(atmospheric electronic music)
- This is the DJI Mavic number three,
and this drone is absolutely incredible.
So in this video, we're gonna go through 10 different things
that you need to know about this drone.
And we're gonna go over all of the features.
And I'm gonna show you a ton of footage
that I've been shooting with this drone
over the last few weeks.
I took it up to Alaska and was flying up
around the glaciers, up by the lakes and the huge mountains.
And then I took it out to Utah
and got some pretty extreme looking landscapes
to test this drone and see how it performs
in all of these different settings.
So before we get started,
I just want to give you guys a quick disclaimer,
DJI did send this drone out to me to be able to test,
however, I was not paid to do this review.
And this is just all of my thoughts after working with this
in all of these different locations.
So the first thing that I want to go over,
the two versions of the drone.
Both versions of the drone have the same sensor
and the same lens on the camera.
The difference is there is a Cine version
with a one-terabyte internal SSD drive,
and it can shoot Apple ProRes.
Now the version that I have
only has eight gigabytes of internal memory,
so it's just like the other drones in DJI's lineup.
And eight gigabytes is not a lot of footage.
You can grab a few shots if you forget your SD card,
but you really can't get that much.
And it's something that I wish DJI would increase this
to at least 64 or 128 gigs internal, on all their drones.
So this version of the drone uses a micro SD card,
just like the original Pro 2.
And you can use SD cards up to one terabyte in size.
So the Cine version is available
if you need that Apple ProRes.
But honestly, the footage I've been getting
out of this drone has been grading super well
because the bitrate is higher
and you're still getting 10-bit out of this drone,
even if you don't have the Cine version.
The other major difference between the two versions
is that the Cine version has a new controller.
So it's just like the smart controller,
but it's one made for the Cine camera.
This version only comes with the regular controller,
which you mount your phone on top of it.
This is the same controller that we've been using
with the Air 2S and some of the other drones.
So it's got the same size
and nothing's really changed about the controller.
All right, number two, let's talk about the size.
The Mavic 3 is pretty much the exact same size
as the Mavic 2, so you're not dealing with a bigger drone.
Now, in comparison to the Air 2S or the Air 2,
it definitely is a little bit bigger.
But when you close down the arms,
this can easily fit in a camera backpack.
And it fits nicely in my Shimoda bag,
so I usually take out the drone, a camera, a few lenses,
the controller, and a few other odds and ends.
So it still is a super portable drone.
All right, so number three,
let's talk about resolutions and frame rates.
So this drone will shoot up to 5.1K,
up to 50 frames per second.
In 4K, it goes all the way to 120 frames per second.
And in 1080p, you can shoot at 200 frames per second.
So you have a lot of options there, if you're someone
who wants to work slow motion with this camera.
But also if you need those higher resolutions,
it does have that 5.1K resolution.
Now, in terms of codec, you have H.264, H.265.
And on the Cine version, you have the Apple ProRes.
But you get the same resolutions
and the same frame rates, for both drones.
Now, in terms of the bitrate, the original Mavic 2 Pro,
only shot at 100 megabits per second.
Whereas this version of the drone
shoots in H.264 at 200 megabits per second.
And if you're shooting in H.265,
it's 140 megabits per second.
I've noticed that the color grading
is just so much easier with this drone,
and you can really make some good looking shots
out of this footage.
Now, all the footage that you're seeing in this video
was color graded using my set of drone LUTs.
And I'll put a link down below in the description
to where you can check those out and download them
so that you can use them on your drone footage.
Number four is flight time.
Now, this is a huge advantage of the Mavic 3.
This has a 46-minute flight time.
Definitely feels a lot longer than what the Mavic 2 Pro had,
which was 31 minutes.
That little bit of extra time
just gives you so much flexibility when you're out flying.
It gives you a sense of safety and security,
because you'll be up flying, getting a bunch of shots,
you'll look down at your controller
and you still have like 50% of your battery.
Typically, I get my drone up
and I'm trying to grab as many shots as possible
before I run out of battery and bring it down.
And I've noticed I've been able
to relax a little bit with this drone.
I don't have to rush so much
because that 46 minutes gives you an extra boost of time.
And it's just enough for you to be able
to spend some time looking for shots,
and just making sure that everything's set up properly
before you have to bring the drone down.
Everyone that I've been with the last few weeks
has commented on the fact that the drone
feels like it's up in the sky forever.
Like we're getting so many different shots on one battery
and you don't have to worry about bringing it back.
And so this is gonna be a huge advantage of the Mavic 3,
because if you're carrying three batteries with you,
that's giving you over two hours of flight time,
which is a lot to work with for a day of shooting.
So number five is the speed of the drone.
So there definitely feels like
there's a difference with this drone.
When I've been flying out in the desert,
I was getting it up to 46 miles per hour,
just by looking at the screen and seeing what my speed was.
Now, on the spec sheet that DJI sent me,
it says it goes 21 meters per second,
which is pretty much what I was getting.
Now, working with this drone in sport mode is a ton of fun.
And that's one thing that I've been doing a lot of
when I was out flying with this drone.
The one thing about sport mode
is you don't have your obstacle avoidance.
So basically all your sensors shut off,
which means that you can potentially hit something.
However, with this drone in sport mode,
there is still a ton of control with the joystick.
And I was able to chase our trucks through the desert
at max speed, and still get super stable looking footage.
So for your ascent and you descent, it's doubled.
So that means that when you take the drone off
and you have it in sport mode,
you can take off and just boom, rip out
as far as you need to go to be able to get your shot
and get there super fast.
When I'm out flying, that's one thing that I always do,
is get the drone up and get it away
to where I need to as fast as possible.
And then I flip into Cine mode
to get that more dramatic, smooth-looking footage.
Number six is we need to go over the camera on this drone.
And this drone actually has two cameras.
It's got your wide typical drone camera,
and then it has a zoomed-in lens on top of that.
Now the main camera is a Hasselblad 4/3 sensor,
which is a huge advantage over other drones on the market,
because having a bigger sensor
is gonna give you more detail,
and it's going to give you overall better looking footage,
especially in low-light situations.
So when you're getting closer to sunrise, sunset,
or even if you're shooting in the dark.
Now the field of view on this main camera is 84,
which is an equivalent to a 24-millimeter lens.
So this is a little bit wider than the original Pro 2.
And this drone also features an aperture.
So it goes from an F2.8 to an F11.
And having this aperture means that you don't have
to necessarily always rely on ND filters.
And also, when you close down your aperture,
you can get the starburst out of any direct light sources.
And I've noticed that the starburst on this drone
looks way better than the Mavic 2 Pro,
because it's not as aggressive.
On the original 2 Pro, the starburst
was like taking over the image when you would shoot with it.
Whereas with this, it has a nice look to it
and you can actually keep it in your frame.
And you can have that look of the sun
being a starburst in the sky.
Now in terms of focus, you have about three feet,
is the closest you can focus to this drone.
And it goes to infinity.
Now let's talk about the zoom lens, because that's something
that's really different about this drone.
On the original Mavic 2, you had two versions,
you had a zoom version,
which was an optical zoom up to two times,
and then you had the normal 2 Pro.
Now on this drone, you don't have an optical zoom,
it's a digital zoom.
However, the top lens is a 7X lens,
so it's a half-inch sensor.
And it's got a field of view of 15 degrees,
which is 161-millimeter.
So it's a 7X zoom compared to the 24-millimeter.
So natively, the second lens is a 161-millimeter camera.
That is so different than anything else on the market
when it comes to drones.
161-millimeter is a super long lens.
This camera has a fixed aperture of F4.4.
So when you put it into what's called, explore mode,
you get access to bunch of different zooming capabilities.
You have 1X, which is that 24-millimeter.
You have 2X and 4X, which is basically just punching in
on that 24-millimeter lens, so it's a digital crop.
And then you have 7X, which is the second lens on top.
And then you have 14 and 28.
So effectively, you have two cameras on this drone
and each one of those cameras can go 4X in terms of crop.
Now, definitely if you're shooting at the 24-millimeter,
or you're shooting at the 7X, the 161-millimeter,
you're gonna get the best looking footage.
Now, one thing you're gonna notice
is that the footage is blurring my face.
Now this is something that's just
with the pre-released software,
but you're not gonna see this blurring
when you get the drone and you're using this zoom feature.
The other thing that's strange about this mode
is you're limited to 4K 30 frames per second,
and you're limited to auto exposure settings only.
Also in this mode, the 1, 2 and 4X, you can shoot in D-Log,
but 7, 14 and 28,
you just have to shoot in the standard color.
And when working with this drone, 7X seems like a lot,
and it's something that I'm still getting used to.
It would have been nice to have an optical zoom
on the Hasselblad camera,
because that's a better camera overall.
However, with the 7X, you can get some crazy shots
that you can't get with any other drones.
And something definitely I'm gonna play with more and more,
because it is something unique with the Mavic 3.
Number seven, let's talk about photography.
So this drone has a 20-megapixel sensor,
and the effective resolution is 5280 x 3956.
So you could use that full 5K sensor
to be able to get these high resolution shots.
And then also you could shoot in both JPEG and DNG RAW.
And on this camera, you have access to shoot your photos
up to 12800 ISO.
That gives you a lot more capability
to shoot in super low light.
As you can see from this photo right here,
we're lit entirely from a campfire and the moonlight.
And when you do a little bit of editing,
you're able to pull a lot out of this image.
Now definitely at 12800, it is much more noisy
than if you were to shoot at lower ISOs.
But you put a little bit of noise reduction on it,
and you get a clean looking image.
Now in terms of video, when it comes to the ISO,
you get access to 12800, if you're in the normal setting.
But if you're in D-Log, you only have access to 400 and 800.
Number eight,
let's talk about the obstacle avoidance sensors.
So this drone will sense things around it, omnidirectional,
meaning that, every direction.
Now, this is something that I've been really looking
forward to for this drone,
because on the Air 2S, you only have forward-backwards,
and you don't have that side to side.
And so when you're doing something
like an orbit around an object,
you could easily run into something that's next to you.
Whereas on this drone, you're never gonna run into anything
when you have the obstacle avoidance turned on.
Now, you get access to this when you're filming
in the cine or normal mode,
but all of it shuts off when you go into sport mode.
And so if you're flying super fast in that sport mode,
you definitely need to pay attention to where you're flying.
Whereas when you're in normal and cine mode,
if you get close to something like a tree,
you could either have the drone stop,
or it's gonna bypass that tree
by going up and over the object.
Now number nine, let's talk about charging the drone.
Let's talk about the batteries.
So one design difference is the batteries
now go in the back,
you have these two buttons on the back that you push in,
and then you can pull the battery straight out.
And the batteries have been completely redesigned,
so it's a different style than the original Pro 2.
Now these batteries take a 65 Watt charger,
and this does make a difference,
because when we are overlanding
and we are charging these batteries,
we can just plug it directly into our Goal Zero batteries,
and we didn't have any issues.
So the charger itself has a USBC port on it,
and you can plug that into anything
that's gonna output at least 65 Watts of power.
Now, DJI's charging cable
is much smaller than previous versions.
And if you have multi-batteries, the way that it charges
is this little multi-battery charger.
It's a much smaller setup and it actually works pretty well,
they don't fall off that easily.
Now, if you want to charge this drone
by just plugging it in, there is a USBC port on the drone,
and you could just plug the drone in and charge it directly.
Now, that USBC port that's on the drone
is also how you can pull the internal memory off.
And if you have your SD card inserted,
you could just pull your memory off that way as well.
So number 10 is the ActiveTrack 5.0.
So the pre-release software that I had
did not have the ActiveTrack fully working yet.
From my understanding the ActiveTrack 5.0 is going
to be better than previous versions of ActiveTrack.
And I've done videos around
how well this ActiveTrack works.
I'll include a link down below in the description,
where I go through all the different modes
and explain how ActiveTrack works on a DJI drone.
However, the big advantage of ActiveTrack 5.0
with the Mavic 3,
is those side to side sensor obstacle avoidance.
So if you're flying in orbit or you're flying in a mode
where the drone is chasing you,
and there's a tree in the way,
you're not gonna hit that tree.
So this is gonna be super useful once it's available.
And it's something that I will definitely
do another video on once I have access to it on my software.
All right, so there's a ton of features packed
into this drone, but let's just take a look at the footage.
So all of this footage that you're about to see
was shot in 5K or 4K.
I shot some in 30 frames per second,
some of it in 50 frames per second.
And it's all shot in the H.264 codec.
And I did a color grade on all of this footage.
(ambient electronic music)
So working with this drone over the last few weeks,
I was able to fly in a ton of different situations,
whether it was freezing at the top of mountains
or out in the desert with super dusty conditions,
chasing our Jeeps.
And I really had no issues flying this drone.
It works well.
It flies well, and it's fun to fly.
DJI has come so far with their drones.
I originally started with the Phantom 2
with a GoPro attached on the bottom,
and now we have the Mavic 3,
which is an incredible piece of machinery.
And this thing just works super well.
So let me know down below in the comments,
if you have any questions about the Mavic 3.
And next, I highly suggest you
check out this video right here.
It goes through all of the different drone moves
that I like to use when I'm out flying.
So I'll see you on the next video.