Good day folks. Shawn here from Air Photography. So DJI has just launched the Avata 360 and I’ve already done a full review of it. But in this video I want to talk a little bit more about what I think is the most important feature of it and that is its new tracking capabilities. This is the first in the Avata series that is capable of tracking and you can track while flying with a standard controller such as the RC2 or you can track while flying with goggles and something like the Motion 3 controller.

I think this is important because whether you have interest in 360 or not, you may have already discounted the Avata 360 because you don’t want to have to edit the 360 footage. You don’t want to have to reframe it. The way DJI has it set up with tracking and Focus Track, there is absolutely no editing required. You can just make use of the new tracking tools and you don’t actually have to do any reframing.

I’ve already touched base a little bit on this in my full review, but I wanted to make a video going over it a little bit more in detail because I do think it’s a really important feature. I’m going to talk about both methods — using the controller and while using goggles and the Motion 3 controller.

Tracking with goggles and the Motion 3 controller

If you are a person who has done any type of tracking with a standard FPV drone, say there’s a moving subject or there’s just a point of interest that you want to capture, you know it can be really difficult. It takes a long time and a lot of skill to get the motions down right. The Avata 360 makes it super simple and it makes it extremely safe.

While you’re flying with goggles, you can enable Focus Track from the top menu or you can press and hold the dial on the side. That will initiate the Focus Track feature. Things that are trackable are now going to have a plus sign appear on them and you can just simply start tracking. The instant you start tracking, you get a secondary window pop up at the top left hand side that’s going to give you two views and it’s going to make it extremely safe for tracking. That little window is going to show you what you are tracking, what’s being framed, and the full view is going to show you the direction in which you’re flying.

So you can just fly around freely and you know that the subject is always going to be locked in the center of the frame. And that’s what you’re going to be capturing. You can just fly around and you’re going to capture some really dynamic movements. Some of these shots and angles are pretty hard to capture with a traditional FPV drone, if not impossible.

No reframing needed — just download and export

When you’re done, you’re left with beautifully tracked footage. And the nice thing is you don’t have to go in and do any type of reframing in the software. All you have to do is download the footage directly to the DJI Fly app. There’s an option there called Shooting Perspective. And all you have to do is go ahead and export it. You don’t have to do any reframing. You don’t have to add any key frames. It’s just going to export it as a flat video, either a 9×16 or a 16×9 depending on what aspect you set it as.

But the nice thing is you still have that 360 footage. So if you do want to go in and change the framing later, you’re able to do so.

Flying the Avata 360 with the RC2 controller

On top of flying with the goggles and doing your tracking, the Avata 360 fully supports the RC2. So that’s going to open the Avata 360 up to a whole new group of people — people who didn’t enjoy flying with goggles and a Motion 3 controller.

When flying the Avata 360 with something like the RC2, again, you have full tracking and Focus Track capabilities. It’s going to feel very familiar to you if you’ve used Focus Track on any of the other DJI drones. It works very similar, except they actually have a few added bonus features.

While flying in 360 mode, you can easily select a subject by drawing a box around it or just tapping on the plus sign on any trackable object. That’s going to give you your three Focus Track tools: Spotlight, Point of Interest, and Active Track.

Point of Interest and Focus Track

Point of Interest works very similar to what we’ve seen. You can just set your speed and rotation and the Avata 360 is going to keep the subject locked in the center. And of course, you can adjust your altitude and distance to make it a little bit more dynamic.

Then we have Focus Track, which again will keep the subject locked in the middle, but you can fly around in different directions and it will keep the subject completely locked on.

The new Free Mode

With the Avata 360, they’ve taken it a step further. They have a new Free Mode, and again, it’s similar to when flying with goggles. As soon as you enable Free Mode, it’s going to give you a second window down at the bottom left hand side. Again, that’s going to show you what you’re locked on to. So if you have a subject selected, the camera view is going to stay locked on to that, but you have full view to fly around freely. That’s going to make it a lot safer because you know exactly where you’re flying, and it could actually add more precision and detail because you can really plan your shots.

Active Track modes

And of course, just like other drones, we have Active Track. Again, it works very similar. You can select your subject. We have two different modes. You can leave it in Auto Mode — that’s where the drone is going to fly around automatically. It’s going to take into consideration things like aesthetics and framing. It’s going to adjust itself as it flies around to give you some nice dynamic movements. The nice thing about the automatic mode is that it leaves you free to enjoy and focus on your activity and you can let the drone do all the work.

If you want more control while using Active Track, you can adjust the positioning yourself. There’s two rings in the tracking tool, so you can just drag the drone around to any position in a complete 360 degrees. If you want to be tracking from a farther distance, you can drag the drone to the outer ring. If you want to be tracking from a closer distance, you just drag it into the inner ring.

Everything framed on screen is remembered

So as you can see, the Avata 360 is going to be an extremely powerful tool for some creators when it comes to tracking. And as I mentioned, if you don’t want to do any 360 editing or reframing, you don’t need to. When you’re flying the Avata 360 with your RC2 or you’re flying with goggles and the Motion 3 controller, everything that you see framed on the screen is going to be remembered.

Although it’s still going to be capturing that spherical video, they have something called Shooting Perspective when exporting. So if you know how to download content from your Avata 360 to your mobile device, that’s all you really need to do. Of course, you’re still going to have that 360 spherical video that you can go and manipulate later on if you so wish.

How to download and export your tracked footage

I’ll just demonstrate that for you here just to show you how easy it is. I’m going to go ahead here and launch the DJI Fly app. And I don’t even have to power on the Avata 360 because it does feature that off-state Quick Transfer. So it will just wake it up and allow you to download the content.

So I’m going to tap there under Quick Transfer, showing us that our Avata 360 is in sleep mode. We’ll tap there. We’ll join the Wi-Fi network of the Avata 360. So right now, it’s going to display everything that’s stored on the internal memory or the memory card.

I’m just going to tap on the video there, and then I’m going to tap on the download icon. So right now it’s downloading the spherical video from the Avata 360 over to our tablet. If we want, we have the option when this is done to download the flat video. Essentially, that’s what was seen in the goggles or on the screen on your controller. If you are tracking, it’s going to be what was framed in the tracking window.

As you can see, it’s going to go ahead and download the perspective view. So there we go. There, it’s all done downloading. I can actually bring up that video now. And as you can see, it’s got the tracking information. I didn’t have to do any 360 editing. I didn’t have to do any reframing. Everything is just ready to go.

Exporting without downloading the full 360 file

If you don’t even want to download the 360 spherical footage, you don’t even have to download it first. We can go right into one of these 360 files. I’m going to tap on the play button, which is going to bring us into the 360 editor. Now, you do have to rotate your screen.

So here’s that 360 video. Again, it’s in the Capture Perspective, and we know it’s in that Capture Perspective because if we tap there, you can see it gives us a few different options. You want to leave it in Capture Perspective if you don’t want to do any editing. Then you can just set your resolution and frame rate there and then tap on the export button.

The nice thing about doing it this way is you don’t actually have to download the spherical video first if you have limited space on your device. You can just export the flat video directly from the drone, again without having to do any type of editing.

The other nice thing about doing it this way is we can set our aspect. So right now this is in a 16×9, but if we’re going to be uploading it as short form, we may want a 9×16. Again, we can just easily switch it because it was captured in 360. We can easily switch the aspect and just go ahead and export it.

Track after the fact in post

As mentioned, you can do your tracking later on. If you’ve been out flying for the day and you get back home and you’re watching back your footage and you see something really interesting that you wish you had been locked onto, that can be done later on in the software.

I’ve removed the tracking from this video. You can see it’s not tracking the vehicle at all. It’s just flying around randomly, but I can frame the vehicle in the shot. And it doesn’t have to necessarily be a vehicle. It can be just a stationary subject as well.

I’m going to tap on the tracking button. And as you can see, it’s already picked up the car as a trackable object. But if it picked up something else or you want to track something different, you can actually just tap on it and move it around. You can increase the size. If there’s multiple vehicles in the shot, you’re going to see these little green lines appear above things that can be tracked.

So we’ll just tap on that there again and then I’m going to tap on Start Tracking. So as you can see, you don’t have to do the tracking while flying. It can be done later on all within the software. Does a really good job. Keeps it nice and smooth. Now you can just go ahead and export it again or you can do some more fine-tuning. Add some key frames, add some motion effects.

So yeah, folks, just a quick look at some of the tracking capabilities of the new Avata 360. Hopefully you enjoyed this video and found it had value.

Be sure to check out Air Photography on YouTube for more great drone content. You can also find more articles by Shawn on his DroneXL author page.