Quadcopters anyone?

You won't be sorry with that purchase

 

Monday can't come soon enough. I'm sure as shit working from home that day too

 

My neighbor just bought the mavic and was flying it last night. First time I seen one out in flight and not a Phantom. Looked sweet and I liked how light and small it was.

 

@Airdog your turn to buy one now

 

You'll love it. Make sure you do the firmware update before you fly it the first time. It will fly just fine if you don't but "eventually" if you don't do the update it will ground itself if you get too far behind. It "might" have the latest firmware installed (it will let you know in the app) since it's new but they push out firmware updates pretty often. They've made it much easier than in the past and you can do it through the app. Just make sure you have a fully charged battery in the craft and the controller is completely charged since the update can take up to 25 mins.

The firmware updates on the Inspire 1 were a pain compared to the Mavic. You had to update the craft and controller separately and sometimes it would take 30-40 mins and you never knew if you were going to brick it until it was finished. Luckily I never had a problem with the Inspire but I know many that did due to the process they used to update. The Mavic is just a touch on the update in the app and it does the rest by itself instead of downloading the update to the memory card and then putting it into the Inspire and hoping it transfers correctly.

 

Will do. Thanks for the info!

 

No problem. You'll love it. Once you get it try out the "tripod" mode. I use it all the time. It's actually made for flying in tight spaces but it limits the speed of the drone to less than 2mph. That's great even if your 300' up because it makes your shots much better and slows down all the controls for you. Just flip off tripod mode when you get ready to bring it back home. Speed is limited to 22 mph IIRC in normal mode and almost 50mph in "sport mode". I've never put it in sport mode since your footage would suck even at 60fps due to the speed and shutter roll.

*EDIT* Sport mode also turns off the GPS function so you need to know how to actually fly it otherwise it will burn into the ground, tree, your neighbor's house, etc...

 

Stop it! Stop making me be even more anxious to get it!!!

I'll have to fly my cheap shitty one some more to really get good at flying before I turn on sport mode. I'll likely be taking it out to the desert next weekend for some hopefully awesome shots. I can't wait!

 

I hope its windy as fuck out there. Ha just yoking. Looking forward to seeing this thing aftet all this talk.

 

Lol...

I wouldn't worry about sport mode honestly. It's an unnecessary mode (to me) and I don't see a reason to fly almost 50mph personally. You're shots would suck or at the very least not very watchable or interesting. On the video I posted on Molas pass the fastest it got up to was 22 mph but it was 250' AGL so it looked slower than that.

Oh... you can also do this if you like though I don't recommend it unless you have a really open space to fly inside (we have 17' ceilings so I could have flown it higher but I was just testing it out). The beeping you hear is the forward facing obstacle avoidance system doing it's job.

 

do eeet

 

One other thing I HIGHLY recommend is

UZOPI Mavic Mini Air Pro Platinum Spark Accessories Tablet Holder – Aluminum Adjustable Remote Controller Bracket Mount Extender with Neck Lanyard Strap for 4-12" Phone Tablets

this if you have an iPad. The controller has readouts on time, distance from the controller, height above AGL, battery life left, etc... built in but so does the app. The iPad will cover the controller screen but it's no big deal since all the info is on the screen of your phone or iPad. Well worth the extra real estate. I was using a iPhone 7 plus and it worked great but the larger iPad makes all the difference in the world. Another thing is since it uses a different type of transmission you can stand under something like a tree or building and still fly it without any interference with glare from the sun.

 

Don't have an iPad but I do have a galaxy tab A or something I use for gps off roading. Might have to get one of those. That would definitely be nice to have.

 

I do know that Android is a little harder to get to work on "some" DJI products. It seems that they focused on iOS instead of Android. That's not to say it won't work I just know there have been some issues on the DJI forums.

Mentioning the DJI forums I HIGHLY recommend you join the Mavic portion. You will learn everything about your craft you want to know.

 

That's a bummer cuz I really hate apple products. I have an iPad actually but it's like an iPad 2 or something super old haha. I've got an iPhone regretfully so I'll try with that first and the galaxy tablet and see how it functions.

 

I used to be just like you. I hated Apple. But once I got into video / photo editing there is nothing out there that will beat a Mac for rendering video in a short period of time. My $5k gaming PC (admittedly not setup for video processing but had the latest and greatest graphics card) would take over an hour to render a 5 min video where as my fully loaded MacBook Pro will do it in about 20 secs. Now everything I own is Apple products . And I mean everything.

 

Ya I just can't justify the prices for their products haha. I don't think I'll ever get in to the editing enough to warrant one. If I do then maybe I'll get a MacBook just for that purpose but that won't happen anytime soon. Especially after buying the mavic haha

 

One other thing I forgot to mention (seems I keep coming up with stuff you'll need). My MacBook Pro came with a 1TB PCle drive in it but I use two 1TB LACiE Thunderbolt SSD external HD's to store and process off of. The transfer rate is the same as the internal transfer rate and it keeps the computer HD clean of trash files. They are expensive as hell ($800 each IIRC) but if you are serious then you are going to need some external HD's I can promise you. If you take a 4k video for 30 mins that can = up to around 36GB of information. Most of which you will discard but still the finished product is still very large.

This is a 16 min video condensed to around 7 mins of some gameplay footage and the file size is huge even at 1080p. All done with Final Cut Pro





Has nothing to do with drone footage just giving a demonstration that you are going to need external HD's. Make sure you get SSD drives. Spin up HD's will not do the trick and will make your life hell trying to process off of it. I store every video I make on the Apple Time Machine so I never lose them. But they are stored through WiFi so obviously you can't process off that but it makes a great storage option with 2 extra TB's of storage.

 

I understand that. I've got well over $5k invested in this Mac, drives connected to it, and software.

 

Ya I've been needing to get new solid state externals. On my PC I keep almost everything stored on the internal HDD and have my OS and any games on the SSD, and I'll be putting any editing software on there as well.