There's a lot going on in today's video.
I've got a DJI drone to test out.
I'm supposed to be promoting ways to stay creative at home,
and I've been wanting to try and do a remote studio tour.
So, it's time to adopt a look of healthy skepticism...
And let's get undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody, I'm Gerald Undone
and I picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue.
So, this video is sponsored by DJI as part of their
"Stay home, stay creative" campaign, which means
I'm supposed to share with you a few ways to be inspired
while stuck in our respective dwellings
using the DJI product of my choice.
And I've chosen this: the DJI Mavic Mini.
Mainly because this little thing fascinates me
and because I have a very specific, very silly idea for it
that I'll get to in a moment. Now, it's a bit late in the game
for a full review because you guys have probably
seen a bunch of them already, but there have been
some crucial updates to this little guy since then
that I'll share with you, as well as just some things
that I like about this particular drone.
First up, as a Canadian,
the fact that this thing comes in under 250g--
well, with the prop guards removed-- is clutch.
Because it lets me fly with significantly fewer restrictions
and required credentials. And with the Fly More Combo
you get these prop guards that, although not advertised as such
and probably not recommended by DJI,
allow you to fly it reasonably safety indoors.
Which allow you to be more creative at home
and take your wide behind the scenes shots
to a whole another level. Get it?
Because of the altitude?
Levels. You know?
OK, but seriously, from a value standpoint,
the Fly More Combo is fantastic.
For $449 you get the drone, six pairs of propellers,
the prop guards, three batteries, and a triple charger
that lets you charge the batteries and your controller
at the same time, and it all comes in
this solid and stylish carrying case.
Sponsored video or not, this is a serious value
and as a casual Canadian flier, it's really the only option
in my opinion. Now, at launch, there were some shortcomings
with the drone. Most notably the lack of manual controls
for some camera functions, and the missing 24fps,
which made the drone a little bit harder to recommend
for serious video shooters. But I'm happy to report
that they just released a firmware update that addresses
many of these issues. Bringing 24fps to the 2.7K mode
and 24 & 48p to the 1080. As well as
manual exposure controls and white balance.
For white balance, you can just dial in your colour temperature
from 2000K to 10,000K, which is a lot more useful
than auto white balance for changing environments
because you can just set it to something like 5200K
and then keep it static like that,
and then it'll correctly capture the change
in mood as your scene changes.
I do wish, however, that it was a bit more accessible
from the main screen without requiring me
to dig through menus to get to it.
But the new manual exposure controls
are available right from the live view screen.
And in here, you can set your shutter speed,
which we can put down to 1/50 now that we have
the 24fps recording mode, and then we can set our ISO,
which ranges from ISO 100 to 3200.
And while these are somewhat minor additions,
they take this drone from hard to recommend
for proper video work, to easy to recommend
and, probably, the value king of drones now.
And since I've been talking about filming indoors with it,
let's run through the ISO range while shooting a moody scene
in here and see how it holds up for noise and softness.
["Freerolling" by T. Bless & the Professionals]
♪
So, now that we have all these accessories
and the latest firmware update, it's the perfect time
to test the Mavic Mini's remote studio tour capabilities.
I just hope the Fly More bundle is enough
to make it all the way to Buffalo.
["Time to Go!" by Out of Flux]
[propeller blades whirring quickly]
♪
Chris! I told you not to fly the drone in the house!
"Hi Becky, it's Gerald."
"I'm here to tour your studio remotely.
Pretend I'm the drone."
[drone whirring loudly]
Dude, I [bleep]-- Can you please leave?
Look at the dust!
Dude... Just get out!
-[propellers cut out] -[clunking]
So, there's still some kinks to work out
with this whole remote studio tour idea,
but I think we made some serious progress.
All right, so, we've still got some time to fill
since that tour didn't take too long,
so why don't we inspect this interior shot in post
to see how we're doing for colour,
and if there's any fixes we should apply.
[Batman transition sound]
All right, so, I've got the shots pulled up here in Resolve.
And I'm actually filming this on the drone right now.
I've got the drone at about ISO 800
and made, kind of, a moody scene in here,
and I'm recording the audio on the RØDE VideoMic NTG
and then syncing them up in post.
OK, so, this shot here of me holding the ColorChecker
is at ISO 400, and we can see a couple problems.
First of all, it definitely has a bit of an over-sharpened look.
And also, we're a bit too contrasty right out of the gate.
Now, if you just wanted to deliver like this, you could.
Just fix the colour a tad. But if you wanted to have
more range with what you want to do with it,
you're going to need to eliminate some of that contrast.
So, we're going to want to put a bit of reverse S-curve on it.
And then lastly, I think that we're leaning a bit too much
toward the red here. Our whites look like
they have a little bit of magenta in them.
And the skin is definitely on the red side.
And if we look over here on the Vectorscope,
we can see the skin tone is pretty much in the red box
rather than on the skin tone line.
I've already made a little bit of a reverse s-curve here,
so I'm gonna throw that on so you can see
what it looks like. And to do that, all we did
is we bumped up this whole cluster here
which is the dark shadows around the edge.
We're going to raise that up a little bit here. If you see...
We're going to take that up like that.
And then, our mids we can pretty much leave
where there are or just bump them up just a little bit.
And then the highlights, we just bring them down
a little bit. It's not that strong of the s-curve
on the upper register and that isn't that strong.
It's not like it's way up here. So, we can just bring it down
just a little bit and we have a pretty good starting point.
Now, before we jump into fixing the colour,
we should make sure that our white balance is OK.
And judging by this it seems like we need to
take a bit of the warmth out of the shot,
and maybe add a bit more green back into it.
Now, I had this shot at, I think, around 5200
or 5100, and so, bringing the temperature down 100
is no big deal, but the fact that we need to remove
quite a bit of pink from the shot suggests that
the manual white balance, while good,
does lean more on the magenta side.
So, taking that down will make our colour correction job
a little bit easier. And if we look at our Vectorscope
down here, we can see it's actually not that bad to start.
So, pretty good colour accuracy right out the gate.
So, if we wanted to skip this for now and see
what it would look like if we just added some contrast back
and try to finish the image, we'll go ahead and do that.
So, we'll put a little bit more contrast on it.
But now we're doing the contrast to our taste,
rather than, sort of, an over-contrasty image.
And we can still see that we're definitely favouring
the magenta a bit too much.
But the last thing I'll do before we deal with the colour
is I'll deal with some of this over-sharpening.
So, we can just soften the image up just a touch.
And, I think, just making it a little bit softer.
Although we're going to lose some detail,
is going to give, sort of, a more pleasing image overall.
So, we're going to want to use our Hue vs Hue here.
And I made a whole video on colour correction,
if you want to watch it, recently.
But we're just going to shift our skin tone
a little bit more towards the skin tone line.
So, we're just going to take our reds
and just shift them down just a couple degrees
until we get the skin tone that is a bit more pleasing
for what we'd like here.
Let's take a closer look at that.
I think that's a lot more accurate.
And now we'll go to Hue vs Saturation
and this will allow us to fix a couple
of our over-saturated areas. So, the red needs to--
we need to pull some of the saturation out of the red there.
And we definitely need to pull some saturation
out of the magenta. And other than that, though,
we're not doing too bad. The blue, maybe bump it up
a little bit. The cyan needs a bit more of a bump.
And I would say that's pretty much it,
just a bump in the blue/green area.
And then lowering it down between the magenta
and yellow zone. And let's look at our before.
And after. I think that's pretty great.
Now, there is another option if you didn't want
to do any of this work yourself.
Paul Leeming has a LUT for the Mavic Mini
which does three of our steps already for us.
So, if we just jump over here, we have the same
completely untouched image. And over here I have
the Leeming LUT for the Mavic Mini,
and if I throw that on, you can see we get
pretty much the same adjustments right out the gate.
We get that reverse s-curve to limit the contrast
and bring our shadows back,
we get all the colour correction already done.
And then just like with our shot,
we can put the contrast on, and this is the same amount
of contrast for the shot that we did manually.
And then, again, take a couple points off the sharpness
to reduce that overall, you know, over sharpening effect.
Overall though, the colour accuracy
isn't that bad to begin with on the Mavic Mini
So, I'm pretty impressed with that.
[propeller blades whirring]
Of course, if you're gonna film yourself indoors
with the drone, you'll have to factor in the noise
of the propellers. Luckily, the Mavic Mini
is one of the quietest drones in this category.
[propellers whining]
-What? -[muffled dialogue]
No, you don't think people will think
you can actually fly the drone all the way
to Buffalo, right? Like, should I put
some kind of disclaimer in there? Nah, it'll be fine.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
entertaining or at least helpful. And if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
try setting the playback speed to 75%.
Alright... I'm done.