My first chance to really test out the follow and tracking modes due to weather, but it has its limitations for sure. I got a couple decent follows, but I think because the day was a little gray and I’m wearing all black, and the drone is looking towards the sun, all these factors gave me a bit of a struggle.

Another thing I noticed is the way the DJI app processes the audio to remove the blade sound, also amplifies any music you might have playing while you’re filming. I imagine it’ll be best to try my filming with no music, alone so the drone doesn’t switch over to another person, and wear contrasting colors to the background of the day.

Still fun to see what’s possible.

In today’s test session, I used the Manual Control setting in the DJI Fly app, and flew the drone into a couple spots where I couldn’t put a tripod. It just hovered while I skated. I placed my phone down on the other side of the room to record the audio.

We have some really cold weather coming up, but yesterday was warm enough to melt most of the snow from my little curb farm. It was only 20˚ and pretty windy, but I was desperate to see how the drone would do outside and I also wanted to skate a few minutes since I won’t be able to for a few days.

I was having a hard time finding the right spot to launch from to get the best angle and framing. I moved around a few times before I got too cold and this was the best angle that I captured. Unfortunately I was also testing a different audio setting in the DJI app which has an even harder limiter on the sound to counter the blade noise, but it was too much and made the audio pretty much useless. I’ve since changed the setting back so that it’s ready for the next test.

I definitely want to try the follow and tracking mode, but I think if the drone was as far as I have it in this clip, but lower to the ground, Spotlight will give me a pretty decent clip.

For now, I wait for warmer weather, and I think I might name the drone Ken Burns.

It’s so cold around here these days, but I had to get out and try to get some clips and see if this drone really can be my skate filmer.

The room doesn’t have the best light and since the drone was pretty close to where I was skating, it seemed to overshoot when I got to the curb. Better placement while in Spotlight mode should fix that. I was able to get some sound recorded on my phone that I had placed near the curb, so that was a decent test.

My biggest issue so far is that the drone wants to keep my head in the frame, and I want it to get more of my skateboard in the frame. I shot about 10 minutes of clips and this was the best one I got. I laid on the ground before launching the drone and it stayed lower giving me a btter chance at capturing a trick.

Super fun to test, but I think it’ll be better once I can skate outside.

I had another couple of flights and showed it off a little to some friends, but then also had a few issues that I thankfully figured out later that night.

When I first launched the drone, the video switched to vertical filming and I should have landed it and checked my settings since you can choose 16:9 or 9:16 ratio and I must have changed it the night before going through the settings from the first flights. Duh.

I wanted to get the sound of the room, not necessarily us talking about how awesome it is, but to hear the quality, but when you use the smartphone as the controller, you pretty much cover the mic with you hand. Duh.

The weirdest thing though is just before I got to the last room, you can hear it say “Flight distance reached”. I couldn’t hear that when I was flying it but it didn’t want to go through the doorway. I’m not sure why it didn’t want to keep going, possibly the musical equipment coming up made it freak out, but I landed it in my hand and walked through to start filming the ramp area. After looking up the warning, it’s not supposed to say that unless it’s at the furthest reach from the controller and the wi-fi signal, but I was standing right behind it the entire time. Weird.

I didn’t want to be super annoying while everyone skated so I just panned around a little bit to see what it would look like and I think a wider lens would be better. Similar to most of these types of cameras, they need a lot of light to look good.

It was still very cool to have a tiny drone to show everyone and to continue my little adventure with it.

When I got home to download the clips, I connected the drone to the app and selected the videos to save to my phone like you’re supposed to. I knew 2 of the clips were kind of long and expected it to take a few minutes, but the progress bar went away and I thought it was done and I powered down the drone. I noticed on my phone though that the video was still trying to transfer in the background but I didn’t realize it and I broke the connection. I tried multiple times to download those clips but it wasn’t letting me and really wasn’t giving me any information as to why not. I tried connecting the drone directly to my Mac and it wasn’t recognizing the drone at all until I realized I need to use a USB C cord directly to my USB C port on the computer. It did not work with a USB A to C cord. I was then able to grab all of the clips, much quicker too, and I could stop fretting that I was not going to get to use the clips for my award winning video above. Phew!

FYI: There is 22GB of memory inside the drone that is NOT physically accessible. You format it within the DJI Fly app after you grab the clips, but there is no card that you can remove or replace.

First impression: It’s tiny!

It took over an hour to charge all three batteries that came with the bundle. The charging hub can also act as a battery bank for other USB devices if you needed an emergency charge which seems cool, but I’m not sure I’ll ever use it that way.

My main reason for getting this drone was to see if it can give me better skateboarding clips that seem like I have a filmer, as opposed to the constant static tripod shots I currently capture. The software it has onboard uses some sort of AI that looks at my face during startup and then associates my body to my face and follows me around in a few different flight modes. Tracking and Spotlight are the 2 modes I’m most looking forward to using and I tried them out in this short video of my first flights and tests. I’ve since angled the camera down so the next test should show more of my feet in the frame. I have some ideas for capturing the skateboarding sounds and not the drone sound, but that will be in later test flights.

It’ll be fun to look back at this first video after a while. I’m pretty excited and looking forward to some warmer days with no snow on the ground.