(drone whirring)
(upbeat electronic music)
(drone crashing)
- This is the new DJI Avata, and this drone, is pretty wild.
So in this video,
what we're gonna go through
is my experience playing around with this drone.
You can fly super low to the ground and super fast,
and it just creates this really dynamic style of shot
that you can't really get with other styles of drone.
So in this video, we're gonna go through
everything that you need to know about this drone.
We're gonna talk about all the features
it has on the drone itself,
the different controllers that you can use with this drone,
camera that they have built into the drone,
and of course, the goggles.
Because DJI has released a new set
of goggles for this FPV drone.
And so before we dig into all of the features that
this drone offers, let's go take it for a flight.
All right. So I have everything here.
I've actually never flown FPV drones before, like at all.
I've got this drone set up,
I got it up in my backyard and hovered but,
this is my first experience into FPV.
And I know there's a lot of you out there who might be
interested in just diving into FPV drones and so,
I thought this would be a great drone to
dip my feet into this world.
I'm not big into FPV,
but I definitely think that there is a lot of use for this
style of drone as a tool to help tell stories
and just to be another tool in the toolkit.
So let's try this thing out.
Let's see how easy it is to fly.
(drone whirring)
(upbeat electronic music)
(drone crashing)
All right, well, that is a ton of fun.
Hopefully this drone's not broken.
I'm gonna look right now and see if we can fly.
But while I'm checking this drone out,
I just wanna say a special thanks to our sponsor,
which is Adobe Stock.
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All right. I think we are ready to go.
I'm gonna go take this guy for another little ride here.
(drone whirring)
Okay, so my shots aren't the smoothest yet,
but this was just my first flight flying this drone.
Now I've taken it out a few other times
in a few different locations and,
I can definitely see where the potential is with this drone.
But let's go over the features around the drone and
controllers and all the components.
Now, first, this drone is tiny.
I mean, it's super small,
much different than the original DJI FPV,
which was a little bit bigger and bulkier.
This is the cinewoop style and,
these got popular for being able to fly through things
and be able to navigate close around objects.
And definitely when I was flying, I mean,
I was taking some risks,
but I was able to get super close to objects
and I thought I was gonna hit the tree or the fence,
and I was able to just skim right by it.
The size definitely makes a huge impact
when flying this style of drone and,
even with my limited experience flying this drone,
you could get really close to objects fairly easily.
And the great thing about this design is that you have these
plastic barriers all around the drone.
So no matter what you hit, it's gonna bounce off.
And let's talk about the durability of this drone because on
my first flight, I flew full speed right into a tree and
didn't damage the camera, didn't damage any
of the propellers, or any of the casing around the drone.
Now I crashed it a few other times went right through a
tree, I hit a fence,
and every time that I crashed this drone,
there's been no issues with the actual drone itself.
It's kind of covered in grass now from chewing up through
the grass when I was flying super low, but that's it.
(upbeat electronic music)
So overall,
this drone is pretty durable and it's gonna take a beating
when you're out flying and running into things.
Especially if you're new to FPV like me, well,
you're gonna run into stuff.
Now the battery on this drone has
about an 18 minute flight time.
You're not gonna get the full 18 minutes because,
you're gonna wanna bring the drone back
and you're gonna wanna land,
and at a certain point, it's gonna return to home.
So this drone does have smart return to home,
meaning that if you're flying out there and you hit the
return to home button, it's gonna go back to the home point.
And one really cool thing when you're flying with the
goggles is that, whenever you rotate around it,
and you're looking back towards home,
there's an H out on the horizon of where your home point is.
So you can always see where you need to get back to.
Now the multi charger that you get in the fly more kit
has a place for four different batteries.
So usually the multi chargers have three.
This one has four.
So you'll wanna bring more batteries with you
when you're out flying this drone.
Now the battery on this drone is a little bit different than
DJI's other drones that I've worked with,
but just like DJI's other products,
everything's very seamless and easy to use.
Now, inside the casing where the propellers are,
there's a slot for your USB-C and also your micro SD.
Now you can use up to a 256 gigabyte card in the drone.
And one other thing that's great about this drone is you
have 20 gigabytes of internal storage.
On all of DJI's other drones
you always have eight gigabytes.
And so I'm glad to see that they're increasing the amount of
storage in the actual drone itself.
Now also on the drone,
you have sensors on the bottom,
which is gonna give you downward positioning.
There's no other sensors on this drone.
There's no forward, backwards, left, or right.
So you can't rely on your sensors to stop you
if you're gonna fly into an object.
But what's nice is that the gimbal is inside the
plastic casing so that it has a level of protection
for when you run into something on the front side.
Now, also with the lens,
you have a little bit of protection around the lens,
and it also allows you to clip on things like ND filters.
Now, DJI I also released a set of ND filters
with this drone, but most of the footage that
you're seeing in this video was shot without them.
I've been just playing around with auto settings and just
getting a sense of how to fly this drone,
before I really start dialing the settings
and getting more of the cinematic look.
Now it has four feet on the bottom,
which gives you clearance for takeoff and landing.
And other than that, that's it on the actual drone itself,
super simple, and small, and lightweight.
It's around 400 grams so, it's not the sub 250 grams,
but it's still a small and compact drone,
that gives you a lot of flexibility when you're out flying.
Now let's talk about the camera on this drone,
because they've improved this camera
from the original DJI FPV drone.
When I look at the specs of this and the Action 2,
they look identical, so I wouldn't be surprised
if they're using the Action 2 camera in this drone.
But I haven't confirmed that with DJI itself.
So it's a one and one seventh inch sensor,
with a field of view of 155 degrees,
and the big thing is that you can shoot
all the way up to 4K 60 frames per second.
In 2.7K, you get a hundred frames per second
with these goggles, but if you're using
DGI's version 2 goggles,
you can go up to 120 frames per second.
Now in terms of stabilization,
you have three different modes,
you have off, which allows you to take
the gyro data and bring it into software like Gyro Flow
to be able to stabilize,
or you can use rock steady, or horizon steady.
Now, in terms of color, you have a standard look,
which is super clean right out of camera,
or you can use D-Cinelike,
which is DJI's kind of flatter profile
that you can then color grade later.
So here's some footage shot in D-Cinelike,
and then here's a grade applied to that shot.
And with the bit rate being 150 megabits per second,
you can definitely do some color grading on this footage.
Now I haven't confirmed,
but I'm assuming that this is an 8 bit 420 image,
so you're not gonna be able push the footage that far,
but it definitely gives you a little bit more room
to color grade when you're out flying.
All right, so let me show you how these goggles work.
So, you have an external battery,
and it's just like every other DJI product
where you press once and then hold,
and then it turns on the goggles and it's got this
longish cable that goes to the bottom here.
And this can be just like mounted somewhere.
It's just like a little tube, but man,
I guess you could stick it up on your head,
you put it in a pocket, pretty much anywhere you want,
or just like sit in your lap, if you're sitting here.
Now also you can attach an additional cable for your phone.
The cool thing about this is if you have a longish cable,
you have a screen on your phone that shows everything that
you're seeing in your goggles.
So if you're with someone else, well you can hand
them your phone and they can see everything
that you're seeing so that,
you basically have this screen or this screen.
Or if you don't wanna fly using the goggles,
you could fly using the screen, just like this.
So if you're out by yourself,
you wanna just fly while you can still see the drone and not
have the goggles on, well, you have an unobstructed view
by keeping this in your hand.
So you can just fly using the screen,
just like you would a normal drone.
Now let me go into the zone.
All right so,
Hey look, I'm over there.
It's so weird like seeing the screen on my face,
seeing the drone over there.
But this is all controlled by swipes here on the side.
So if I swipe down, you have a menu with record,
screen lock, enhanced display, head tracking,
brightness, and volume.
You swipe, right,
you have all of your settings, so you have like your status
you have your album, your transmission,
you have settings where you can control all the settings
of your drone, safety, camera, et cetera.
But then also you could swipe up,
and then you get all your camera settings.
So this is really convenient cause you could
switch from photo to video,
you can go to your mode,
or you can take full manual of all your settings,
and you could go through and set your video quality,
your field of view, your ISO limit, your RockSteady,
your color, basically everything that you need
is on that menu where you swipe up,
or you can go in the deeper menu.
And then also, in the deeper menu, let's go to that.
Here's where you can change things about your controllers,
your gimbal pitch speed, your gimbal calibration.
This is also where you access turtle mode.
So there's been plenty of times when I've been out flying
today where, I've flipped the drone over
and I had to go in here,
hit the turtle mode and flips back over.
And you could also set this in the custom settings on
your controller, so let's dig back in.
Okay, so now let's go to our remote controller
button customization and you can see here,
you could do a bunch of different things.
There's the C1,
which has a single press and double press.
You have your top, which is C2
and you have top, mid, bottom.
So that's three separate buttons.
And then you have custom mode,
which that's where you can set up manual mode.
You can also change your stick mode and then you also have
some other configurations for customized flying.
So one of the best parts about this drone
is when you crash it, you click C 1,
at least that's what I have set up,
and it beeps and flashes,
so you can find it...
(drone beeping)
when you lose it in the brush.
(drone beeping)
That's super convenient.
Now one other thing that's great about the vision goggles,
is that you can record to an SD card that's in the goggles.
It can support up to a 512 micro SD card.
And the difference between the drone and the goggles
is that on the goggles,
you can overlay your data, and the image that's being
transmitted is 50 megabits per second.
So as long as you're having a stable connection between the
drone and the goggles,
you're getting a clear image and you actually have an
overlay of all of your data so that you can have the clean
footage that comes straight from the drone,
or you can add the overlay of all your data
that's coming out of the vision goggles,
so you could see everything that was going
on at the time of flying.
All right, so with these goggles,
I have them turned off right now,
but moving my head around in this
bright sunlight in the middle of the day,
and I'm not seeing any light come through the edges.
So it's a nice seal around the edges of your face,
to be able to see your screen while you're flying.
Now in terms of latency, it's a pretty low latency.
I've noticed that everything's very responsive between
the controller, the goggles, and the drone.
Now you have two controller options for this drone.
You have the motion controller, which uses your wrist motion
and your body position to control the drone,
or you have your classic style drone controller.
Now, personally,
I've just been using the standard remote control.
I haven't really dove into using this one yet because,
this is new to me, and it's a different way of flying
because you use motion of pushing forward,
or coming up, or left, or right.
Like, you actually use your wrist motion and your
body position to move the drone around,
and I'll play around with it but,
personally I've been using this style of controller
for years, and this is just what I'm
used to when I'm flying drones.
However, if you're coming from DJI's other drones,
there's some different controls that you have access to
when using this controller.
So looking down at the front,
you have your power button, and you have a custom button.
Up in the upper left hand, you have your gimbal wheel,
you have your home button, your pause button,
and then you have this switch that goes from normal,
to sport mode, to manual mode.
Now there's no cine mode like you'll find on other drones
because these are meant to go faster,
they're not meant to go super slow and just
creep along, get those slow cinematic shots.
If you were gonna do something like that,
you might as well get a different style of drone.
These are meant to go fast and be close to objects because
that's where you really get the use out of an FPV drone.
So there's only a normal mode and a sport mode,
and I've been flying a lot in the sport mode because you get
that sense of a lot of motion when you're going super fast.
And then if you want to go full manual,
and you're experienced FPV pilot,
you can set this to be full manual.
You click down on this.
And then on the other side,
there's a start stop button,
which will start the manual mode.
The cool thing about this drone is that, if you just take
your hands off the controller and you're not in manual mode,
the drone will just stop,
like every other DGI drone and just hover.
This makes it super easy and accessible,
especially to first time pilots.
If you're just getting started with FPV,
this makes it really easy because if you're outta control
and you can't really figure out what you're doing,
you can let go or hit the pause button,
and the drone's gonna come to a stop and just hover.
Whereas, if you have it in the manual mode and you let go of
the controller, well, the drone's gonna keep moving.
So you have to be an experienced pilot and you have to learn
the controls on how to use the joysticks,
if you're gonna fly in the manual mode.
Now, on the right hand side, you have your record, start,
stop, or your photos, and then you also have
another custom switch, which is three different buttons.
Now, right now just the default,
it snaps the gimbal up, down, or straight ahead.
With this gimbal, you have a lot of range,
so it can look straight up or basically straight down.
And when you're flying this drone,
you don't have to use it always as an FPV drone,
you can slow down your movements,
put it in normal mode,
and fly it more like a traditional drone,
especially if you use horizon steady.
So you're not seeing that shift happen when you're
flying around in FPV style.
Now the other thing you'll notice about this controller is
there's nowhere to put your phone because you're gonna be
using the goggles that's on your face.
But, they've also added a loop in the center here,
so you could just let the controller just hang here
loosely when you're flying.
So as a first time flyer of FPV drones,
I definitely feel like this is a fun experience.
Just flying the drone, whizzing around these trees
in the baseball field.
It's so much fun to just fly the drone all over.
FPV is not something that I'm super interested
just to do this, however,
I see the potential for these style of shots
to be used in a bigger story piece,
and I think this drone just makes FPV so much more
accessible and so much easier to learn.
So I've got a ton of practice to do to
really perfect these shots,
but it's something that I'm definitely gonna keep in my
toolkit when I'm out shooting my videos.
But next, you should check out this video right here,
which goes through a ton of different drone moves that
you can use when you're flying any style of drone.
I'll see you on the next one.