DJI Avata 360 | BEST SETTINGS and Beginner Setup Guide

The DJI Avada 360 is officially out, and I think it's probably one of the most anticipated drones they've ever released. This thing is absolutely incredible, and in the future I am going to be doing a full review that I'll post on this channel. But for now I just wanted to make a quick video going over the entire setup process from getting it out of the box to actually going out and flying, as well as all of the best settings that you should be using to get the best results. And there's a couple of small setting changes in there that are going to make a huge difference in your footage. Right now, if you're in the U.S., you're probably thinking, how the hell am I going to get one of these things? But hopefully in the future there will be third parties that you can buy these from. Without further ado, let's get into it. Before I get started, if you guys could do me a massive favor and hit the like button, I'll put a photo of a very adorable baby elephant at the end of this video. Honestly, it helps out the channel a ton, and I really appreciate it. If you don't have the controller, later in this video I'm going to be covering settings for the goggles as well. Okay, so I just went ahead and reset my drone, so this should be exactly what you're seeing. Basically, when you first open up the controller, all you have to do is activate the drone and then log into your DJI account. Once you do that, you're going to end up with this screen right here, and to access all the settings in the main page, just hit go fly. So after that, you should see this. And the first thing that I always change is the safety settings. And how you access that is you go to the top right and hit these three dots. And basically, most of this stuff for me stays the same. The one thing that I do always change is the max altitude. It starts out at 120 meters, so I'm going to raise that to 500 meters. You have to agree to the safety warning. Basically, in most places around the world, you can fly up to 400 feet above the ground, but this doesn't take into account any hills or mountains. So if there was a mountain right here, and I took off the drone and went 400 feet high, if I tried to go to the mountain, it's not detecting where the ground is. So I always just raise it to the max level. So again, make sure you're not flying too high, but you want that on so you can fly up mountains and down them. Just make sure you're not flying illegally. Other than that, everything on this tab stays the same. Okay, so next up, let's go to the control tab here, and you can switch the measurement units from metric to imperial. I just have always flown drones on a metric system, so I like to leave that. Scroll down, and then we're going to go to gain and expo tuning. And essentially the thing that I want to change is the tilt smoothness. So this drone, being a 360 drone, it's constantly shooting a 360 image. So this gimbal doesn't actually tilt manually. It's sort of like a virtual tilt, but if you're setting it to sport mode, the tilt is going to be super fast, so you're not going to get very smooth movements. So basically, if you look on normal mode, and it's all the way at the bottom, the tilt smoothness is set to eight. But if you go up and go to sport mode, it's set to six, which is just a little bit faster. Sometimes this is set to zero, but I'm going to put that up, I'm going to put that nice and smooth. I'm just going to go with 10. Okay, so I'm going to back out of that tab, go back here. And basically your focus track settings is basically just for your tracking. So if you're tracking a subject or a person, and you can kind of set the distance that you want. So there's sort of an inner circle or an outer circle, it's going to follow cars further away than it will follow people. And you can just set the radius of those, something that is really helpful and something to look into if you do a lot of autonomous tracking. And again, for the rest of this, everything else stays the same. So now we're going to move over to the camera settings. Keep in mind, some of these settings can be changed when you go to the main camera settings on the home screen, but there's a few that you can only change in here. So I'm going to focus on those. And every time I get a new drone, I always mess with these ones first. Okay. So the first thing that I'm going to want to change is color. Basically you have normal color profile, so you can see it's pretty saturated. I got a nice looking elbow there. Put that there. It's nice and saturated, but if I go back and switch to D log M and turn off the color display assist, basically what it's recording is a more desaturated look. But the dynamic range is slightly better. And what this allows you to do is color grade your footage much more easily. Because it's so flat, you can kind of give it your own little specialized look. By the way, if you are interested in color grading your footage exactly like you see on all the clips you've seen in this video, I sell a pack of four LUTs that are basically video filters that you just put on top of your footage and it just gives it that cinematic look. So if you're someone who doesn't plan on color grading your footage at all, in other words, you just take it from your drone and upload it straight to your camera roll, social media, Instagram, stuff like that. You probably want to shoot on normal so you don't have to color grade it. But if you are planning on color grading your stuff, I would definitely recommend D log M. And what I would also do is turn on the color display assist. So basically what that does is just add some saturation to the image that you're seeing on screen. The actual footage is still going to be kind of that gray D log M look. But at least when you're flying, it's not so gray and depressing. Okay, so scrolling down more. One thing that is nice to turn on sometimes is the overexposure warning. Basically, it's just going to warn you what parts of your image are overexposed. So you can see on my image right now, the lights in the top over there are all overexposed. And this is really helpful for skies. Usually when you expose for the ground, sometimes the sky is overexposed. For me, I've gotten pretty good at just like noticing it on my own. So I usually have that off just because it's a little bit distracting, but that can be super helpful. Next up, grid lines. So basically, as you can see, this is basically just going to put lines on your controller. You can stack different ones. You can kind of customize how this looks here. You can even have a center dot, which just helps you frame shots better. So I usually like to turn on this one is a little different with a 360 drone because you can frame everything later, but it is helpful if you're trying to get a specific shot. Okay, then frame guide. Basically, this is going to show you what your footage is going to crop at. So again, on a 360 drone, this doesn't matter as much because you are shooting everything. But let's say I wanted to shoot a vertical clip. I would just go down and put 16 by 9 vertical, go back to the home screen, and it'll show you exactly what that vertical clip will look like once you crop it again. It's not as important on this drone just because you can reframe everything later. So I'm going to turn that off. As far as white balance, I'll cover that a little bit more in a second. And then another very important thing to change here is if you go into the style tab, basically with a lot of drones and action cameras that have smaller sensors, for some reason from the factory, they send it out with a bit of an over sharpened look, and you can always add sharpness in post, but you can never take it away. So I always turn my sharpness down as far as possible. This just gives it a little bit of a smoother look, and it just kind of looks more natural in my opinion. You can also up the noise reduction if you're someone who is shooting in low light and you just want a little bit more noise reduction, you can turn that up. I usually do noise reduction in post, so I leave mine there. You can also change from either using internal storage or an SD card. Coming down even more, you can custom name your folders if you want. So you can put your name on that, or you can put the name of the drone on that. And then you can also custom name the files. So each file that comes out is going to have that custom name on it. As far as this setting here, the cache recording. So basically the controller is going to get a kind of low res version of the shot you took on your drone, and it's going to save it. And whatever gigabyte number you pick, it will record up to that amount of gigabytes and it'll start rewriting on older stuff. For me, I always film with an SD card and just make sure I get that footage off every single time. So I don't use the cache that much. But if you are someone who's kind of worried about losing your drone, you can up the gigabytes on your cache. So I'm going to leave mine there. And then in transmission and about, don't change anything there. We're just going to go back to the home screen now. Okay, so now we're finally getting into the main camera setting. So basically in the bottom right corner, you're going to see a little thing that says auto. You're going to want to tap that. And then as you can see, all of the pro settings just kind of extended out of that. So I'm going to press the AK 30 D log M section. The first thing at the very top you're going to notice is white balance. White balance is essentially kind of how blue or yellow your footage is. If we're inside, the lights tend to be a lot more orange and yellowish. So the white balance is going to be a little bit lower. For example, right now it's auto detected the white balance at 4,600 inside. If we were outside, 5,500 would probably be the most natural look. And usually the auto does a really good job of detecting what looks the most natural. However, sometimes it does change during flight. So what I like to do whenever I'm flying, whether I'm flying indoors or outdoors is I see what it detects on auto. So if I was doing a flight in here right now, I would see what it detects on auto, but then I would turn the auto button off. So it doesn't change throughout the flight, if that makes sense. Okay, then as far as resolution and frame rates, I usually shoot in 8K 30. The only reason you would want to switch to 6K, it's lower resolution, so it will take up slightly less space on your SD card or your computer. But the image is going to be a lot better if you shoot in 8K and it'll allow you to crop in different ways. So I would definitely recommend shooting in 8K. For most things, 30 FPS is perfect. But if you do want to shoot slow-mo stuff, if you're shooting action sports, stuff like that, you can shoot all the way up to 8K 60. It actually looks really good. The reason that I shoot in 30 frames per second and not 24 or 25 is because that is what displays the best on YouTube and Instagram that I've found. But some people do shoot in 24 as well. Okay, so moving down, you can change the color from normal to D-Log-M here again and mess with the color display assist if you want. And then again, at the very bottom, you can switch from SD card to internal storage. So we're going to leave that the same and then we're going to move to the next tab, which is this little circle to the right. So I'm going to press that. All right, so now we're in the section where you can change ISO, shutter speed, and EV. And to be honest, guys, this drone is the first drone in a very long time where I honestly most of the time shoot auto. It does a really good job of detecting things. And sometimes if you do manual settings, because it's a 360 image, you will kind of forget about different directions and you sort of have to calibrate for every single direction. And the auto kind of just does a really good job of it. So a lot of times I am shooting auto. Another thing with this drone is there are no ND filters. So typically with a classic drone, you want to get your shutter speed double your frame rate. So if I'm shooting at 30 frames per second, I want my shutter speed to be one over 60. But since this doesn't have ND filters, you're not able to match those up without your image looking super overexposed. But if you are shooting on manual settings, what I would do is definitely make sure your ISO is as low as possible. 1600 is really kind of pushing it. You're probably going to get a good amount of noise in there. So I'd adjust your ISO first to be as low as possible and then mess with your shutter speed. You can shoot down to one over 30 frames per second. And as you can see, if you go up, it's going to make it darker just because the shutter speed is faster. One example of a situation where I would definitely use manual settings is let's say I was flying the drone through like a tunnel and I didn't want it to adjust super bright while I was in the tunnel. So basically I would use the auto feature to kind of get the proper settings outside, but then I would turn off the auto feature so it's not adjusting constantly throughout the video. So you get a nice, even, you know, outdoors, indoors, and then out without these crazy exposure changes. Okay. So let's put those back on auto. The other thing that I want to talk about before I move on to photo settings is this setting here, which is either 360 or single lens mode. So 360 is pretty self-explanatory. It's going to be recording a massive 360 image of everything going on around you. Single lens mode. It's just going to capture the front part of it. So as you can see on the demo video right here, it's going to give you a bit of a more like immersive FPV feel because the lens is sort of tilting with the pitch of the aircraft. When you switch to this, it's not going to be recording in 360. So the front view that you're seeing is all that you're going to get. Okay. And then the other thing is quick shots, and I actually can't press this until the drone is in the air and has a GPS lock. I tried doing this in my house. It's not getting a GPS lock and I'm just going to touch more on quick shots when I do my actual review, but you can basically do a bunch of really cool kind of preset routes. All right, let's switch over to photo settings. Okay. So again, you have either 360 or single lens mode, same principles apply. I would just shoot 360 because you never know if you want to crop it different afterwards. And let's tap here. It's automatically in auto setting, so I'm going to tap the auto tab there. And there's a very important setting that you need to change here. White balance, same thing as we talked about before, especially for photos, I usually shoot on auto just because it's a single frame. So you're not going to get a bunch of changes throughout, but the setting below that is very important. So you're going to want to switch it from JPEG to JPEG plus RAW. RAW images basically just have a lot more detail and dynamic range in them. And even if you don't think you're going to be spending a lot of time editing the photos, when you switch to that setting, you get the JPEG and the RAW. So you can kind of decide later if you want to use the one that you don't have to edit that much or if you want to spend some time editing it. Okay. Then below that you can change the resolution. You can do either 30 megapixels or 120 megapixels. Basically the reason that you would use 30 megapixels is if you want to take a bunch of images super quickly, when you're taking 120 megapixel photo, it kind of takes a while to buffer. So you take the photo and it takes like a second kind of loads for a little bit before you're able to take another one, but it does have a lot more resolution. So I just keep mine on 120 megapixels. Okay. Then going to the final tab, the little circle over here, and this is pretty similar again. Like most of the time I use auto. If there is a mistake in the auto, you can kind of look around with the drone and see if the auto is kind of messing up either the sky or the foreground. You can switch off of auto and manually adjust these again, try to get your ISO as low as possible and then do your shutter speed. The only other reason you'd want to use this is if you're kind of shooting in low light and the auto is adjusting to like one over 50, for example, and you want to lower it so you could come down and go one over 30, but most of the time I just leave these on auto. All right guys. So now I'm going to be covering the settings with the goggles. I'm going to do less explanation of what the settings do in this part and just kind of show you where to change them with this. So it is helpful to watch the beginning of this video just to know what you're changing. The controls are slightly different for the goggles N3, but you'll be able to figure it out pretty easy. All right. So you just swipe to the left to open up the settings, go down to settings, uh, start off with safety and you're going to have the same options here. So I would put the flight altitude up, um, control. I just keep everything the same there. And then when it comes to camera, unfortunately I can't change many of these settings right now because I am recording internally on the goggles and it doesn't let you change them for some reason, but I'll show you where they are. So you can either change settings here or in a different menu. So you have aspect ratio, video quality, turn grid lines on and off, center point storage, all that stuff. I will say it's worth going into the advanced settings and putting the sharpness down to negative two noise reduction. I keep at zero, the rest stays the same. And the easier way to change the actual camera settings is actually if you tap up. So here you can switch from single lens to 360, you can switch from video to photo here. You can change from auto to manual. You got your ISO shutter, EV white balance mode. You can change that aspect ratio, video quality and color. Again, I'm recording on these, so it's not going to let me change them, but that's where all the settings are. All right guys. So that is it for setup and settings of the DJI Avada 360. The only last thing that I do want to mention real quick, just because this video does not have a sponsor. Again, like I talked about earlier, I sell a pack of four video filter LUTs. So if you do want to get kind of a more cinematic look on top of your footage, so if you want to support the channel and just get something that will help you, link is below, but thank you guys so much for watching this video. Make sure you're subscribed. If you don't want to miss my full review of the Avada 360. Like I said, if you did hit the like button earlier, I'm going to leave a photo of a really cute elephant at the end of this video.