This video is going to be all about the DJI Action 3. I'm going to talk about specs,
features, let you hear audio in different environments, show you footage in different
environments with different settings, and just basically give you an all-round view
of what the camera is like. Also this video is sponsored by Epidemic Sound.
So I'm going to first talk about the design because the Action 2 was a bit
of a controversial camera in the sense that a lot of people didn't like it and so DJI I've
gone back to the original design of the Action 1 which is more actiony-looking.
I
think I’m about to walk past a
school and it's going to be really noisy. Let's try and go this way. So yeah, original design
of the Osmo Action 1, and the thing that I like about this is the fact that it's got not just
a rear touch screen but also a front touchscreen, and it just makes it so useful when you're filming
yourself, you don't have to flip the camera around and then fiddle around with your settings on the
back of the camera you can just do it all on the front touchscreen so that makes it really
useful. It's also waterproof to 16 meters and it's 30 meters with a case and the audio from
what I have listened to previously in my tests sounds pretty good. So the audio that you're
hearing at the moment is coming straight from the camera microphones and I'm also filming in
the Normal color profile, so Normal color profile and this is what the footage is looking like.
So the other thing I really love about the design is the fact that it comes with a cage that has
a vertical side mount, so you can basically mount the camera horizontally or vertically,
and it's got a quick release system which means that you can buy these little magnetic
mount adapters and you can just put them on anything, so you can put them on a tripod,
you can put them on a mouth mount you can put them on literally everything that you would
want to mount your Action 3 to, and you can just quickly clip it on, clip it off without having
to faff around with unscrewing the screws that come with the normal action cameras.
So in terms of the specs it's 4K120, 2 7K120 and 1080p240. so you can shoot slow motion
in 4K and 2.7K up to four times and then with 1080 it's up to eight times.
So in terms of the sensor size it's got a 1/1.7” CMOS sensor which is
the same size as the Action 2 but bigger than the Action 1 which is
a 1/2.3” sensor and the aperture is f/2.8 so it shouldn't do too badly in low light,
it would have been better if it was a slightly wider aperture to do even better in low light.
Compare the footage to the Action 2, it pretty much looks similar I'm not gonna lie and it's
basically because the camera seems to be a repackaged Action 2 so the body's
different but a lot of the internals and a lot of the specs are pretty much the same,
but the footage looks good overall and the footage that you're seeing now is in D-Cinelike,
previously it was in Normal, so I just wanted to give you an idea of what the difference is
between the two and I will show you a little bit more of that later on.
I just dropped my camera on the floor, now if that was my Action 2 I definitely would have been
a bit more panicked thinking that I would have cracked the lens or something so I'm
actually okay with this one because this lens can also be replaced, that's something to note
but my tripod's just broken which is a little bit annoying.
I didn't bring a spare one with me annoyingly but I'm gonna have to buy a new one now.
So as I mentioned this video is sponsored by Epidemic Sound and I love including b-roll in
my videos and I feel like adding music and sound effects just makes the b-roll a bit more engaging
so with Epidemic Sound because they have over 35 000 music tracks and over 90 000 sound effects
which just makes it really easy to find the best music track or the sound effects that kind of fit
the b-roll that I filmed, and to make it even easier to find more of the tracks that I've
already discovered that I already like, there's a Find Siimilar feature so you can find similar
tracks to the ones that you've already listened to and the ones that you've already selected,
so it makes it even easier to curate a soundtrack for your video. There's constantly new tracks
being added every week, both music and sound effects, so it's all licensed music, all cleared
so you're not going to get any copyright claims in your video. I've dropped a link in the description
so you can sign up for a 30-day free trial so you can try it out, you can actually use the music in
your videos during your trial so that's really cool and you're not going to get any copyright
claims on that so check it out, and thanks again Epidemic Sound for sponsoring this video.
So up until now I’ve
been switching between D-Cinelike and the Normal color profile. So the Action 3 just has two color
profiles. The Normal color profile means that you don't have to do any color correcting or color
grading you can literally just start recording and the footage looks as it is and you can just
use it straight out of the camera, whereas with D-Cinelike then you have to color correct and
color grade the footage for it to look normal and the benefit of D-Cinelike is the fact that
you get a bit more dynamic range and then you also have more control over how your footage looks. So
I love shooting in D-Cinelike because I like to have that contro,l and when I got the Pocket 2 I
created some D-Cinelike LUTs because I was filming with D-Cinelike all the time and I didn't want to
have to faff around with color correcting and color grading the footage every single time,
so the LUTs work with the Action 3 so I've dropped a link in the description to them,
but this is the difference between D-Cinelike and Normal.
D-Cinelike definitely works better when you can manually control the camera settings,
so if you can set your exposure manually then it's a lot better because you want to be exposing in
a certain way but that's something I'll cover in another video, so I'm not going to go into
that in this video. So the next thing that I'm going to talk about is the video quality. So
I've been filming in– it's a cloudy day today so this the clouds have been– the sun's been going
in and out of the clouds and so there's been really bright periods and then periods where
it's more overcast, so hopefully that gives you an idea of what the footage looks like,
and the exposure and the dynamic range so that you can just see how good the
image quality is. So yeah so I'm just walking through a shady bit at the moment just to give
you an idea of what the footage looks like going in and out of the sunshine and going,
yeah, into the into S,shady bits. So I'm shooting in auto exposure, so this is the footage.
It's not easy pushing a push chair on grass.
So when the Action 3 arrived it came later on in the day for me so I didn't get to go out when it
was daylight, so it was around sunset that I went out and I did a low light test and I was
actually really impressed with the fact that the footage didn't look bad it looked really usable.
So I've been out for quite a little while now and I just looked at the battery life
and I've got 51% left so I've been filming quite a lot and filming in 4K60, 4K120.
and the battery is doing really well. DJI claimed that it will last for 160 minutes and though I
haven't filmed for that long continuously, I can't say about it continuously, but on and off clips
here and there it's definitely doing really well, so I don't have any complaints about the battery
unlike the Action 2 which just seems to drain and just not last very long, so yeah battery
is great and actually they do have a combo where you can get a battery case and a couple of extra
batteries so you're literally good to go all day so another great thing about this camera.
When it comes to stabilization there are three modes you've got RockSteady,
HorizonBalancing and HorizonSteady. At the moment I'm using HorizonBalancing,
or Horizon Leveling, HorizonBalancing.
RockSteady and HorizonBalancing both work at 4K but you can only use HorizonBalancing up
to 4K60 so you won't get it at 120 but you will get RockSteady at 4K120 and Horizon
leveling only works at 2.7K up to 60fps so that's something else to bear in mind,
and HorizonBalancing was actually only introduced to the Action 2 after a firmware update so it's
kind of a new thing that they've… that DJI have put into the action cameras, so
yeah it works really well it keeps the horizon level at plus minus 45 degrees when you rotate
your arm, and that little running bit that I just did that was me using HorizonBalancing, so
yeah the stabilization is pretty good. If you're using it in low light though it's never going to
work it just looks really shaky and so in that respect you would need to use a gimbal but I'm
going to talk more about that again, or that in another video so just something to bear in mind.
Also electronic stabilization doesn't work in timelapse mode or slow motion mode, so that's
when you actually go and you select slow motion not when you shoot in 4K60 or 4K120 or something
like that it's just when you actually go to the slow motion modes that stabilization won't work.
So typical that the sun had come out just as I sit down, facing this way as well,
but anyway I'm gonna give you my final thoughts on what I think about the Action
3. So starting with audio I think that the audio is pretty good, like,
I wouldn't have any problem vlogging with this and using the audio that comes from it because it does
sound clear, it sounds good. I will always advocate for getting an external microphone
if you can, and if you can, use one. And you can actually use one with the Osmo Action 3, you can
use any USBC microphone, and I tried it with the Rode Wireless GO II, not the Rode Wireless GO II,
the Rode VideoMic GO II and it sounded really good, but in terms of using– filming in the wind–
so I had wind noise reduction on when I started filming when I was filming most of the video
yesterday, and it did a good job of cutting out the wind and my voice was clear but there was
still a lot of wind noise so you're not going to get away from actually completely cutting out the
wind, so what I actually tested out, which I'll talk about in another video, is using a foamy wind
muffler thing, windshield, and also switching off wind noise reduction because that's going
to give you better audio, and then I also started filming in mono instead of stereo, so I had it in
stereo originally, I didn't change any of my audio settings I just kept it as it was straight out of
the box, but definitely filming in mono, putting on a wind muffler and doing that is just going to
give you better audio in the win. The other thing is because I filmed a lot of the footage when it
was windy and I didn't have anything on apart from using the wind reduction setting on the camera,
in Final Cut I did Voice Isolation, so I tried to get rid of as much as a wind as possible
to make it clearer– my voice clearer and that seemed to clear it up a little bit, but again,
you're not going to completely eliminate the wind without actually doing something to mitigate that.
The other thing that you can get as well are Rycote windshields, so you can actually stick
those over the microphones and that's something again that I'll talk about in another video.
I was really impressed with the video quality I'm really interested to see what it's going
to be like when the 10-bit firmware comes out so yeah definitely going to do a video on that
when that does come out, but yeah video quality looks really good especially in low light I wasn't
expecting it to look as good as it did it's really usable footage. I would not, like I said, advocate
using an action camera if you're mainly going to be filming in low light, there are so many
other cameras that you could choose rather than using an action camera so if that is your primary
filming scenario then definitely don't choose an action camera, but in the in the scenarios
where you will need to be filming in low light just on the odd occasion then it does a pretty
good job and the footage is going to be… so interestingly my Action 3 just overheated on me,
so I got a warning message to say it overheated and it stopped recording and that was it, so I’m
finishing this video on the DJI Pocket 2, I wasn't going to bring it with me today which I'm glad I
did, normally I do take it everywhere and I just thought oh do I need to bring it and I thought
you know what, just chuck it in the bag it's so small, it's fine, so I'm glad I did bring it.
So I was talking about low light and I think I said everything that I needed to say. So in
terms of Normal color profile I think it actually looks pretty good the only thing
that I would say is that when going in and out of, like, shade or sunshine or just in various
scenarios it did look quite washed out whereas with D-Cinelike it didn't have the same issue,
so like I said D-Cinelike for me is my preferred color profile and I'll always use it but there is
a way to kind of get around the whole washed out look with Normal and that's something that I'll
cover in another video but otherwise Normal looks okay in most scenarios and D-Cinelike
colored corrects and color grades really nicely so it just depends on which one you want to use.
The quick release system is really good it's something that I really like about the Action 3
and something that I really liked about the Action 2 as well, even though the Action 2 was not one of
my favorite cameras, but the quick release system is great and the only thing that I will say is
that it does take a little bit to kind of clip it, so it doesn't– it's not as good as the Action 2,
so when whenever I clipped… I need to turn out of the sun… whenever I clipped the Action 2
together, so the the touchscreen module and then the camera module, or just clipped it
onto its actual adapter mount it just clicked seamlessly, it was absolutely fine, whereas with
the Action 3 I feel like it doesn't quite locate straight away and you kind of have to fiddle it
a little bit and then clip it in but once it's clipped in it's solid it's not it's not gonna,
it's not gonna come off, so pretty solid, but even though it's really good the one thing that
you do have to remember is that if you forget your a quick release mount adapter there's no
way for you to mount the camera anywhere so it's definitely worth picking up a couple of them and
just keeping one in your bag as a spare just in case but yeah it's just something to note.
in general I like it, it's really good I'm gonna keep using it between that and
the HERO11. if you haven't seen my HERO11 video I put out a review last week so do
check that out but I'm going to keep using both of them and see which one
I prefer because I am going to do my comparison video of both very soon.
Back to normal.
Okay so hopefully that video was useful. My Action 3’s back to normal now I can use it again,
but yeah thanks Epidemic Sound for sponsoring this video and thank you guys for watching
and I hope it was useful for you. if it was do give a like and I've got loads of videos coming
out about the Action 3, different settings to use, going through settings, different things
to make video sound better, audio sound better, so do subscribe if you want to see those videos
if you haven't already subscribed, but yeah thanks for watching and catch you next time.