Master Your DJI Pocket 2 - Epic Tutorial Instructions Creator Combo

this is the video where you learn everything you need to know about your dji pocket camera gimbal what i like about the dji pocket cameras is that they open up some creative opportunities that are not really available with a smartphone and a gimbal so i'm going to show you how to get some spectacular shots using a dji pocket camera i'm also going to talk about the different modes when to use them and how to get the most from them i'm also going to talk about the dji memo app and how it works with these pocket cameras so if you've just bought one and you're getting started for the first time uh the next section is gonna be for you if you've already done the setting up part and you're a bit more experienced and you can skip to later in the video [Music] if you purchase the creator combo like me your box arrives with all kinds of extras at first it might look a bit intimidating so the best thing is to make yourself a favorite drink and give yourself the time to work through this i already have the dji memo app on my phone but if you don't then you may as well get that downloaded and installed you will need the memo app to activate the pocket camera but you can also use it to control the pocket and get a bigger screen to look at as well this packet contains the extra lens so i'm just gonna leave it in there for now to protect it whatever camera you have smartphone a big cinema camera or a tiny dji pocket always try to look after the lenses fingerprints and dust and scratches will all degrade the quality of your image you could remove all these protective stickers there's a lot of little bits and pieces here so we will want to keep those organized there's space in the case to store the wide angle adapter there's a magnet to keep it in place and the smartphone connectors otherwise maybe you want uh some kind of little box to put those in i've seen that you can buy some pretty cool little cases on aliexpress they're not too much money so that might be worth investing in the very first thing to do is activate your dji pocket to activate your pocket you will need a smartphone with the dji memo app installed you will need a memory card installed into the pocket as well this doesn't come with a device so if you don't have one you will need to buy one the one i have is a scan disk extreme pro 128 gigabytes it just slots into the side here with the metal stripes facing upwards power up the pocket camera by pressing and holding the button on the side to connect your smartphone dji provides two connectors a usbc for android devices and a lightning connector for iphones as soon as you connect your smartphone the dji app boots up automatically well at least it did with my iphone 12 pro max now you just need to go through the activation procedure which involves dji sending you an activation code via email after that you'll probably be prompted to install a firmware update and i recommend you install that once that is all done your pocket gimbal is ready to go [Music] [Applause] there's a power button on the side of the gimbal press and hold and the camera powers on with the camera facing towards you in selfie mode but on the front of the pocket there are two buttons the one with the red dot is the record button for video or shutter button for photos the one on the right with no red dot is like a mode button dji calls it a function button but you can use this as the power button by tapping and holding again and the camera will start facing away from you this time so these two power on buttons allow you to kind of get started a bit quicker if you know you want to film yourself just use the side button and if you know you want to film something else then use the front button okay let's get a feel for this camera boot up so the camera is facing away from you and hold it by the handle now just twist it a little bit left and right notice that when you move the camera eases in and out of the movement the camera doesn't move exactly as you move rather it slowly speeds up so it's kind of behind your movement and then it catches up as well when you stop moving the camera doesn't just stop it slows to a stop and i think some users see this as a problem almost like it's a design flaw but it's really not this is designed to act like this because it gives you smoother more cinematic camera movements i'll talk about that more later but before you go any further it's a good idea to just spend a moment playing around with this get a feel for it because you'll want to incorporate this into your camera movements when you're filming the reason you bought this is for the movement if you're not using it for movement there's really not much point in using the pocket when you press the button with the red circle the pocket starts recording and note that when you start recording it beeps once and when you stop recording it beeps twice so it's worth remembering that because it might help you to avoid that mistake that we all do where we are pressing record and thinking that we're starting record and actually we just stopped record and we end up shooting lots of bits in between all the bits that we wanted so to avoid that try to memorize those beep sounds this is the mini control stick for the dji pocket 2. the original pocket comes with a control wheel if you bought that extra by the way the extras for the original pocket all work for the pocket too so if you have the control wheel already you can use it with the pocket too remove the smartphone connector and replace it with a control stick the button goes on the right if this is your first time using the pocket when you use items for the first time the gimbal offers you some quick start guides you can use those or just let me explain everything for you i recommend the latter of course once you have the mini control stick in place you can use it to tilt and pan the camera or if you switch it to zoom you can also use it to zoom in and out note that when you have tilt and pan selected there's a slider with a plus and minus sign at the right side of the screen which can be used to zoom the swipe up and down on the slider to zoom you can use the button on the right to move through the different modes if you've used a gimbal before you'll probably be familiar with these modes the dji pocket of his u4 modes follow tilt locked fpv which is first person view and locked the first three modes are accessed using the control stick button to access lock mode press and hold the modes button on it's actually called function button and it's the button beside the record button when you release the button the pocket will exit locked mode so you have to keep pressing down to keep it in locked mode and then when you release it releases from locked mode back into the mode that you were in before anyway i'm going to talk more about modes later you will notice that there's very few controls on the gimbal itself even after we added the control stick but you can access many many different settings using the little screen here so let's look at how the screen works and some basic settings to access most of the pocket gimbal settings swipe up down left or right all four directions open up various options and menus swipe down on the screen and you will get a cog symbol tap that to open up more settings but you can also swipe left and right on this screen to access yet more settings swipe right on the screen and you will open up the gallery containing your videos and photos swipe left to go back to the main screen swipe left on the main screen to open up shooting mode options you can choose video photo and hdr video plus other modes like slow mo and time lapse swipe right to go back to the main screen finally swipe up to access a screen with four control buttons top left recenters the camera top right flips from front to rear facing camera bottom left switches between fast and slow follow mode and finally bottom right switches modes the button to the right of the record button as i say is called the function button or dji calls it the function button we can call it whatever we want but we might as well stick to function button here's some functions controlled by the function button so tap once to switch between photo and video mode tap twice to recenter the camera tap three times to flip the camera between facing away to facing towards you whichever way it's facing it will go the other way oh here's another tip when you're using the touch screen controls the function button acts as a back button so if you change your setting you can get back to the main screen quickly by tapping the function button or if you just want to go back one screen so now you have a pretty good understanding of how your pocket gimbal operates just using the pocket on its own like this you are going to spend a lot of time swiping around on this little screen when the pocket gimbal is in video mode in the bottom left corner of the screen you can see two numbers at the moment it says 1080 and stroke 30. so that means the video is set to shoot full high definition fhd video at 30 frames per second the videos come in different resolutions and different frame rates which make a difference to how your video looks if you tap these numbers on the screen you open up a settings menu to adjust resolution and frame rate swipe up and down on the left of the screen to set resolution and the right of the screen for frame rate so there's three options for resolution 1080 2.7 k and 4k unless you're saving memory space you might as well use the highest resolution which is 4k that said certain features aren't available at 4k resolution like hdr video for example frame rates available go from 24 frames per second up to 60 frames per second so 24 frames per second is the standard film look frame rate most movies are still shot and played back at 24 frames per second and higher frame rates do look a little bit more digital however high frame rates can also be used for slow motion effects as well you can shoot at 60 frames per second and play back at 24 frames per second to create nice cinematic slow motion and in fact even shooting at 30 frames per second and playing back at 24 frames per second does create an interesting subtle slow motion effect one thing to be aware of is that the battery life of a pocket 2 isn't that long dji says the battery lasts up to 140 minutes so that's just over two hours and in reality it's probably going to be a bit less than that most of the time to charge the battery connect to the usbc port at the bottom so when you're charging you know it's charging because you get this green flashing light the pocket has four modes which change how the gimbal motors work to keep the camera steady there's follow mode tilt locked mode fpv mode and locked mode the dji pocket contains a three axis gimbal and a camera all in one device to better understand how the different modes work it is good to understand the terminology when we talk about camera movement each axis has a word which describes the movement controlled by the axis there's the pan axis the tilt axis and the roll axis the pan axis refers to when you move your camera left to right in a twisting movement the tilt axis refers to when you move your camera to tilt forwards or backwards the roll axis refers to when you move your camera at an angle to the horizon so it's kind of rolling left and right rather than panning left and right it might be helpful to think of each mode in terms of movements it follows locked mode doesn't follow any movements tilt locked mode follows one movement which is the pan movement follow mode follows two movements pan and tilt movements fpv follows all three movements pan tilt and roll so let's look at these modes and what they do and why you might want to use them hollow mode follows your movement when you pan left or right and when you tilt backwards and forwards but it does not follow your movement if you roll the camera on the horizon this mode is the most natural mode it's the most similar to how we view the world we look left and right or up and down but we don't often look at things sideways that's why in follow mode the gimbal tries to keep the camera level with the horizon this mode is a useful all-purpose mode for example if you're filming a travel video and you want the freedom to have the camera explore the surroundings maybe there's a tool building and you want to be able to approach and then tilt upwards to show it tilt lock mode follows your movement when you pan left or right but does not follow your movement when you tilt backwards or forwards or when you roll the camera in other words it only follows your pan movement tilt lock mode is useful when you're filming a subject and you want the camera to remain focused on them you don't want the camera to tilt up or down you just want them in the same part of the frame throughout the shot so use this mode for any kind of tracking shot where you're tracking a subject fpv mode or first person view follows all your movements on the pan tilt and roll axis that means you can now shoot video where the camera turns against the horizon this is not how we normally view the world so when would we use this kind of shot fpv mode allows us to be more creative and to do something unusual we can create spin shots and shots with creative camera movements and when edited together these kinds of shots can really grab the audience's attention the fourth mode is locked mode in locked mode the gimbal tries to keep the camera pointing in the same direction no matter which way you move to get into lock mode just press and hold the function button which is the button to the right of the record button with the function button held down you will now see a padlock appear in the top right of the screen when you let go of the button the gimbal goes back to whatever mode you had it in before and the padlock disappears when should we use this mode well one reason could be that you want the camera to stay facing the same direction while your movement is more than just walking in one direction so for example if you need to walk around an object and you want the camera to fly over it okay once you've got the hang of the controls on the dji pocket you probably want to get a bit more advanced with the settings to get better image quality and one way to really improve the look of your videos is to start using exposure [Music] [Applause] video from the dji pocket has quite low dynamic range i mean if you compare it to a mirrorless or a dslr or even one of the recent flagship smartphones so if you want to shoot better videos or photos it's important to understand the dynamic range of your camera so when we talk about dynamic range we're talking about the camera sensors ability to deal with varying light levels for example in this video i shot with the dji pocket 2 i'm walking through the trees in bright daylight you can see that while the trees are exposed pretty well the brighter parts of the image are completely washed out and if a lot of the frame is washed out like this it really doesn't look good so what can we do well we can try to adjust the exposure so that there are less washed out areas and to do that we need to use pro mode pro mode gives us all kinds of manual controls to change the look of the video to get to pro mode swipe down on the screen and then swipe left until you get to a button called pro tap it to switch the pocket into pro mode now swipe back to the main screen and you can see there's now a yellow symbol to show the gimbal is in pro mode tap that to open up the promote settings you can swipe left and right to access two screens which each contain pro mode controls we want the one which says exposure so tap that to open exposure settings in the exposure control screen we have two settings at the top shutter speed on the left and iso on the right there's also two ways to use exposure control you can have it set to auto with some parameters or you can set it to be in full manual mode so auto means that the camera will try to set what it thinks is the best exposure whereas manual means that you set it and it will be locked at those settings throughout the shot and you can switch between manual and auto with the switch in the bottom left corner so if we leave it in auto for the moment we can try using ev compensation values let's swipe up and down on the left of the screen to get a plus or minus value so this means that the camera will still set the exposure automatically but it's going to adjust that exposure based on this value that you've just set in this example where the sun is bleaching out the trees i would probably try to bring the exposure down so for ev i will set a negative value but i want to balance between too much light and too much dark now personally i will always lean towards more shadow than more washed out white areas because i know that i can recover some of those dark areas and the other thing is that as well it looks more natural to us humans to see dark areas we're not used to seeing things washed into white but we do see shadows it's more natural for us to see darkness especially at night so pushing your exposure down will result in a more natural looking image on the right side we see this max iso setting so let's look at that with a fixed aperture camera like this there are only two ways to control exposure shutter speed and iso if the frame is too dark you can push up the iso to brighten the image the problem is this can result in digital noise in the image to prevent that you can set a maximum iso say you set it to 200 now no matter how dark it gets the camera will keep the iso at 200 or less so essentially this setting is all about controlling the digital noise in your image in this clip i have the ev set to a negative value and i set the max iso to 200 and you can see straight away there are now almost no washed out areas of the image so to my eyes this is a big improvement on the previous clips i shot using just the auto exposure that said i can still see the exposure adjusting during the shot unfortunately it doesn't change smoothly either for that reason to improve things even further we should maybe think about using fully manual setting if you want to lock exposure so it doesn't change during the shot can switch to manual mode now you can set iso and shutter speed precisely the advantage of locked exposure is less messy looking video which is usually considered more professional the disadvantage of locked exposure is it cannot adapt to changes in light conditions in the frame as you move and if we're going to go to the trouble of locking exposure we may as well look white balance too so in pro mode tap the yellow pro button and then tap white balance set it manually using a kelvin number the white balance will now be fixed and it also won't change during the shot so that means your shot is going to look a bit more professional a bit tidier now when we're filming in bright conditions the shutter speed needs to be fast to stop too much light hitting the sensor but if we want smooth video a slow shutter speed is better if we can get shutter speed below around about 1 100th of a second the video will look smoother to do this in bright conditions we will need to use some kind of nd filter dji sells nd filters for the pocket gimbals but you can also get some good third-party ones as well so that's a shutter speed of what 120th of a second with an nd8 so it should be a little bit smoother now if i take it off so that's without the nd8 now put it back on so now that you've got a good grounding in how the dji pocket or pocket two works let's look at the other features and controls that are accessed using the dji touch screen [Music] i've already shown you a few controls you can access from the touch screen like pro mode and so on let's look at some others swipe up on the screen now you get four button icons top left recenters the camera top right flips between front and back facing camera bottom left switches the follow mode speed between slow and fast bottom right switches through the three modes follow tilt locked and fpv now follow speed determines how quickly the gimbal reacts to your movements so if you want really slow smooth pans or tilt shots then switch this to slow but when you move just remember to wait for the gimbal to catch up swipe down on the screen and first we get a cog icon and you can tap this cog icon and you get two screens of settings and you can swipe left and right to access them when you select the full screen mode you don't actually record full screen 4x3 video rather all this does is zoom and crop off the size of the video for monitoring purposes perhaps it helps you see what's in focus better below that button is the face tracking on off button switch this on and then when the camera is facing you it will try to detect a face and then keep the camera locked onto that face while you're moving around this just helps to make sure your face stays in the center of the frame and the storage button just simply allows you to reformat your memory card accessories opens up more controls for various accessories one useful setting here is control stick speed if you want the control stick to move the camera faster or slower you can set that here i generally tend towards slower speeds for things you get nicer smoother more professional looking video so swipe to the other screen because there's one other setting that you might find useful if you're getting flickering from lights you can try setting the anti-flicker 50 hertz for europe and 60 hertz for america you need to check out the hertz of your local electricity depending on which country you're in okay use the function button to get back to the cog symbol so swipe right and you can use this button to switch what the control stick controls either pan and tilt or zoom swipe left past the cog to the smiley face which switches glamour effects on and off swipe left again to find the quality on or off button when it's on you get a higher bit rate but the battery will drain faster and also you can't use this setting when shooting at 4k and 60 frames per second note that if you are in photo mode instead of the quality button you get a choice between 16 megapixels and 64 megapixel photos swipe left again for pro mode and we already looked at that so swipe again for the external wireless mic this will pair with the wireless mic included in the creator combo or if you bought it separately back in the main screen swipe right to reach the gallery in the top left corner you can see the total number of files on the memory card and the number of the file you're currently viewing so swipe up and down to scroll through all your photos and videos if you want to delete a photo or video swipe right once more and tap the trash can icon if you tap the heart icon this file will have a heart in the top right corner so this is useful for marking certain files as good and that will save you some time weeding out the bad files later once we've shot some videos or maybe some photos we'll eventually want to get them off the dji pocket and onto our computer and maybe a smartphone if you're going to edit there that you should be able to connect a cable from the dji pocket to your computer and do a simple file transfer what's supposed to happen is you connect from the base of the dji pocket to an input on your computer if all is good a message pops up asking you if you want to connect to your computer now you tap yes and a new drive should now appear in your system to open it like any external drive and then drag the files across thing is when i connect it to my macbook air which only has usb-c ports there was no message this is a cable i've used to transfer files from my smartphone so i know it works and the cable which came with the dji pocket has two usbc plugs at one end and a usb a and the other which means if you find you can't get it to connect using the included cable just make sure you're using the correct plug of the two usbc plugs because one is for data transfer and the other one is for charging so use the data transfer plug and that's marked with the little symbol anyway when i connected using this cable to my ipad pro with an adapter and this adapter has a usb a style port it recognized it and i was able to get the files off onto my ipad pro and at least from there i can transfer them to my macbook if i want to so the other way to get your files off is to simply use a micro sd reader just take out the micro sd card and plug it directly into your computer with a reader now another thing if you're going to edit the video on your smartphone you can just connect it using the little adapters the ones that come with the pocket [Music] [Music] if you have the do-it-all handle you can connect to your pocket gimbal wirelessly using bluetooth this doesn't come with the basic package so you need to buy extra or buy the creator combo as i did when you connect to your smartphone you can use the dji memo app as a remote control for the pocket and you can also connect to the wireless microphone included with the creator combo set one part of this gimbal which is not too well designed is the changeable base it ships with this little cap over the base so there's no catch or anything you just have to try to remove it with strength and i just couldn't get this thing off and i was struggling struggling struggling but i came up with a solution to make it easier you just screw a tripod or a monopod into the base and now use that as the extra grip and it comes off much easier that way so now you can slide on the do-it-all base bear in mind this attachment does come with a catch which you need to pull down when removing so once you have the do-it-all base fixed in place power on the dji pocket and then boot up the dji memo app on your smartphone go to device and it will search for any dji devices nearby tap to connect the first time you do this you have to give your phone permission to connect and a message should pop up on the little pocket screen and you need to tap ok after you've done that once next time it will connect without having to do that now there's two ways to connect a smartphone to your dji pocket without the do-it-all base you need to use one of the smartphone adapters which means your smartphone needs to be attached physically to the gimbal which is a bit precarious unless you have some kind of clamp to hold them in place i have actually seen some on aliexpress for not too many dollars but if you have the do-it-all base you can now connect using bluetooth and this opens up the option of using your smartphone as a remote and this is great for solo filming whichever way you use to connect a smartphone there are many advantages you get a bigger screen to look at which is obviously much better especially as i've found the auto focus on the pocket 2 is not the best it's almost impossible to see what's in focus on the little screen the downside is that the whole setup is bigger and takes longer to get filming your smartphone controls the pocket via the dji memo app you can set mode start and stop recording set exposure and plenty of other things as well there seems to be an extra mode which doesn't appear when just using the pocket 2 mini screen which is hyperlapse mode using the app the control stick now appears as an on-screen icon and this works a bit differently to the physical control stick of the gimbal itself firstly the app control stick can control the speed of the camera movement depending how far you push it on the other hand the nice smooth easing out of the shot is gone it now just stops suddenly unless you slow it gradually by hand so if you really practice you can get a little bit of a gradual slowing to a stop but it's not too easy so it would be nice to have that easing out motion with the app too and i couldn't find any settings within the app to set the control stick speed either one thing you can do in the app is separate the virtual control stick into two control sticks one for pan and one for tilt just toggle off the gimbal easy control switch now you have a pan control on the left and a tilt control on the right and this can be useful if you're filming a shot and you only want the camera to move on one axis so then there's no chance of your finger accidentally tilting like i did in this shot but using a smartphone as a remote also allows us to turn the dji pocket into a super camera crane adding some kind of handle extension to the dji pocket opens up some creative possibilities we can now shoot impressive hollywood style crane shots lifting the camera into the air this way the pocket can reach places we wouldn't be able to reach otherwise so i just add a monopod and then extend the monopod as far as i need for the shot now if you attach your smartphone to the opposite end of the monopod using something like this cheap little magic arm and then connect the smartphone to the pocket using bluetooth you've made yourself a remote controlled camera crane i find the best mode for a crane shot is tilt locked that way the camera faces forward as you move the arm up and down i've been using the dji om4 gimbal and a smartphone to shoot similar crane shots the big advantage of this setup is now you can see what you're doing as well if you want to create more complex crane shots can combine movement of the arm with movement of the camera using remote control [Music] [Music] the dji pocket 2 has the option to shoot using a color profile called d cine-like this is a flatter profile like a log setting which has less contrast and less saturation and this can be used to add luts or for when you do your own grading so the idea is that this flatter profile would be better for grading because it retains more of the dynamic range having said that there's no reason that you can't just use this without grading if you prefer a kind of less contrasty look and i have to say i really did like the look of it ungraded but it's also great to use when adding a grade as well [Music] the creator combo includes a wide-angle lens adapter like the nd filters is magnetic so it sticks over the pocket lens very easily it's not a dramatic difference but it does give you a wider field of view another advantage of the wide-angle lens is that it makes the footage look smoother because the wider the lens the less you notice those small movements from your hand or footsteps unfortunately i wasn't able to combine the wide angle with the nd filters i have and i'm not sure if other combinations work but i can say these definitely don't so a quick note about hdr which is supposed to add more dynamic range the problem is it crops the image quite dramatically and as well i didn't really notice much difference to the image so for that reason i don't really use it so this is the wireless mic that comes with the creator combo it's pretty easy to connect just a couple of buttons to press and it does it itself it tells you that it's connected you get a little microphone symbol just above at the top of the screen in the middle so you can see that i've got exposure on locked that's why i'm going dark under the trees um yeah so that's a microphone test for you so that's it really for this video so i hope you enjoyed it let me know by giving it a thumbs up if you want to join us on patreon we've got all kinds of downloadable stuff there there's a silent eye series which we shot on smartphones pretty much everything on the patreon for patreon members is for smartphones for smartphone filming but i'm sure that you can learn something from it but it'd be cool to see you there if you want to join us and now i've gone completely dark that's okay it's the moody look i think i look better in shadow don't you at least the background is properly exposed i think this is even cine d have i have i set it on cine d wait yeah i actually have it set to d c and you like so i can grade it or just leave it as it is yeah i think it's pretty cool this pocket camera the pocket two what's the pocket one like is it a lot different pocket one users let me know anyway i'm off and i'll see you in the next video ciao

Channel: Mobile Motion

Views: 54,714

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Id: Bt4ktePI71U

Length: 35min 51sec (2151 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/G188S]

This video is insanely useful and I honestly wish it had been available when I got my Pocket 2. The camera has so much functionality and after owning it for 4 months and powering it on and triple-clicking to flip the camera probably 1500 times I now know I can just use the function button on the front. Seriously great!