if you just bought a drone and you want to learn how to fly it safely today i want to give you some of the basics so you can go out and have a great first flight and hopefully not crash your first drone now if you want to go really in depth and dive into how to fly your drone well and learn some advanced moves how to take care of your batteries how to take every drone all those kinds of things i do offer a paid course it’s linked in the description but for now we’re going to jump in the basics of how to fly pretty much any drone that’s come out on the market in the last few years now when you take off or when you go fly for the first time make sure that you’re in a place that you’re okay to fly and there’s a lot of different ways to look at that i use an app called air map there’s before you fly there’s a few other ones that you can check and make sure you can legally fly wherever you’re gonna go fly and make sure you’re in a big wide open area where you’re not going to be really concerned with running into any trees any poles any buildings anything like that could get in your way so make sure you go out to a big field big open field big open space and fly there for the first time before we jump into flying the drone for the first time the first thing you want to do is turn the controller on and we want to understand how the controller works so you double tap and hold the second push to turn the drone on once it beeps turns on then it’s on open up the app plug your phone in whatever device you’re using and then be ready to go now there’s a few basics that we need to understand is this stick on the left side here is the one that basically the drone stays in the same position but moves uh up or down or turns left or right but it stays above the position wherever it’s hovering at that time so if you push up the drone will go up if you push down it’ll go down you turn to the left it’ll go left if you turn to the right it’ll go right so that’s the basics of movements on this side this side the right stick is a little bit different this is the one that actually makes the drone move forward backward or left to right relative to whatever the position it took off of so if you push left the drone is going to slide left if you push right the drone will slide right if you push up the drone will move forward and if you push down the drone will move backward those are the basics of all the controls and everything we’re going to do today revolves around those things now there’s a few other things that you might want to familiarize yourself with if your remote has a pause button or return to home button like this one does that’s good to know just in case you get in trouble you can push it and have the drone come back i always recommend flying the drone back to yourself don’t just use the return to home function because sometimes that can go wrong depending on the settings that you’ve used and then in the middle we have a switch here that selects between three different flight modes the one furthest on the left cine mode or sometimes called tripod mode is the slowest and the drone everything about the drone will will respond slowly to the controls so that’s a good mode to start with if you’ve never flown drones before normal means that if you have obstacle avoidance that obstacle avoidance is also active just like it was in the city mode but everything is a little faster the drone will move faster it will go places faster up down left right all of those things will happen a lot faster and the gimbal will move faster and then sport mode or the fastest mode ludicrous mode depending on the drone manufacturer will move the drone at the absolute maximum speeds that it is capable of but if your drone has obstacle avoidance there will be no obstacle avoidance available so then it is 100 dependent on you to not crash your drone and then on most dji drones on the back of the remote here is a record button so you can take pictures or start and stop the video recording and a gimbal control wheel so if you push the wheel one way the gimbal will tilt down if you push it the other way the gimbal will tilt up so now that we’ve gone over some of those basics let’s jump into unfolding our drone taking off and flying for the first time some drones might unfold differently than this but you should be able to find your directions in your manual or there’s probably videos out there about how to do it the first thing you want to do is definitely take the gimbal cover off so that the gimbal has free range of motion before you turn the drone on and then usually you unfold these two legs the front two legs or the top two legs by moving them forward first and then the back two legs fold down and back now the drone is unfolded you don’t have to straighten out the propellers if you don’t want to but you can most drones will have a like soft start to be able to get the drones going or get the propellers going and spin them out before the drone actually takes off and then power it on by double pressing and hold the second press until it beeps or you hear it turn on once it’s completed its boot up process you’ll hear that tone everything’s ready to go so let’s take off for our first flight i don’t recommend that you hand launch and hand catch if this is your first time using a drone i’m going to because that’s how i do it a lot of times i do have a whole video about how to hand launch a hand catch it’ll pop up here and it’ll be linked in the description but for the most part just take off of the ground something hard some surface area that won’t get your drone too dirty and that will give you safety to be a little ways away so first things first if you are going to video record this you want to make sure that it is in auto that may not be the best for all situations but it is good and it will certainly get you through most things and will give you pretty usable footage in most conditions so make sure that you’re in auto and everything’s ready to go and record the way it is and then what we’re going to do is turn the drone so it’s facing away from us and perform our first few flights up down turn it left and right back or forward backward left right all that with the drone facing away from us if you remember this is up down and left and right so if you push up the drone is going to go up if you push down the drone is going to come down and then if you push it to the left the drone will turn left if you push it to the right the drone will turn right but all of that is staying in the same position that the drone took off in it’s not moving forward or backward and then when we come to the right stick if you push left the drone slides left if you push right the drone slides right i’ll get it back here in the center and then if you push forward the drone moves forward and if you push backward the drone moves backwards now that’s relatively easy but when you turn the drone around and have it facing towards you everything on this stick and the left and right on this stick has just become the opposite and so this takes a little more time and a little more practice but that’s all you need is a lot of practice if you’ve never flown drones before so again remembering that when you push these sticks this is forward backward left right and then turning right and turning left on the left side here you just want to remember that it’s going to respond the opposite of what you think because it’s now facing you so the way to do that is just very slowly and very gently move the drone to the left to the right maybe a little forward a little backward up down is of course still the same but and then turning left to right all you’re really doing is building muscle memory and so the way to do this is keep an eye on the drone don’t get stuck looking at your screen all the time but keep an eye on the drone as it’s flying and do these motions over and over and over again and you’ll be a pro in no time because what you want to do is build the muscle memory so that you don’t have to think about it as much and that just takes a little bit of time and a little bit of practice and then as you get more practice you can combine the motions together to do things like orbit like what i’m doing right now which is where the drone is moving around me the subject and keeping me somewhat in the center of the frame or on a third because that’s kind of where i want it as i’m moving around i’m keeping my subject and this is where you do want to keep an eye on the screen but also check on your drone to make sure you’re not going to run into anything because obstacles do appear out of nowhere and just get a nice smooth motion around your subject as you go takes practice you’re combining two different controls don’t try this until you’ve gotten a lot of practice with the single controls and now i get a lot of questions about how to make your videos look good how to get good photos if you don’t do a lot with videography and photography there’s some really simple ways one is just use the auto mode on the drone that will get you good photos and good video in like 90 percent of situations especially if you’re just doing it for you for friends for family just for fun don’t worry about it we talk a lot about using nd filters and there are times and places to use those but if you don’t know what those are you don’t know how to use them just don’t worry about it go out and shoot a lot of stuff in auto you’ll get some great footage and have a really good time as you can see here i’m recording in auto and that means the drone is managing everything for me now if i switch it to pro which is where i have set all the settings you can see that it’s dramatically over exposed that’s because i have the shutter speed set to what i would use the shutter speed at and the iso is set at what i would use the iso at but because i don’t have an nd filter on there that means there’s too much light coming in so i would have to raise the shutter speed up until i get the exposure to about where i want now the rule of thumb if you’re going to use the manual settings is you want to keep your iso as low as you possibly can you want to keep your shutter speed at two times your frame rate and then you want to keep your white balance set to whatever your white balance is supposed to be so on a sunny day it would be 5500 or 5600 on a cloudy day it might be more in like the 64 to 6600 range uh just depends on what you’re shooting this is where nd filters come in essential because you can’t really do anything but adjust your shutter speed when you’re flying to get the proper exposure now even though a lot of drones have obstacle avoidance i never recommend relying on obstacle avoidance 100 of the time because it will fail it will miss things small branches things like that it can’t see as well and it might run into something and in addition to that not a lot of drones have 360 degree obstacle points where they can see objects around them completely and so like this one does not have side obstacle avoidance which means if i’m moving sideways it could run into something don’t rely on obstacle avoidance learn to fly it manually and you will be much better off and then obstacle avoidance just becomes a nice added safety feature or added benefit something that’s really neat about drones today is most of them have smart features built in which means they have pre-programmed flight paths that they will fly those are a lot of fun to use they will give you some really great footage of yourself of your family of you doing whatever it is you do whether you’re hiking out in the middle of the wilderness or you’re just on the beach having a good time so use those i did put together a video about how to use those it’s up here up there it’ll pop up in one of these corners to master anything it just takes time and it takes practice if you go out and fly three five six seven eight batteries fly a couple batteries every day for a week you’ll see massive improvements and you’ll get a lot better like i said i do have a full paid course that really goes into depth on not only how to do the basics of flight but how to take care of your batteries take care of your drone and also do more advanced flying more complicated maneuvers and how to use that in video a little bit drones are an incredible tool they’re a lot of fun but you do want to use them correctly and use them safely so please take your time and learn to fly smart and learn to fly safely as you go about exploring this new world of drones now if you want to learn how to film great videos and take great photos with your drone i’ve put together a short playlist right here that will take you through some great tips and some great ways to learn how to fly your drone as always you can join my live stream wednesday nights at 4 pm alaska time 8 pm eastern if you have questions i will see you again soon in the next video cheers
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