drones have become a staple of filmmaking the perspective they provide in wide establishing
shots is well known but what if we thought about it differently what
if instead of wide establishing shots we used a drone to create
movement and a perspective of scale what if we used it exclusively as a tool to create parallax
so we can definitely use this camera to create incredible parallax and motion in shots
but can we use it to film the entire journey can we use it to film the entire video
so
hey my name is jake and i create content here to help solo creators on the go so i test and
review cameras lenses drones here in alaska in places like this and i give you tips and
tutorials on how to use them so if that's something interests you consider subscribing
today i want to talk about the mavic 3 and there was one area when i did my initial review that i
was completely wrong about it and that is the telephoto camera lens system that is built on
this drone uh i didn't like it at all at first granted dji did make some updates via the firmware
and a couple of those updates and then also figuring out how to use it have completely changed
how i view this drone and this lens this camera specifically in the past to get shots like this
you basically had to use a helicopter and not just any helicopter but an expensive helicopter that
operated anywhere from a few thousand dollars to like ten thousand dollars per hour and you
had to use something like a shot over or city star also costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars
with a really expensive camera and very long lens now we've got something similar built into mavic
obviously the quality is not the same but it is really good and if you're using it in the right
situations you can get these incredible shots that just have movement and parallax and lens
compression like nothing else and really while i don't think this lens is great for everything
there are instances where it really helps to tell a story for example these are shots shot
with the regular camera the four thirds camera and the regular lens and you can zoom in up to
two times on that lens which helps a little bit i don't really recommend going past like 1.4 1.5
times if you're filming in 4k because then you don't really lose any quality but you can get a
little bit of lens compression which is pretty nice it starts to look similar to an inspire 2
with like a 24 millimeter lens on it um not quite but a little bit better it just gives you a little
bit more motion but if you want to tell a story and you want to show how vast how large and how
bigger than life your environment is and you want to really immerse your audience into the
story then using the telephoto camera the the zoom camera is going to really add a whole different
dimension and a whole different sense of scale of what you're shooting you can use it to really
really immerse your subject into the location that you're filming in this case out on a glacier
or up on a mountainside and then add an insane amount of parallax an insane amount of movement
in the background and what's surprising is how much movement you can actually add like these
shots here were shot in sport mode i was going really fast probably a little too fast you don't
need to move this fast to really get a lot of movement but it just makes the background the
foreground and then whatever your subject is in the center really kind of it looks like the world
is unfolding around it which is a really bizarre and really wild shot but it gives you this really
interesting really intense parallax effect while filming this video i forgot to add that the most
important thing is only use this camera in the 7x or the seven times zoom setting anything else will
give you much less than optimal sharpness and quality so then the question is how do we use
this lens and how do we get the best out of the camera number one lighting you've got to get this
and use this camera in good lighting it doesn't do well in low light it does okay at sunset even
but that's still a fair amount of light but anything beyond that anything else low light
it just doesn't work well at all and that's partly because it has an insanely high aperture of like
26 f 26 something like that but it's also a much smaller sensor so it gets really noisy really fast
but if you use it in lower light or dimish light it's okay you're just gonna have to use a little
denoising so using this in really good light and then using an nd filter to get it kind of
about where you hopefully you're gonna get the shutter speed and the blur you want is good if
not you can always add a little motion blur after the fact in your editor but this camera works best
in really really well-lit bright light situations and then it comes to movement this lens this
camera is not ideal for everything if you want to feel like you're moving through a space or really
show off a vast area you still want to stick to that really wide angle if you're flying low
and close to things because that gives you that feeling of motion all the stuff going right by
the camera on the edges makes you get the feeling of motion if you're using the telephoto camera
you just don't get that sort of that same feeling of things going past the drone really fast so
you don't want to use this in high motion scenes where you're where you're revealing the whole
area or flying really low and really close to stuff but there are a couple of movements and
a couple of ways that this camera is absolutely outstanding and the first is of course the orbit
orbiting shots on this look insane now you don't need to go that fast and you don't need to go
very far to get an insane amount of parallax an insane amount of movement in any sort of
orbiting shots what i love doing with this is coming from behind something and then revealing
your subject and orbiting around because there's so much parallax and so much movement and having
that reveal really makes your subject all of a sudden explode onto the scene but there's so
much going on around your subject that it really grabs your audience's attention and forces them to
really focus on your subject and the environment they're in another shot i'd like to use this on
is a tracking shot where you're flying sideways tracking with a subject and so in this case here
it just gives this nice solid amount of movement solid amount of motion now this is probably one
of the more difficult tricks shots to pull off because it's tricky matching up the speed
but if you can get it down and you can get a nice tracking shot it makes it look really cool because
you got your foreground your background moving really different speeds but your subject is
staying right in the frame and one of the other shots that i love to use this thing on is a jib
shot where you're just going straight up straight down it gives you a whole new sense of revealing
what's around your subject and the scale of the area they're in or whatever they're around it
makes the world around them feel so immersive and expansive and just a massive area or massive thing
that they're in in my case and uh it's you know the middle of a glacier so it really
reveals something amazing to your audience to your audience so using this this camera works
best with orbit shots with tracking shots and with jib shots you can combine motions with this camera
and do something like a rising orbit shot or a uh you know whatever sort of things you want to
do as you're coming up and around if you want to track down with your jib shot as you're coming up
it really adds an intense amount of movement an intense amount of motion
and really sets this footage apart like you know wasn't that many years ago you just couldn't get
anything like this with a drone at all not even close and so even with an inspire and a long
lens you couldn't quite get this intense sort of feeling of parallax now there are a couple
of things you really need to watch out for when you're using this camera and this lens because you
can get into trouble really fast the biggest thing is when you're filming on this because the camera
is so punched in because you're zoomed in so tight or so close on a subject you have no idea what's
around you and it's really dangerous really fast if you're flying low and close to stuff because
it can get really uh dicey really quick so either fly with your obstacle voice on as a
safety measure or what i like to do is go out in the wide lens and then scout a flight path for the
drone a rough flight path knowing that okay yeah there's no obstacles here and i can fly behind
this object with my subject on the other side of it or whatever but you really want to be cautious
because you have zero situational awareness when you're using this lens because you are punched in
so tight it's just impossible to tell how close or how far away your drone is for something
and you you know you don't see anything on the sides at all because you're really really
punched in so you got to be careful when you're flying with this to make sure you scout out and
pre-plan all of your flight paths but you can get some fantastic shots if you do one more thing you
need to know and is an absolute must with this camera right now at least until dji gives us more
control over it is focus use the autofocus to set the focus on the subject you want to have in focus
and then part it on manual focus so that it doesn't otherwise this camera this lens
focus hunts like crazy so it'll constantly be pumping and you'll ruin a ton of shots
if you don't turn the auto focus off but using the autofocus to find focus
really helps you get a good focus point and even in the case of like this shot here my opening shot
you can see it blurs out the background pretty nicely and i'm pretty nicely in focus
so i had a lot of shots that i did with this where i was not in focus and or the
drone was hunting for focus a lot during the shot so it ruined a lot of shots that way
one last thing that i found with this lens that really threw me off is it doesn't work with every
nd filter it doesn't seem to like variable nds i don't know why but i have not been able to get
this this camera to focus with a variable nd with any of the regular nd's i've not had any issues
so right now i'm using the nd 32 from dji and it works fine any of the other dji nd filters work
fine but any of the variable nds from polarpro or from freewell it just did not want to focus and i
could not even manually get it to focus on where i wanted it just something about the variable nd the
two plates of glass or something it just threw it off and it wouldn't work having the right kind of
nd filters on here or no nd filters at least until we get more manual control is the best way to go i
recommend using pretty strong nd filters if you're in a place like this because you do want to try
and get some motion blur as you're filming out here but you know we don't have a lot of manual
control over it so we just kind of get what we get but i feel like the effects and the view
the storytelling aspect of using this camera this lens on the drone it really outweighs the cost of
the things that you do lose for now and when dji gives us manual control over the camera settings
then it's going to be spectacular now if you want to learn how to take better photos and video with
your drone and how to fly your drone better so you get great video and great photo click
or tap right there put together a playlist i'll see you in one of those videos as always if you
have questions ask me in the comments below or you can join my live stream that happens
both wednesday nights from 4 pm alaska time or 8 8pm eastern just have a couple miles to hike
back over this treacherous ice field of a glacier i'll see you guys soon in the next video cheers