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DJI Intelligent Flight Modes

So you know how to fly, just like the takeoff, and learn to takeoff on your own, learn to land on your own. And then when you feel comfortable, do the automatic modes. Again, going back to the boat, you're going to find yourself in scenarios where you need to be on it. When I'm on the boat, my home point has changed because the boat has moved. So that return home is kind of pointless. I can reset it in the settings, but by default it's way over there where your boat was. So, I need to feel comfortable with bringing the drone close by and landing it either on the boat if there is enough room, or I can hand catch it, which sounds really dangerous, and it is. (laughing) Disclaimer. But if you feel comfortable with that, I have a tutorial on my website specifically on how to hand catch your drones. Check that out. The key for that is you're going to find yourself in a situation... Maybe not a but, but maybe you're at the beach and there is all this sand. You don't want to bring your drone ...

in and have all that sand kicking up into your props, getting in your motors, that's not good. I was at a location where it was all muddy. It was like, I'm not going to set my drone in the mud. So there is a situation where it's going to be helpful to be able to understand what's going on and to hand catch it. So checkout that tutorial if you want, its on fromwhereidrone.com. But the key is is that you're comfortable with flying, comfortable with taking off, landing, now it's time to have some fun with the intelligent flight modes. And this is some really cool things that DJI builds into their drones that give you some added, advanced techniques, all with the push of a button, which is pretty cool. So I'm just going to walk you through some of them. The DJI Intelligent Flight Modes... If you remember when I first walked you through the DJI Go app, it was a remote controller button just like that and it was down on the left-hand side of the screen. So if you're like where are the flight modes? It's down on the left-hand side of the screen on that main screen that we were looking at. You push that, you're going to get a menu like this. Now depending on what drone you have, this might look a little different because the Mavic 2 Zoom has an intelligent flight feature that the Phantom and the Mavic 2 Pro don't, a dolly zoom. Why? Cause it has the zooming feature. The Mavic Air has a really cool boomerang feature that the Phantom does not have. But what I've done is I've basically taken the main intelligent flight modes. And again, if you are in this menu, you pop it up and you're like I just wanna go back to flying, click normal and you go back. So that's the quick way to get back. But I'm gonna walk you just through some of these and just kind of explain them. So we have the Draw feature. What you can do is you can enter the Draw intelligent flight mode, and you'll see what your camera's seeing. So if your looking out at a field, you can with your finger literally draw a box, and it'll show up and you can hit go, and it will fly that path. Or you can draw a line out to the sunset, and it will follow that path. So kinda cool. I don't really ever use it, but it's there. The next one, Gesture. I guess if you're alone and you want to take a selfie, something like that. You can do funny poses like this to take a picture, you could start the picture and count down 3-2- and then pose and it'll take a picture for you. (laughing) I guess that's pretty cool. I don't use it a ton, but you can do different things and it does different stuff. It can capture a picture of you, video, stuff like that. Interesting. Now, ActiveTrack, now that's a really cool one. So ActiveTrack. What I do for ActiveTrack is, if I want to track someone... These drones are smart. I can kind of, at least with these smaller drones, not the Inspire, I can kind of mimic the Inspire by having two pilots. So if my drone is tracking someone through ActiveTrack, I can then just focus on the camera. So I could focus on controlling the gimbal so I can move the camera down or up or whatever, and if my drone is tracking that person the whole time, I basically have a co-pilot. So that's a really cool feature. If you wanna try that out, it kind of feels like you have two pilots manning the drone. But one thing that's cool about that is you can track your friend riding a bike, a skateboard, a car. There's lots of options for that. And you'll be impressed, it is an impressive feature. Basically what happens is, you point your camera the subject, you push on your subject, it detects it, it draws a box, and you're like wow that's magic, and then you hit go, and it tracks the person. You can adjust the speed. If the person starts going faster, it'll pick up speed. So a pretty awesome feature, really interesting. Next we have TapFly. The cool thing about TapFly is instead of drawing on your screen, you can just tap off into the distance and then you can say go and it'll just start heading that way. And you can then just focus on gaining altitude or descending and it's flying that way. So its another way for you to feel like you have a second co-pilot because you don't have to focus on every single thing. The drone's kind of taking care of the movement. You can yaw. So pretty interesting. Tripod mode. This is a cool mode. So much so that DJI actually made the switch here on the Mavic 2 Tripod mode. So here on the Phantom, we have Positioning, Sportmode, and Adimode. On here, the Mavic 2 controller, we have Tripod, Positioning, and Sportmode. So its actually really cool that they added the Tripod mode. What Tripod mode does is it really slows down how fast your drone can go. So sometimes you want to... To kind of go back to that question I got earlier, if you want to really dull down the sticks, I believe it goes 2.2 miles per hour, but the drone won't go faster than 2.2 miles per hour. So even if you're like this, it's going 2.2 miles per hour. Why is that cool? Well I found that to be pretty interesting for when I wanted to fly through tree branches, it's a really tight spot. And I'm even kind of nervous in that situation. I'm like, am I gonna crash, right? Even if I go all the way like that, its not gonna... (vrooooom) hit the branches. It has to ease into those moves. So this can be really cool if you're trying to get a cinematic shot. That's when I'll switch over to it. I wanna go like around someone nice and easy and not worry about am I putting too much pressure on my sticks, finding that balance. When you guys are doing the orbit, you'll know what I mean. You're like finding the perfect balance. It's really helpful setting. And the one thing that that made me think of too is Adimode, just to go back to that for a quick moment. It can be really helpful if you're doing something indoors. Because like in here, I'm not sure if we're actually gonna get GPS signal. It might not... If we were to take the drone off, I don't know if it would hold. There is a good chance it probably wouldn't. So if I was flying something indoors like down a hallway of an architecture project I'm working on... I would kick it over into Adimode, and then what you can do is you don't have to worry about if you get close to the door, automatically it gets a GPS signal and your shock jerks. Cause its like, oh signal! Or whatever like that. But I do wanna note that these drones now, I mean the new drones they all have sensors. They can detect the ground. So there's ways around it if it doesn't have GPS signal. I don't think that's a huge issue, but definitely something I would do back in the day, is Adimode would be the mode I'd be flying with indoors, if that makes sense. Okay, Terrain Follow. This only works going uphill, but you can put it in that mode and because it has the downward sensors, it will detect the ground. And if the ground starts to get higher and higher, the drone will ascend on that path. So that could be a pretty cool shot I guess if you're not really sure how much to climb. You can flip it over into that mode, and it will constantly monitor the distance to the ground and keep ascending as the ground is ascending, if that makes sense. Okay, Point of Interest. This is the cheat one. I totally could have done it to trick you guys when I was doing the orbit, but I was all by hand. But Point of Interest is so cool, I actually use this the most. That, Tripod mode, and another one I'll tell you about in a minute. Point of Interest, why? Because I can get my arcs nice and perfect. Basically what I do is let's say I'm on a mountain cliff, I'm looking out at sunset and I want to get that epic shot of the drone sweeping around me. Well if I'm standing right here, I fly the drone right over me. I'm in Point of Interest mode. I then mark that as my Point of Interest, and then I fly the drone out to make the outer ring. So this is now the center of the circle. Then what I can do is I can make the drone go in a perfect circle, closer or further, and I can gain altitude and go lower in altitude. So really cool feature because it's perfect orbits. I tend to do any orbit shots with Point of Interest, so I'm definitely using that mode. I'm not gonna try to find the perfect balance when the software is perfect. So what that does is that allows me to get really cool sweeping shots where I can kind of start at eye level and then gain altitude behind and then descend and it's a perfect arc, such a cool feature. You definitely want to try that. Follow Me. You can follow... We can treat the remote controller as your point, so you can try that out. To kind of summarize that, the ActiveTrack, the ActiveTrack is another subject. I'll be honest with you, I don't use that too much. Waypoints. This is really handy. If you do any type of real estate stuff, you want to get a time lapse of a construction project. What you can do is you can take your drone, you can fly it to a spot and say right here is waypoint one, record GPS. Fly over here, this is waypoint two, record GPS. Three, four, five, six, seven, whatever. Then you can hit start, and your drone will go from point one to point two, to three, to four, to five, to six, to seven, and complete the path that you made with waypoints. Now why is this helpful? Well you can actually save the waypoint data. So a cool feature... I know one of our guests shoots 360 stuff. This is a cool feature for you guys. What you could do is you could be like... Let's say there is a new building being constructed. You're gonna do a drone time lapse of it. You can be like, I'm gonna take my drone up 100 feet, and I wanna get a full... I wanna record imagery around the whole building, the whole site. So you set all your waypoints. You capture all your data. The drone's going around and you're snapping pictures, taking video, whatever. You save that. You can come back next month, load it, it'll go to 100 feet, and it'll remember all those spots. Next month, next month, next month, and then you can, in post, cut to each clip and show the building progressing over time. Isn't that like so cool? Really cool feature. So if your thing is a little more automated, another project you could do, you know... Just set waypoints, you don't have to worry too much about automatically flying. It's a pretty cool feature. Home Lock. This is a cool one for you guys to think about. Sometimes... I will be confused on where my drone is. I'm like, I think it's over there, I think it's facing that way. And so I'm going forward and it's going further away, ah I was facing the wrong way. Home Lock is awesome, because what you can do is you can kick it into Home Lock and pull back on your sticks, and no matter where it is it's gonna come back. So if it's way over there, you just pull back. Even if it's facing the other way. Back is coming to you, or I should say coming to home. So if you're by where it took off, it'll come back. Super awesome feature. The same thing, if you go forward it'll go away from home. So that's super handy, especially when I get like, where's my drone? I just go Home Lock, pull it back, there, right there. Out of it, I know where it is, and I fly. That make sense? That's like a little tip for you guys. And then Course Lock, this is pretty cool. You can lock the heading of your drone, so which way the drone's facing. So if I wanted to do Course Lock, let's say straight ahead Course Lock, my drone will go forward, but I can yaw and face you guys, and it's still going forward. I can turn around and it's still going forward. So that's really handy. It's really cool for when you're filming. That's a great feature. So, some of my favorite modes in here is ActiveTrack, Tripod, Point of Interest, Home Lock, and Course Lock. But look at the features in your DJI drone and see what it has. Because like I mentioned, the Mavic Air has some extra features, like a really cool boomerang effect. It's really cool, I wish my drone had it. Some of the Mavic 2, it has features that maybe the Phantom doesn't have. So do some research, check it out, but these are the main ones. And what's cool is DJI keeps adding intelligent flight modes all the time. Why? Because essentially this is a smart computer that can fly. So they just program it and they make these really cool flight modes that make it simple for us to get some really cool, interesting shots.