Lessons
Lesson Info
Intelligent Flight Modes
So we've just moved down to the river. I wanna remind you I do have this special cable that is recording my screen so you guys can see what I see. You don't need to worry about having one of these, though. And what I'm gonna show you now is a couple of the intelligent flight modes that I use to help me capture some shots when I'm out filming the videos that I shoot. Let me take off. (drone whirs) All right, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to line up my drone with my friend who's in a kayak in the river, and what I wanna do is go into the intelligent flight mode, and I wanna slide over to where it says Course Lock. And what this does is whatever way I have my drone facing right now, so whatever way the heading is, if I click apply, it will not deviate from that path if I just go forward on the right stick. So this can be really helpful for flying, like, a straight line, and you can yaw the drone as you're flying straight and you're not having to worry about keeping that line perfectly...
straight 'cause the drone will do it using GPS. So I'm gonna wait for her to get a little closer. I'm gonna point it in her direction, and I'll hit apply, and I will hide this now. And I'm gonna push on my right stick, so now it's going straight. And I'm gonna start yawing so that when I pass by her, all I have to do is worry about the yaw. And I'll stop that move. So that's really cool because I don't have to worry about anything else except focusing on the yaw. I can fly a straight line by just having the course lock. Now one other move I'm gonna do, I'm gonna hit stop here, is I'm gonna show you in the intelligent flight modes what I do when my drone is far away. I'm gonna go into the home lock, and very similar, I'll hit apply. What this does is it is going to fly the drone back to where it took off, where home is. So if I pull back on the right stick, no matter which way this drone is facing, so I have the drone facing backwards, and all I'm doing is pulling back. It's coming back towards us. So I can turn this drone, I can yaw it any way. As long as I'm pushing back on the stick, it's gonna go closer to where the home point was. If I push forward on that, it's gonna go away from the home point. Why that is cool is because you could select a certain spot in the river or on your subject, you could come up here into the menu settings and right up here where it says Home Point Settings, you could change the home point right there, and then all you have to do is fly away, pull back on the stick or pull forward, and it's gonna move closer or further away from that home point. So that's another cool trick you can use using the intelligent flight modes. It's very similar to that course lock that I just did. So I'll hit stop right there. All right, so another intelligent mode I will use sometimes is the active track, so I'm gonna enter into that. I'll go to active track, and I just need to select my subject, which, there she is, and it says go, so it's found her. I'm gonna hit go. And the drone is now tracking her, so what I can do is I can start to move around and get a better angle on her, so maybe, like, this side profile look, and what I can do is just focus on the gimbal because the drone is going to automatically track her, so I won't have to touch any stick. I'm just gonna worry about the gimbal. And I might just do, like, a slow pan down. And maybe I'll do a slow pan up or something to reveal the trees. And the drone is automatically yawing. And so imagine if she was moving even faster, this is a car, a bicycle, something like that, and all you're doing is focusing on the gimbal, this can really help you get a really dynamic shot. So I'll stop that. I'll now go into the point of interest, and I'm gonna get right over her, because we have to establish a center point, a point of interest. Okay, so I'm right over her. I'm gonna hit apply, and then I'm now gonna fly a little bit away so the drone knows where the point of interest is, and I'm going to hit start, and this gives me the dialog box to let me know how I can control this move. So I can decrease the radius, I can increase the radius, I can still gain altitude, I can decrease in altitude. I know all that, so I'm gonna hit OK. And I can select how fast I want this move to go. So right now it's 2.2 miles per hour. I'm gonna pull back on the right stick to get a little bit out and I'm gonna increase in altitude with the left stick, and all I'm having to focus on is how I want to gain altitude and how wide I wanna make this radius around that point. Other than that, the drone is doing all the other moves. So if I feel like this is a little too slow, I could increase this by going up to something faster, and I can gain even more altitude, and all I'm doing is focusing on the left stick, I'm gaining altitude, and the drone is doing the orbit all on its own. And then what you could do is as you're doing this, you could combine it with a gimbal move. You could point down to your subject or you could start down and then you can slowly move up. Like this. To then in this case reveal the landscape on the other side of the river. So another intelligent mode I like to use is the tripod mode, and the reason why I do this mode is because it really slows down my drone. So if I'm doing a shot where I wanna get really close to a subject, or if I'm doing a shot where there's tight quarters, I'm trying to fly through two tree branches or even if I'm flying indoors, I kick my drone over into tripod mode because everything's really slowed down. So when I push really hard on my sticks, it's not gonna go too fast. It really dulls 'em down. So I'll show you how I do this move getting my friend in the kayak, but I'm gonna be really close to her, and the reason why I'm gonna use tripod mode for this is because I wanna make sure I don't hit her. So this is a really good move for when you need to be precise, when you get really close to a subject or there's obstacles in the scene that you wanna make sure you avoid. So that's a really cool way to get some dynamic shots using some of the intelligent flight modes.
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
There was some good and helpful information here! However he stated that when shooting video he sets the camera focus on a stationary subject and then put it in manual mode so as to avoid the camera re-focusing on a different plane, but I would have liked to have heard his tips for camera focusing on his shots where the subject was moving toward or away from the camera.