Hey, how are we doing? Brett Garamella here, and today i'm going to give you my top
tips before your first flight with the dji
mavic air 2 although this will apply for any dji drone
so let's get right into it
all right so the first tip i'm going to give you is to make sure
that your batteries are all charged everything is charged
as well as your device and also the firmware is updated for everything as
well so the way to check your battery you can
just tap here just once and you'll see a bunch of dots
there should be four different dots or four different little lights that light
up all four of those should be lit up you
know you're at a hundred percent all right sun just came out so you could
also check it on your controller just by pressing the
power button just press it once and you see those little dots go on so
we'll show it right here press it once those little dots go on
all right show you again see how those dots just
go on all right to make sure our firmware is updated we're gonna go
into the dji fly app or the dji go 4 app and for the dji flyout you click on the
upper right hand corner and those three little dots
and then you're gonna go over to the about section and then where it says
aircraft firmware and rc firmware you can
press check for updates so we press that now you have to have a wi-fi connection
so since i'm flying with my ipad i can't check my
firmware here because i don't have wi-fi connection with this ipad but if i was
flying with my phone or if i was at home i would check my
firmware so make sure you check your firmware and make sure your batteries
are updated when you're at home before you come on
site because you'll run into this issue right here
and you can also click in the upper left hand corner
click right there and go to the main home screen and then you can look there
and it'll tell you if your firmware is updated if you have
wi-fi connection if you don't like i said just do this before you come
on site to fly so make sure all your batteries are
charged for your controller for your drone battery
for your device and as well make sure your firmware is updated
for your controller for your battery firmware and for your
aircraft your drone firmware so for dji drones it's
all three the controller the battery and the drone
and then as well as your device firmware so make sure that's all charged and
updated all right my next tip is to make sure you're in an open area
so right here i'm in a parking lot no one's around there's a small little
street over here other than that there's no one really
around i'm also flying early in the morning
so this is like a bonus tip added on to this is to
try to fly early in the morning i found that's the best time to fly because
most people usually don't wake up early and you'll be able to fly
without a lot of people around and i like flying without a lot of people
because sometimes they can come and ask you questions or
cause you anxiety especially if it's your first time flying it might cause
a little anxiety if a bunch of people are around and you might be worried
that they might ask you something or you might be worried about if something
happens with your drone people around so it's good to fly in an area like this
where there's no one around and you also have to watch out for
obstacles trees telephone wires telephone wires are a
big one so i noticed there are some telephone wires but they're really far
away a couple hundred feet away at least
probably like five six hundred feet away so i have plenty
of space to fly my drone and i can land it and i have a nice flat
surface here so i'm good so make sure you fly an open space a park
or anywhere around your open space and it'll make your flight
experience a lot better all right so i had to relocate because the sun was
getting crazy there so that leads to my next tip which is find
a shaded area so you want to find an area where you can see your screen now
if you can't see your screen and if you're in an area where there's no
shade no trees nothing around to be able to see your screen
then you're gonna have to get a screen hood or you could build your own with
cardboard just put a piece of cardboard over here and kind of tape it around
and that'll allow you to see your screens alright so that leads to my next
tip which is to use an ipad and a tablet holder having a tablet
holder an ipad allows you to have more screen real
estate i really like an ipad you can use some other type of tablet if
you want and make sure you have a longer cable okay so you're gonna have
to get a longer cable that way it'll fit all the way into the back of
your controller and there's plenty of space to move your
tablet around all right so that leads to my next tip
always take off the gimbal cover when you turn on your drone you never
want to turn on your drone and have your gimbal cover on because
when you turn on your drone the drone does an auto calibration so it
auto calibrates the gimbal and your gimbal will move
around like this all right so let me just demonstrate an auto calibration
when you just turn on your drone you'll see the gimbal auto calibrate right so
i'm turning it on and you see how the gimbal moves all
around if i had my cover on it would damage
that gimbal the motors would be trying to do the auto calibration but you the
gimbal cover would be holding them in place
so always make sure you have the gimbal cover off when you turn on your drone
and then the opposite is true when you turn off your drone turning off my drone
what i then want to do is put on my gimbal cover so whenever your drone is
not in use you want your gimbal cover on that way
it maintains the integrity of the gimbal keeps it in a nice position straight
forward and will help your drone last a lot
longer and you won't have to tweak the gimbal
when you're flying or send it back to dji for repairs because it's not
perfectly level so you always want the gimbal
cover on when your drone is off all right my next tip is to always have
a flat surface when you take off so that's why we have
a nice open space which is nice and then we want to have our flat
surface we can put our drone on a landing pad you can buy one of them
or you can use anything you have it could be a piece of cardboard
there's a little hack i have you could take your backpack and just flip it
upside down and usually on the back it's usually flat
and you can push aside the straps to put your drone on then when you take off you
have a nice flat surface and you can also land on that so having
a nice flat surface comes in handy like i said you don't need something
crazy but just make sure that you have a flat surface with no
rocks grass or other obstacles near your drone when you take off or
when you land all right so my next tip is to position
the drone away from you so now it's always good to
position the drone away from you when you take off
because this way you can orient yourself correctly
when flying it's just a lot easier okay because if the drone is facing towards
you then everything's kind of backwards on
your controller so always take off with your drone forward
the gimbal or camera facing away from you that way when you fly it you can
move it left right forward and backward and
taking off and it's a lot easier just for your first flight this is a
good thing to do if you become more experienced
you don't have to do this but even if you're more experienced
it's just a safety precaution because you don't want the drone to ever come
at towards you and hurt you so it's always good to have the drone facing
away from you at takeoff all right guys i got a little
too crazy out there too much noise so i decided to bring it indoors
so my next tip is to go into the app and format your card in the app okay whether
you have dji fly app or the dji go 4 app it's best if you do it inside the
app all right so now i'll show you how to do
in the dji fly app in the dji go 4 app what you do in the dji fly app you just
go up here to three dots and then you click on
camera and then you go down to where it says
format you can click on sd card or internal storage start with
the sd card and just make sure you don't have anything
on it so you can click on go back to your main screen click on that triangle
right there you can see whether you have any photos
or videos so i have some old photos but on this card i don't have anything okay
so you're gonna go up here you're gonna go back to camera
and then internal storage so you press format and then you can
format both of them simultaneously which is really nice in the dji flyout
check both of these circles right here and then press format
and then bam you're done okay so formatted both cards
and you're good don't format it on your computer or anywhere else
do it in the app sometimes you can record and shoot for a while and then
you bring it back and all your footage is missing or it's
not or your certain files are missing or it didn't record it right or something
happened that's because you didn't format your card
in the app so always format the card in the app
before you fly i suggest you actually do this at home
before you get to the location because at the location that's just one more
thing you have to think of so try to do this
well before you're going to fly all right for my next tip you want to change
the return to home height but before you do that
you want to make sure that height is in the system that you
understand so either imperial if you're in the united states
if you're outside the united states usually it's metric so what you can do
is go in the dji fly app click on those three dots and then
you're gonna click on control and then you're gonna see either metric
or imperial since i'm in the united states
i'm going to click imperial if you want metric in meters or kilometers you can
use that right so once you have it in the system
you want what we now have to do is adjust the return to home height
so we go to safety and on our safety we're going to go to the top
and at the top we can adjust first let's adjust
our max altitude so legal limits 400 feet let's just set it to about 300 feet
so right about there is good okay it doesn't need to be perfect but
we'll just do close enough 305 feet then we'll go to our max distance and
our max distance we'll set that to about a thousand feet
away we don't want to go much more than a thousand feet so that's
about a thousand feet and then our return to home height so if
it returns to home we want to have it at a height that goes above the highest
obstacle near us and since where i'm flying i was flying
in that parking lot there was a lot of tall trees so i'm gonna put it to 300
feet because that's higher than the tallest tree near me
so just make sure the return to home height the return to home altitude is
higher than the highest obstacle around you whether that's a building a
tree a lamp post or anything like that so now that you
have your max altitude max distance and auto return to home
altitude you're safe both for your drone coming
back and for how high you can fly and how far
again this is just for your first flight so your max altitude and your max
distance you can change later however your return to home height
should be based on the obstacles around you all right
guys this was just part one part two of this video for more helpful
tips before your first flight is in my dji
drone pro course you can access that course by clicking
on the link below and in that course i teach you
everything from setting up your drone to pre-flight to all the settings and
different things you'll need for photography
and video during flight and then to the advanced settings
and features for really more professional flying and many things that
aren't mentioned on youtube and it's all condensed into a
course that's all killer no filler so you don't waste your time searching
on youtube or online for all the answers to your drone
questions again you can sign up for that course by clicking on the link below
in the description i also have a free 40-minute video where i show you my
seven secrets for flying dji drones and answer
a ton of questions you can check out that video by clicking
on the link right up there i'm brett garamella the drone pilot pro
and remember fly like a pro