll show you how it all works okay after track is just like one of the spotlight modes and every time you take off uh it'll automatically turn off the subject scanning it seems like a bit of a bug at this point but I'm gonna turn that back on go in the dot dot controls menu and then subject scanning and now you'll see me as a subject so I will now just simply choose myself as a subject I will choose active track and they have two options trace and parallel Trace means to follow from behind parallel means off the side we'll start off with trace for right now so again tap that and you have to choose the Go Button also by the way validate that the resolution is what you want uh sometimes it will switch to a different resolution the very first time you use after track and validate that you've recorded uh for whatever reason DJI has never got on the boat of automatically recording when you're in active track mode so at this point I'm in Trace but it hasn't I haven't started moving yet so it doesn't really know what front and back is once I start doing that you'll see it'll start moving and following me so we'll start off with this very basic stuff we're going to go with the uh Tailwind right now and you're gonna see it's going to slide in behind me also by the way I'll drop a link to the bottom there for the amount that I'm using for the bike it works pretty well uh and right now I'm just kind of cruising on nice and slow to show you this uh you can go in normal mode up to about 40 kilometers an hour about 25 miles an hour uh before it'll slide in behind you so at this point I'm just following along just fine if you look in the lower left hand corner you see that little person there I'm going to tap that really quickly and this basically shows me different ways I can follow me and this is new on the mini 4 Pro it's called our active track 360. and what those two rings are is basically two different ways to go ahead and sorry just getting around the bumps two different ways to go ahead and tell where the Drone is going to go so right now it's low and behind me but if I kind of swipe so just swiping on these sorry it's really bumpy here if I swipe around this on the lower the middle Inner Circle middle uh sorry the inner radius then it's going to slowly rotate around me here you can see that right there slowly rotating around it's on the slow setting as opposed to the fast setting and I'll show you that in just a second there we go and it's going to hang out in front right there pretty straightforward right no problems hanging out there in front you can go in front there's there's no issues doing that okay now if I want to go out and high I basically swipe around so it'll go out to the outer radius and high so we'll do that now we're going to tell it to go out off to my side over there and up high pretty cool right pretty straightforward that one way up there and the way you can change that now is going to hang out there and apparently I swiped all the way around like that sorry there's all these bumps in the basement here so you're getting something a little more cinematic this time which is fine and what this allows you to do is just swipe the path that you want after track to do which again is pretty darn cool now there's a couple settings I want to show you before we go back and kind of pick up the speed a little bit or attempt to in this wind anyways so if I go to the dot dot dot in the upper right hand corner here and I'm on a controls option I go down to focus track and you see this person and vehicle there's the Inner Circle in the Outer Circle like I showed you and then here's the inner radius and the outer radius and you can change these different radiuses right there radii so you can see I've changed it out to 15 meters for that if I go down the inner Heights and I presume this is the outer height but it's in Chinese hopefully they'll fix that and I've increased that to be 15 meters sorry getting a strong wind warning here but no big deal and then I've changed the camera motion now to fast you can also do near ground but given the water and everything I'm not going to do that that'll allowed to descend below two meters so I don't see a reason to do that right now and for this little section here we will choose parallel just for fun and I'll show you the difference on that now here we go I'm gonna bring the altitude down you can control the altitude as well as the direction and Time by using the sticks so I just pull the left hand stick down there we go and it's going to descend like this and I can also control the distance to me by using the right hand stick wait for the bump there we go I'm gonna say I want you go to out sorry out a little bit more so pull back on the stick and now I can move a little bit faster uh I know I have an entire video dedicated to active track how this works where it works well where it doesn't work so well um much faster speeds and trees Etc that you can check out in the corner this is sort of just like a a little tease as I hope I don't snap a phone off the mount so I've got a structure coming I'm just going to go above it just because I don't feel super confident at the moment there we go and we'll see if it'll pick me up on the other side nope you lost ah there we go good job little guy we'll spin back around again and you know it's going to find itself on this side over here so it'll eventually swing back around and try to catch up uh there we go now it's struggling in the wind here because there is this wind I'm now going into the headwind so generally speaking when active track struggles it'll slide in behind you instead also no access track can be used on vehicles both the actual track mode as well as the POI mode right now I'm using the POI mode on this boat that is kind of floated by doing a slow rotation into the wind very slow rotation and again you can adjust your height and distance to that object which is kind of cool with the controls again all that's covered in my complete active track video up in the corner there okay so now I want to show you sport mode I've got a boat coming out over there I'm going to show you where I use sport mode the most so we're going to take off real quick here we go up and out of the way and the way you access sport mode is on the controller right there you just swipe to the s for sport mode now you see it on the controller and I want to get to this boat quickly before it gets out of the harbor here so I'm just going to go sport mode to it because that gives me a much higher uh speed threshold here we go now we're getting closer to the boat in that sport mode now at some point I could switch over to basically non-sport mode in fact instead I'm going to switch over not to the 2x Zoom but to the slow modes to get some slow-mo footage right here there we go stay off the side strong wind warning no problem keeping it in sport mode so I have that opportunity getting the battery over current which is kind of surprising I'm on the Plus Battery right now a bit surprised to see that okay now when I'm done here I can zoom on back again I'll switch it back over to sport mode I always get a bit of elevation by the way because it gives me more flexibility in case something goes wrong and watch that speed down there now I should be getting a Tailwind coming back here so watch the speed as I do this increasing up to 55 kilometers an hour and we find the exact tail when it should be about this angle right here there we go 56 that's about the topping out right there okay now the skill that I think every pilot should learn in fact this is actually a great scenario for it where it's windy out here which is hand catching a drone uh you know you can land a drone the normal way by just pressing the button let it land when it's calm out or if you have nice ground but if you're in snow or on a beach or anywhere where it's sketchy uh the wind here where maybe kind of bouncing all the place close to the ground it's much easier to Simply do this via hand touch let me show you the key thing people do wrong I'm gonna show you what they do wrong that way you can avoid it so right now we have the Drone right here right in front of me I'm gonna bring the Drone down I mean bring it down to shoulder level so I get a little closer so you can see in the camera view I'm gonna bring the Drone down to shoulder level right shoulder level right here good now I will approach the Drone I will reach underneath it grab it and flip it over if you stand here and try to grab it as it comes down it will fail it'll fly away from you it knows that's a bad situation so you just bring it out of here and then once you turn it over like this that will turn off the Drone automatically it turns off the props and you're good to go I use hand catching like 90 of the time because it's just so much faster it avoids a scenario where like it close to the ground you hit a little rock or something Pebble will break a prop so with that let's go ahead and jump inside and look at the quick App Master shots and all that kind of fun stuff now I'm gonna do a quick walkthrough of the app in terms of getting footage off of the Drone onto your phone as well as getting that Master shot built that we saw earlier on so what I've got here is a drone I've got the arms open up that's really really important and I've turned it on now the key thing here is not to have the remote control powered on if the remote control is on nearby either the two mode controls this will not work the direct connect feature basically it shuts off as soon as it connects to the remote control so what this does is establishes a connection between the Drone and the phone using Wi-Fi and you can see down the bottom there of the app it shows the ability to switch to Quick transfer mode when I tap that that switch right there it'll go ahead and connect it to the Drone via Wi-Fi it may take a couple seconds and then they'll ask you to join it and then from there allow you to choose to view the album at that point you'll see all the footage on your drone as well as the SD card inside of it and you can swipe through and you'll notice there's different icons or different things so one icon for slo-mo footage or regular footage and if we go down we'll find the one that has a little star next to it and that is the one for the master shots so if I tap that open right there you can see the option to create master shots and when I do that it's going to ask to download the footage if you haven't already downloaded in this case I've already downloaded so it's going to go straight into it now at the bottom you'll see a bunch of different templates these are roughly 15 to 20 maybe 30 second videos depending on each one so I can choose Springtime for example a 15 second video that'll create I can choose Vibes and each of them had different sets of music with it and so on I'm going to go ahead and choose the springtime one here and I will choose to export it out it'll export out to my phone and I'll play it for you right now all right so with that all set we'll back out into the main album here press back again and again you can see all the footage and if we look at the quick shots one this is where you may just want to Simply download that entire thing no at the top though there's the info button this allows you to see more information about it you can see the file size resolution FPS Etc so it's about 236 Megs not too bad in the lower right hand corner I can choose to download this and choose to download the full thing or a trimmed portion uh the trimmed portion is useful if you know you had for example a 20 minute video that would take forever to download but this short little 21 second clip won't take too long you can see the progress bar on the lower right hand corner moving along pretty quick again it's super important to have the wings of your drone opened up that is basically the antenna that lets us go if you have it closed it'll be a lot slower and will often fail now there are other sections to the DJI app where you can basically do some AI video creation as well as download more templates Etc but for me this is primarily just what I use right here most of the time I'm grabbing short clips from this to upload to Instagram or I'm taking the SD card out of the Drone sticking it in my computer and down downloading the footage that way the reason why you want to do this is mostly just to get it to your phone if you're trying to get the footage to your computer then simply just take the SD card out put in your computer it'll be a heck of a lot faster okay there you go everything you need to know about the DJI Mini 4 Pro including how durable it is against bicycle tires somewhat durable uh anyways if you found this video internet useful go ahead and whack that like button at the bottom there or hit subscribe for plenty more Sports technology goodness with that have a good one foreign [Applause] [Music]

Channel: DC Rainmaker

Views: 114,811

Keywords: DJI Mini 4 Pro Review, DJI Mini 4 Pro Tips, DJI Mini 4 Pro, DJI Mini 4, DJI Mini 4 Pro Guide, DJI Mini 4 Pro How-To, DJI Mini 4 Pro waypoints, DJI Mini 4 Pro drone, DJI Mini 4 Pro obstacle avoidance, DJI Mini 4 Pro beginners Guide, DC Rainmaker, dcrainmaker, ray maker, active track 360, How to fly DJI Drone, DJI Mini 4 Pro first flight, DJI Mini 4 Pro Tutorial

Id: oFX-PQJBPRA

Length: 54min 11sec (3251 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2023