today i want to show you how i set up and set the settings for the mavic 3
to get the best video and photos that you can get out of this drone
hey my name is jake and i create content here to help solo creators on the go so i do lots of
drone camera lens reviews and tips and tutorials on how to use them if that's something interests
you consider subscribing today i want to walk you through the best settings and the setup that i use
on my mavic 3 to get the best photos and the best video that you can get when you're out
there flying as well as some of the best settings you can do to get the best performance as far as
flight performance out of this drone now this is not for the cine version this is for the regular
mavic 3 but i do have the smart controller and i can walk you through a little bit later how
do i set up the smart controller specifically but otherwise most the other settings and setup will
be exactly the same throughout the entire drone here we go walk through the app this
isn't a complete exhaustive uh run through everything but it will give you a basic idea
starting from the top left you have what mode you're flying in so city mode normal mode sport
mode it'll tell you whether or not takeoff is allowed if you're in a restricted fly zone and
you have to unlock it or anything like that if you want to get into some of the more deep settings
you can check here and it brings up this little dialog that has um some of your other settings
your return to home altitude the max distance and the max altitude you can fly in and then over here
we go over here you've got your battery settings of course it's not going to show anything right
now because we're not in flight but it shows you how much battery is left and then normally
it'll show you also how much battery is left how much flight time you have left and things like
that you can tap on that to get more information as you're going it shows your rc controller
strength your link to to the rc and then also how much gps satellites you have locked it's very
important that you wait to start flying until the drone says the home point has been updated
because then you know it has a good gps lock and it will return to the right home point you will
have less of a chance of a fly away in that case here these three dots are what gets you in and out
of all the menus you have your different modes here you can select between photo mode
video mode uh master shots quick shots hyperlapse panos things like that and then
when you tap on each one of these it also gives you the options for what's available in those
modes so if we go to photo mode here you can go single auto exposure bracketing time shots etc
so we'll leave it in photo mode for right now so we can talk through the photo settings first
you have your start and stop record button right here you can turn auto focus on or off
and then you also have your explore mode which enters the zoom camera and then you can cycle
through your different zoom levels here i don't really use a zoom camera that much
but it is kind of a neat thing if you want to use it be aware that the zoom camera can only
shoot in jpeg or in the standard color profile in video and then down here if you want to see
footage you've already shot you can pull up here and see exactly everything you've already
shot also handy if you want to delete a clip you just shot because it's totally worthless
then down here you can change between your auto modes and your pro mode so the promo gives you
the more you know different amounts of control you can change your shutter speed or you can
leave that on auto and then it also gives your iso controls or you can leave that on auto your
white balance controls all of those things can be adjusted and changed from pro mode then over
here you have your distance to your home how far you've gone and then how high you are as well as
your speed uh vertically and horizontally so those are good things and then i've got my histogram up
here because i like to see if anything's being overexposed or not and then here this is if you
push and hold this the drone will take off as soon as you take your finger off you push it
hold it down the green circle will go around and as soon as you take your finger off the drone
will take off so that's an easy way the other way you can do that is push both sticks down into the
center you want to get into the maps and see kind of where you are you can jump in here and pull up
a full screen thing of all of your maps you can look around i'm in a heavy no fly zone right now
because i'm next to three airports so now let's jump into the camera mode now when you're in photo
mode it's going to bring up the photo settings when you're video mode it'll bring up the video
settings but tap on the three dots there go into camera and here is where you can shoot jpeg raw or
jpeg plus raw i shoot in raw raw will give you the most amount of leeway in post to be able to edit
the photos and give you the absolute most amount of data from this four third sensor which is great
i also shoot in 4x3 because that's the full sensor size if you do 16x9 basically it's
going to crop down the top and the bottom a little bit if you need to use anti-flicker you
can do that here this is where you can turn your histogram on or off your over exposure
warning you'll see like zebra stripes kind of moving in the background if it's overexposed
let's see on the light there you can see though that's what the over exposure warning is
and then you can also put your grid lines in if you want you can do a center point rule of thirds
and triangle i just do rule of thirds that's generally what i want or not triangle but diagonal
lines and then you can have your peaking level low to high to medium to normal and that's when if you
switch to manual autofocus you push and hold here you can set from near to far and it will
show lines with whatever's in focus white balance you can do manually or like you have it do auto
a lot of times i will let it do auto and then i'll switch it to manual once i feel like it's gotten a
proper white balance and obviously you can see here it's changed white balance a fair amount
and you can also do that here when you're in pro mode you can go down
you can tap right here hit the white balance you can change it or adjust it right there
but yeah auto does a good job to start out with and then once you feel like it's found the right
white balance you can hit auto and turn it off or you can just set it yourself so now let's switch
to video mode and i'll walk you through the video settings tap here switch to video do we're going
to do stay in normal and then again the three buttons up here and we can switch mp4 or mov
is really six and one half dozen they're both just compression wrappers on what sort of uh you
know how you want that compressed i use mp4 because mp4 seems to be the most compatible
with everything i've used um you can use mov if you want to but there doesn't really seem
to be a difference between the two as far as i've been able to tell and then below that you have d
log and normal mode so normal mode gives you your normal color which is built in it doesn't give you
the full 10 bit color it doesn't give you the full 422 which is what you want if you're going to do
a lot of color grading in post so i shoot in d log and that gives you really some great uh ability to
color grade in post and so a lot of leeway in how exposed it is then you can choose h.264 or h.265
not all of the settings will work in h.264 because h.265 is a more compressed codec
but if you have an older computer and you find you're struggling to edit the h.265 files switch
to a2 h.264 and you might find you have a much easier time because h.264 is not as compressed
so it'll take up a little more space but it'll also be easier for your computer to unpack and
edit with so that's a little tip um and then again all of these other settings here are the same
now when it comes to shooting photos and videos i expose to the right which means that basically i
want to set my iso or my shutter my aperture speed let's do the aperture we'll set that down to 2.8
right there and we can adjust our iso so if you go too far over it's going to be way too overexposed
like that you can see there's a whole bunch of overexposed areas but if you start bringing your
iso down and of course this is a very dark room so it's pretty dark but you can set it to where
uh you can see here what is overexposed and of course you can see over there and you know that
if there are white lines on something that is overexposed so you'll lose those highlights so i
go to where i can find the highlights pretty much on they're not on anything i don't want them on
and they might be on super bright things like the sun or on really white clouds and so you
can expose using that it's exposing to the right essentially but for now i'm going to
leave the shutter and the iso on auto for photo mode because it does a pretty good job overall
for video mode in d log i kind of do the same thing i just basically i want to make sure i'm not
over exposing anything now in d log you only have 400 and 800 the rule of thumb is keep your iso as
low as possible and then adjust with other things as you need to so you have nd filters for this
you might have uh your aperture you can adjust your aperture on this as well you can set on
auto or you can manually adjust it so that it darkens or brightens the image the best aperture
i found is about five five point six up to about f9 as far as the performance of the actual camera
but f 2.8 and above f9 also work fine it just the image gets a little sharper at about f 5.6 through
f9 as i said d-log gives you a lot of space to be able to color grade and it gives you a lot of
leeway even as far as the highlights and shadows but keeping it as clean as possible is important
so shooting at the lowest iso you can really helps now we've gone through the photo settings
and the video settings that i used to get the highest quality raw d-log definitely makes a big
difference if you're going to do something like active track you need to switch to 4k uh cinema
4k or 4k and then you can active track through there but i don't active track that much so
i use 5.1 because it gives you the most amount and you can punch in a little bit and still get really
good full 4k quality but let's talk about some of the controls that we set up on the controller
these are how i like to set them up we'll go through some of the settings um as far as safety
goes i keep obstacle voice off for the most part but you can do it also to bypass if you want to
and then here this is dangerous and where a lot of people get hung up if you have the display radar
map on but your obstacle avoidance is off you will still see that the drone is sensing obstacles
it can get you caught in a trap where you think its obstacle voice is on but it's not and you'll
fly into something so keep an eye on the display radar map if that's on but your obstacle voice is
off you have to keep in mind that there is no obstacle avoidance even though the drone will
tell you yeah there's an obstacle there and then here you can set your max altitude max distance
max return to home or the auto return to home altitude you can update the home point which is
really important if you're going to be flying from a moving boat or something like that and you want
to keep the drone closer to you if it decides to disconnect or return to home for some reason
calibrate all that here you can see your battery info and battery temperature
you keep an eye on your battery temperature when it's cold you want to keep it around 20c if you're
flying in extremely cold conditions because that keeps the um it keeps the voltage constant or more
consistent i should say and then here's where you can unlock a geo zone if you're in a place
where you have to get permission to fly and you can also do some of your more advanced safety
settings like what happens when the disconnect from the controller if it returns to home or if
it just hovers or just descends into the ground you can also turn your air sense on or off if
you want adsb at least in the united states to be able to sense other aircraft and then we go into
the control section here's where you can select metric in meters or kilometers and imperial i'm in
the us so i use imperial the gimbal mode to be fpv or follow mode here and then you can calibrate the
gimbal and do some advanced gimbal settings here between your different modes normal mode uh cine
mode and sport mode i think i've left all these on default um just because yeah here's where you can
turn your phone charging on or off especially nice in cold temperatures to keep your phone charged
because i use a smart controller it's off on this but here also
if you tap the function button once it will recenter the gimbal that's what i've got it set
up you can choose between a lot of other things here if you want or if you double tap you can
have it lock or auto lock the exposure again you can set this up to be a lot of what you want here
as far as the different settings those are what i use just because i find those the most
the most useful if we go into the advanced tab this is really great because this is where you can
set up your different the way the sticks respond so for cine mode i like it to be very very low
response in the center and then more response as you get out to the edge basically that means like
you can make fairly large movements in the center and the drone will respond very little and then
as you get further out the drone will respond more and more quickly as you get further out that helps
to make it so you have the most fine amount of control in the center for cine mode i find that
to be nice for normal mode i have it a little bit yes less and then for sport mode quite a bit less
um depending on you know what i'm doing at the time so that's a great way to be able to kind
of fine-tune your cine your normal and your sport mode controls that's the way i've got it set up if
you use the smart controller there's a few things that you can do differently and so this is what
i've done by the way the smart controller if you want to record the screen which is kind of handy
swipe down hit screen recording there and if you find the screen is dimming or
uh turning too bright or kind of constantly fluctuating you can turn the auto off and then
you can control it right here which is nice but if you want it to kind of auto sense the brightness
or not brightness right there launch the dji fly app and we pop right in there you can see the
screen recording is going in everything looks the same if you tap here you can kind of jump into all
those things including like the sd card internal storage and formatting if you want to but the main
thing is that when you're in these different modes here you get a few other options not necessarily
in here all this is pretty much the same you have the remote id stuff on the new smart controller
which is nice but when it comes to controls that's where you have some other options because you have
two different jog wheels and you have the 5d controller as well as two buttons on the bottom
here you get these two buttons here these two jog wheels and the 5d controller so right here is
where you can set those two buttons i have one to re-center the gimbal and two to be the auxiliary
led to turn the landing led on or off you can see like here the gimbal goes down goes back up
i can turn the the auxiliary light on or on auto until it's uh basically taken off it's
not gonna do anything i usually leave it on auto but sometimes when i'm flying at night it's kind
of nice to have it set to where i can have it turn on when i'm coming back so it helps me find the
drone in the sky even though it has a strobe on it it still just makes it a little bit easier to find
back in there and then here you can adjust all of your 5d buttons so upper i have it if i want to
increase the exposure or decrease the exposure is up or down left goes to pop it into explore
mode which turns to the zoom camera so if you go here it changes to the explore mode camera
and then down uh or right re-centers the gimbal i don't know why i have that but
if you just push down here like that it'll bring up all the advanced camera settings which i find
i need to get into every once in a while so just like the other controller you can turn tilt your
gimbal right here with this one and by default this one when you're in the explore mode
will zoom in or out i really hope that dji gives us the ability to change the aperture with this
because that would be fantastic but for now you're basically limited to using it as the explorer
as the explorer mode as i said this wasn't a complete like setting setup beginner tutorial
or anything like that my friend jevin doe did one that'll be linked in the description or a
card will pop up here or here in the meantime if you have questions let me know in the comments
below i'll do my best to answer them or you can join my live stream which happens wednesday
nights at 4 pm alaska time 8 pm eastern i will see you again soon in the next video cheers