How to Transfer and Edit DJI Avata 360 Footage on Mobile Devices

Good day folks, Shawn here from Air Photography. Today’s video is a bit of a tutorial on how to transfer and edit the footage that you’ve captured on your DJI Avata 360. Some people are a little concerned about the Avata 360, thinking it’s going to be very complex to edit the 360 footage, but it’s actually pretty easy.

I’m going to be demonstrating how to edit on an iPad, but this works exactly the same way if you’re using a smartphone, either an iOS device or Android device. You can also edit on a PC or laptop. DJI has something called DJI Studio, and we’re going to save that for a separate video. My personal preference is editing my 360 footage on a mobile device. I find it a little bit easier. Apple silicon is incredibly powerful and really smooth. I find on a PC sometimes it gets a little bit laggy.

Understanding Capture Perspective Before You Start

One important thing I do want to point out before we get too far into things: if you’re out capturing with your Avata 360, you’re capturing in 360 spherical mode. When we go to import and edit the footage, there are a couple different perspectives, they call it — a couple different options. One of them is called capture perspective.

Essentially, while we’re downloading the footage, we can export what we’ve seen on the screen. A lot of people will like that because that requires almost zero editing. When you download the footage, it’s going to be downloaded in a traditional flat video, exactly what you’ve seen on the screen. If you’ve adjusted the gimbal angle, perhaps you’ve done some flips and rolls with the gimbal, all that information will be stored in the video file.

Transferring Footage with Off-State Quick Transfer

We’re going to be using the DJI Fly app to transfer and edit the footage. One nice feature of the Avata 360 is it has something called off-state quick transfer. So when we go to transfer the content over, we don’t even have to power the drone on. That only works for about 12 hours after the last time it was powered on. So if you were out capturing three or four days ago, you will have to physically turn it on.

I’m going to go ahead and launch the DJI Fly app. Right away you can see it’s picked up the Avata 360. We can tap on that, and it’s telling me the Avata is in sleep mode. I click on that, and it’s waking up the device. It’s going to ask us to join the Wi-Fi network of the drone, and there we are — now connected. I didn’t even have to power the drone on.

Right away, it’s going to list everything that’s currently stored on the drone. You’ll be able to tell what video files are what because the circle ones mean it’s a spherical video, something captured in 360 mode. The square ones are either going to be content that you’ve captured in single lens mode, or if you’ve taken a photo or panorama.

Two Ways to Download Your Files

When it comes to downloading, there are two different ways we can download. We can do a batch download where we select multiple files at once, or we can download each individual file. To do a batch download, we tap the check mark box at the top. From there, we can batch select different dates or different files, then tap the download button. That will automatically start downloading the footage and give you a progress bar with the speed.

The other way we can download footage is just by bringing up the video file. This is if you just want to download one individual file at a time. What’s interesting about downloading it this way is once it’s done downloading the 360 file, it’ll ask us if we want to export the perspective view.

Essentially, it’s the flat view — everything that was captured the way we captured it on the screen. This is great for those who don’t want to do any 360 editing. The 360 file is going to be stored within the DJI Fly app. However, the flat file — the traditional file that it’s exporting — will be available in the Photos app. The nice thing about this is we have the spherical video that we can go in and manipulate and edit, but we also have a flat video that we can go and share instantly.

Getting Into the 360 Editor

Because we’ve downloaded our footage, we don’t have to go back and connect to the drone. We’re going to tap on Album, and anything we have downloaded from a DJI drone is going to be listed here — not necessarily just the Avata footage, but if you’ve got other drones, they will be listed here as well.

I’m going to select the file we just downloaded. We tap on the play button, and that’s going to bring us into the editor. While we’re editing, we do have to put it into portrait mode when we’re on a tablet. Here’s our 360 video. We can scrub through the timeline, but there are a few things we need to do first before we start editing.

First is setting our aspect ratio. By default, it is 16×9, but if we’re going to be editing for social media, we may want to put it to 9×16. That can always be done later — you can actually do your editing first and then export it at multiple different aspects if you’re uploading to different platforms. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to leave it as 16×9.

Capture Perspective vs. Free View

Down at the bottom are all our tools. This is how we can add key frames, change perspective, and do some color grading. But the really important thing you need to set first is the perspective button. Right now it’s saying capture perspective — the perspective of what you captured on the screen or in your goggles.

If we go through the timeline, you can see it’s exactly the way I filmed it. We could go in and just edit this down, trim it. Say we just want the front part. We can go to trim, tap on the front handle, and drag across the timeline. Tap the check mark, then tap the check mark in the bottom right corner. Now we just have a 24-second clip. That’s great if you’ve got a 20-minute video but there’s only a small segment you want to export.

We can do some basic editing like adding a filter over the footage. We can do our own color adjusting by tapping the adjust button — perhaps increase the saturation a little bit, or take it down. When you’re in shooting perspective, for the most part it’s because you want to export it the way you captured it.

You can do some adjustments, but you’ll notice if I spin the camera around by using my finger, as soon as we play it, it’s just going to pop forward. What we need to do is add a key frame to tell the camera to look in that direction. But anytime you add a key frame or change a camera movement, it’s always going to want to revert back to the way it was filmed.

If you want to do your own camera movements, we need to change the perspective. I’m going to tap the reset button to take away any changes, then change the perspective to free view. Now if I change the perspective, it’s going to stay that way. It’s not going to automatically flip back around. If you are going to do key framing, make sure you put it over into free view.

Working with Key Frames

Let’s trim this video up because it’s a four-minute video and I don’t want the whole four minutes. I’ll tap the trim tool and drag it along until we just start flying, then tap the handle and drag it along until we get to the lighthouse.

Now we’re going to add some key frames to change the perspective and add some movement. We’re flying out over the water, and I’m going to add a key frame by tapping the plus sign on the playhead. Now we can drag the footage around to change the perspective.

But what’s really important to note before you do that: any changes you make at that first key frame will affect everything before it and after it. For example, if I spin the camera with that key frame selected and go back to the beginning, you can see it’s starting out in reverse — which is something we didn’t want. To delete key frames, all you have to do is tap on it. You can see it turns to a negative sign, tap on it again, and that gets rid of it.

To prevent that kind of shifting when I don’t want it, I like to start the video the first frame the way I want it and make sure I add a key frame. That way that perspective is locked in. I want to fly out over the water, so I’m going to go to about the 10-second mark. I don’t want any movement during those first few seconds of flight, so I add another key frame.

Now I want to change the perspective where the camera rotates and looks behind us. But if I change it right now with that second key frame selected, it’s going to start turning right from the start. What we have to do in order to prevent that is go to that 10-second mark, add another key frame, then keep going along the timeline until we get to the point where we want it to turn, and add the key frame there and change the perspective.

Now it’s flying along in a straight line. Once we’re at that second key frame, that’s when it’s going to start making the turn, and it’s going to finish the turn at that third key frame and then continue on. Key frames — things before them are affected and things after. Sometimes you have to add key frames with no movement just to keep the perspective you want.

If we want to make the turn faster, all we have to do is make the key frames closer together. So I’m going to delete that key frame and put it closer to the other one. Now when I play it back, it’s going to be a lot quicker.

Now we’re flying in reverse. Say at this point I want to look down. I’m going to add a key frame first before I change the camera angle, because otherwise it’ll start making the change from the previous key frame. Then maybe here I want to face forward again, and I also want a nice wide field of view, so I’m going to pinch to shrink. All that information has been added to the key frames.

At any time, you can tap on any of those key frames and delete it if you don’t like the way it looks. If you’ve really messed up and you’ve got 30, 40, 50 key frames on there and you want to get rid of them all, all you have to do is tap the reset button.

Field of View Presets and Pre-Made Camera Movements

When you have a key frame selected, there are a couple things we can do. First, we can set a field of view. We can do it manually by pinching and zooming, but they have some preset ones on the side. Perhaps you want a shot with no distortion, we can tap that. If you want ultra wide field of view, or if you want an asteroid look — all that information is going to be stored in that key frame.

Another thing we can do while editing our 360 footage is add some pre-made movements. DJI has some pre-made camera movements built right in, and it can make it a lot easier to add some really dynamic shots. I put the playhead where I want one of the camera movements, tap on the camera movement button, and we get all different options. We can add a 360 flip and all different types of movements.

When we add the movement, you can see it adds a darker shaded area over the footage — that’s the position the movement has been added. We can actually adjust it by tapping on it. We could tap delete to get rid of it, but if we want it to be longer and slower, all we have to do is drag the handles. So the rotation is going to be a lot slower. Once you’re happy with it, tap the check mark and it will be applied to the main timeline.

Tracking a Subject

Another thing we can do within the DJI Fly app is tracking. If you’ve been out flying and there’s something really interesting — a nice point of interest — we can actually track on the subject. I just did a reset to put everything back to the way it was. Out here there’s a lighthouse, but it’s now out of screen.

We go to tracking and right away we get a green box. We can drag it around over something we want tracked. I’m going to tap the start tracking button, and what it’s doing is trying to keep that lighthouse as close to the center of the screen as possible. When we’re happy with it, we can hit stop tracking. Now in the timeline we’ve got a green bar — that’s the tracking information that’s been added to the video. We can tap on that and clear it if we’re not happy.

Gyro Framing: Reframe by Moving Your Device

Another way to edit is something called gyro framing. If we tap on the gyro frame button at the bottom, for this you actually have to hold your device because the way we position the device is the way it’s going to capture. As I move it around, it changes the perspective.

We tap on the red start framing button and it’s now recording information. As the drone is flying, we can look down, look off to the side, zoom in and zoom out. We can even just use our finger to manipulate it around as well. When you’re done, you hit stop, and all that information has been saved to the file. The only thing with gyro framing is you have to be extremely smooth, otherwise it can be a little bit jittery.

So there are a couple different ways in which you can reframe your 360 footage — key framing, tracking, and gyro framing.

Exporting Your Final Video

Once you’ve got all your 360 editing done, you’ve added all your key frames, trimmed it up, made some color corrections or added your filters, you now have to export the footage to your device’s camera roll. That’s going to make it into a flat video that you’ll be able to use or share on social media.

At this point, it’s important to make sure you set the aspect that you want. I’m going to leave mine at 16×9. The nice thing about 360 is that you can export it in multiple different aspects. Once you’ve done all your editing, you might want a version to upload to your YouTube channel — so you want 16×9 — but you might also want some shorts for YouTube, so you can then put it to 9×16. Because it’s 360, we can export it easily in multiple different aspects.

Before we export, we have to set our resolution. By default it’s going to be at 1080. If you have an older device, you might want to leave it on that if you have limited space. Ideally, for the best quality, we want to turn the resolution up to 4K. I always like to turn my bit rate up as high as I can have it for better quality video.

There are a couple different options for improving the footage. We can enable noise reduction, or we can enable 10-bit color depth. You can only have one of those turned on at a time. I have 10-bit turned on right now. If I turn on noise reduction, it’s going to automatically turn off the 10-bit.

We can also add a watermark — the Avata 360 watermark — or you can turn that off. That’s personal preference. Once you have all the settings exactly the way you want, just tap export and it’s going to export it as a flat traditional video right to your device’s camera roll. Once that’s done, it’s ready to use like any traditional video file. You can upload it to YouTube or social media.

Using AI Highlights for Quick Clips

The other thing we can do is something called Highlights. If we tap on Highlights, this is kind of AI-driven. It’s essentially going to allow the Fly app to go through and find some interesting clips. We tap here to start the smart recognition and it’s going to analyze the files.

We’ve got all these clips that it’s picked up from the video footage, and it kind of gives you what it is. The first one says clouds, then flight shot, water. I’m just flying over water here, so it’s kind of limited to what it could pick up. But if you’re flying over a city or another point of interest, there’ll be a lot of other variations.

We can click on each clip and it’ll give us a preview. If you’re not quite happy with some of the clips or you want to adjust them, we can tap on clip adjustment, tap on each clip, change the length, or delete it. If we’re happy, we can select the clips we want and tap the export button.

This gives you a few different options. We can export right to our photo album — basically the Photos app on the device — and it will export each individual clip, which allows you to go in and edit them later. Or you can actually import it into the DJI editor, which we’re going to save for a different video. I’m going to tap export to system album. If I launch my Photos app on my iPad, there are the clips that it just exported.

Multiple Paths to the Final Video

DJI gives you multiple different ways in which we can process and edit the footage captured on the Avata 360. We don’t have to do any editing — we can leave it in that perspective view, and everything captured the way we saw it on the screen is how it’s going to be exported as a flat video. Or we can go in and do key framing where we control the movements, do tracking if we want to track points of interest, or do some gyro framing just by moving the device around.

This tutorial was just a basic first look at how to export and manipulate the 360 files. If this is a drone you are going to be purchasing or you’re interested in, make sure you’re subscribed, as I will be making more advanced tutorials as we go along.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Shawn from Air Photography. For more of Shawn’s articles on DroneXL, visit his author page.