Hi everyone, my name is Evan Thomas.
In today's video you are going to learn everything you need to know about the DJI Osmo Action Cam.
We're gonna unbox it, set it up and discuss the specs and features-
-you're gonna see some real footage taken on the Osmo Action-
-and I'm gonna share with you some tips and tricks.
An Action Cam is an absolute must for any videographer or vlogger.
Especially travel filmmakers and action filmmakers. They're light, compact, resilient and very affordable.
The DJI Osmo action cam is only around $349
I used to be a huge GoPro fan, but truthfully the DJI Osmo Action-
-has completely won me over and I'll tell you why a little bit later in this video, but first-
-let's unbox it and see what's inside.
Alright, it's a very simple small box.
I actually like that it's a lot smaller than that big clunky plastic box that GoPro comes in.
Inside you have the charging cable.
Note that it doesn't come with a block so you'll have to just use like your iPhone charging blocks to charge it.
You have some accessories and the cool thing is that these are completely compatible with GoPro accessories.
You have the battery case and what you'll notice is that this actually doesn't come with an SD Card-
-so you'll have to purchase separately a Micro SD card and I like SanDisk Extreme Plus.
I don't know if you can see it here, it's quite small.
But make sure that you get one that's UHS class 3 and has a minimum read/write speed of 30 Mbps
So the first thing you want to do is pop out the action cam. I'm gonna get rid of everything else for now.
You'll want to actually take the action cam out of this case and you just do that by unlashing at the top.
Pop this open like that. You might need a push here to get it out.
And then what you want to do is just peel away these stickers.
Put these on the side. The very first step you want to do before anything is to make sure the DJI Osmo Action is charged.
So you're just going to click the battery in like so.
To make sure that it's watertight-
-you need to make sure that both of these sides click. So you're gonna hear a click here.
You need to hear two clicks and make sure it's watertight.
Second of all, you just want to push this button down and then pull down.
This exposes as the charging port and the Micro SD port so grab that Micro SD card that I told you about.
Pop it in like that. The first couple times it can be hard to get in. So you really need to push pretty hard.
Then we'll just take our charging cable. It's a USBC. So if you already have a USBC cable-
-you can use that and you're just gonna plug it in like that. Put this into a charging brake.
The battery will take about 90 minutes to fully charge from 0%
From my testing a fully charged battery lasts about 60 minutes when shooting in 4k with RockSteady turned on.
So what is RockSteady you ask? RockSteady is DJI's EIS
or Electronic Image Stabilization GoPro calls theirs HyperSmooth.
And essentially it's an algorithm that reduces all of the bumps and jitters from your footage.
Here you can see some side-by-sidefootage with RockSteady turned off.
And with RockSteady turned on. Just note that Rocksteady does crop in a tiny bit and-
-that it also uses a little bit more battery. Alright, once the Osmo Action is fully charged-
-you're just going to powered on. So there's three buttons. There's a quick shot button on the side-
-there's the display power button on the top left and then there's the record button on the top right.
So to power on we just long hold this one on the top left for a couple seconds.
The first time you start it up you're gonna see some language options. These are all various different Asian languages.
But I'm gonna go ahead and click English and then I'm going to set today's date.
So the very first time you start up the action you might need to connect it to your phone and the DJI app.
Which you can find in the link below in the description. Come to your app here.
Turn on your Bluetooth and it'll find the cam and you just make sure that the codes are correct.
So you can see 9415, 9415 and then you click accept, they'll start pairing.
Now we're on the home screen.
The first thing you're gonna want to do when you get this thing booted up is format your memory card.
So you're gonna swipe down from the top to access the menu button. You're gonna click this top right icon.
I'm gonna scroll down to format SD Card and click OK on the Osmo Action.
You always want to format just to make sure that your card is completely compatible with the camera you're using.
So there's four ways to access all of the settings on this camera.
If you swipe down from the top you come into all of your menu controls.
This one is to manage your custom modes.
Very much like a DSLR if I have certain settings that I like to use often I can configure them here.
If I slide back down I can change the brightness by hitting that Sun.
I like to keep it bright and like I mentioned at the very brightest this battery will still last about 60 minutes.
I can lock the screen which I don't find very useful, I never do it.
To unlock it you'll just have to swipe back up.
Here we have the auto screen mode. You can flip through these and-
-basically what it does like let's say you're filming something upside down. You can have an auto up or down.
I like to just keep it on auto. This is a pretty nice feature. This is the Spot Metering.
So if you want to take some cinematic footage and you need the correct exposure to stay the same then-
-you click Spot Metering on and you can press and hold down wherever you want the metering to be.
I'm gonna turn Spot Metering off.
I like to have it on auto because it just correctly exposes the whole frame.
Here you have voice controls and to access all the voice controls you click the little gear icon.
You click on voice control you can turn on or off to do which language and you have the command list here.
So we can do start recording, stop recording, take a photo, screen switch, etc.
So, let's just show you screen switch. Screen Switch.
Now the screen footage is flipped to the front screen.
Osmo Action Screen Switch.
The other way to switch the screen is by double tapping with two fingers, so just go like this.
You can see that it's switched.
Or you can press and long hold the Quick Switch button on the left side.
So this is extremely useful.
Let's say you're recording something as a selfie.
If I just want to screen switch then I would hold the Quick Switch button.
And I can see myself. There's actually an option to change this a little bit cropped-
-so you get a better view so I can show you what I mean by that so I'm going to switch back.
So I'm gonna flip down. I'm going to click here.
I can toggle between full screen on or full screen off. So if I turn it on-
-and then I double tap the switch you can now see that this is fullscreen and cropped.
So I actually like this mode better because it just gives you a bit more screen area to see what you're shooting.
Go a little bit deeper you can see SnapShot.
So Osmo Action SnapShot is when the camera is turned off.
I'm gonna go ahead and turn the camera off by long-pressing on the power button here.
Let's say I'm a dirt biker.
I have this on the top of my helmet, it would be far too much trouble to turn this on and then record.
So all you have to do is click the record button and-
-the unit powers on and it starts recording in the last setting that you had.
So the last setting I had was photo mode so it just took a photo but let's say I want to go to video mode.
I'm gonna turn the unit off again by long-pressing here.
Now again, let's say this is on top of my helmet I can't see anything I just reach up and I press this button.
The unit turns on and it starts recording.
This is extremely useful for action sports like surfing let's say you're paddling for a wave-
-you don't have time to turn it on and click all the buttons.
You just click this button one time and it starts recording.
This is an excellent feature and any extreme athlete will love this, snowboarder, surfers, mountain bikers-
-when you have only a fraction of a second to respond and get your footage rolling.
It's so easy just to click this and this is completely customizable as well.
If I go here and I go to settings and I go to SnapShot I can either do the latest settings-
-or I can always have it on video. I can always have it on photo, slow-motion etc.
Before I go any further-
-I just like to say if you're enjoying this video and would like to see more gear tutorials and reviews-
-please click the like button, hit the subscribe button. And if you have any questions at all-
-please leave them in the comments below, I answer every question within 48 hours.
If you want to see all this camera gear in action-
-you can follow me on Instagram and see all of the pictures and videos I get with them.
Finally, if you're considering buying the DJI Osmo Action review cam-
-please do so through the link in the description below.
That's an affiliate link and any sale through there gets credited to my channel.
Thanks in advance for supporting my channel so I can bring you more videos.
On the left side of the Osmo is the Quick Switch button.
This is very useful as well for action sports athletes.
So you just click here and I can flip between video, HDR, slow motion, time-lapse, photo, etc.
If you're a serious filmmaker-
-you'll probably want to turn grids on and obey the rule of two thirds or the rule of thirds as they call it.
So you can just scroll down to Grid and I like to always have this on because it helps you frame up your shot.
With the gridlines turned on you can see that-
-this is a fisheye very action cam feel and if you've had a GoPro before, you know that it's a very wide angle lens-
-so everything's sort of bulgy and work. Luckily you can turn that off.
So if you are in any other modes you swipe from the right side to get to the camera settings.
I can just click on this video icon here and you can see where it says DeWarp here.
I can click that and turn it on.
Now you can see that the lines on the table are much straighter.
The only thing you have to keep in mind with using Dewarp is that it slightly crops in a very a little bit.
So you're not getting the full sensor, you're not getting the full frame that the Osmo Action offers.
But I like to keep Dewarp on because I don't really like that fisheye sort of action cam thing.
I like the more cinematic footage. Some other settings by swiping right, since I'm in video mode I'll click video.
You can adjust the white balance, of course.
You can adjust the color. So Cinelike is a flat log profile if you plan on doing a lot of color grading and color-
-correction in post then you might want to shoot in this.
But I like the color right out of the camera.
So I'm going to use that and keep it on normal and you can of course change between MOV or .MP4
I'm gonna keep .MP4
So aside from Osmo Action Quick Switch, you can also enter the camera modes by clicking the icon in the bottom left.
This shows you what mode you're now.
So I click here. These are all my photo modes.
We have auto exposure bracketing, regular photo, burst, timer and for video-
-we can do regular video, time-lapse which is a really cool feature.
Here you can see some time lapse footage shot on an Osmo Action.
Regular video and then you have HDR.
HDR does a great job in low-light just captures a lot more detail and you can also do slow mode.
You can do 4x slow mode which shoots at 120fps
Or you can even do 240 fps for 8x slo-mo, which is super slow motion and the footage looks really awesome.
But let's just say go to regular video, in any of the camera modes if you want to access-
-more of the settings you swipe up and here I can choose the resolution.
Then I can choose the framerate.
Remember if you're shooting cinematic, you'll probably want to shoot in 24fps
If you're shooting like action footage you might want to do something closer to 60fps.
Here in the top right you can turn on a RockSteady and remember-
-RockSteady isn't available in every mode. So for example, if I go to the 4k 4:3 resolution-
-which is the entire sensor, you'll see that RockSteady is unavailable. It's grayed out in the top right there.
So now I'm going to show you all the different sensor modes. So right now we are in 4k 16:9
You can see that we have Dewarp turned off.
So I'm just going to go ahead and turn Dewarp on and you can see that the lines get straightened out.
And here you can see the lines are much straighter in the window.
If I go to the 4k 4:3 resolution-
-now we're utilizing the entire sensor. You can see we're capturing a lot more video.
However, with this mode you can see that it's quite bulgy and you cannot turn on Dewarp or RockSteady.
If I go here, you can see the Dewarp and RockSteady are not available.
I've showed you all of the gestures. From the top you have your settings, on the right-
-you have your camera settings. On the bottom you have your resolution and frame rate.
Finally if you swipe from the left-
-this is where you have all of your media so you can flip through your files like this.
Or I can click this top left and then click the top and I can see that I've taken 10 video
6 photo
And I haven't liked any or done any slow motion. Another tip and trick is that you can take off this side latch here.
So by just gently pulling off and now this door comes off and why would you want to do that?
Let's say that you're gonna do a time-lapse or something that requires a lot of battery over a long period of time-
-I can stick this in the case.
Now if I want to do a time-lapse I can charge here and plug this in either to a wall or to a battery pack.
Then I can conceivably have this up for however long the memory card will last.
Another cool thing is that if you want to use like an ND filter or polarizing filter you can easily just-
-swap that out by going like this.
And then I can place an ND filter here and that's for getting cinematic footage-
-by reducing the amount of light coming into the sensor and thereby you can adjust the shutter speed.
Earlier in the video I said that I prefer the Osmo Action over the GoPro and why is that?
Well, the main reason is this screen right here.
This full-frontal color screen is a massive benefit for action cams.
You can take out the guesswork of what you're shooting and if you're doing any sort of selfie footage-
-like let's say you're swimming or surfing and you want to get a selfie, this front screen is absolutely a lifesaver.
Secondly, it's cheaper, $349
It's cheaper than the GoPro and I am just completely blown away by this product the Osmo Action.
I've been a huge fan of all of their drones.
I own the Maverick the Phantom 4 pro and of course their Gimbels are the best in the world as well.
So overall you cannot go wrong with this action cam. It is simply amazing.
That's it for today's video. Thanks for watching.
Like I said, if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below. I answer all questions within 48 hours
Please click like, hit subscribe-
-it really helps out my channel and if you want to see all of this gear in action, you can follow me on Instagram.