Is 360-degree footage worth the editing headache, or is it just going to eat up your entire weekend? The DJI Avata 360 is DJI’s first 360-degree drone, and we have spent about the last three months testing it, flying it, and editing footage from it. Today I want to talk about the best and the worst parts of this drone, the pros and the cons. We will cover the editing workflow, the camera quality, and everything else we have tested.
I’m Greg from Pilot Institute. We have trained over 150,000 remote pilots and reviewed dozens of drones already. Joining me for this one is Ben, our head of production. Ben actually bought an Avata 360 himself, has been flying it a lot, and has been editing a ton of footage while getting used to the whole workflow. These are all the things you should know about the Avata 360 before you buy it.
The Worst Part: Editing Is a Bigger Deal Than Most People Expect
Let’s start with the worst, the editing, because it is a bigger part of the experience than most people expect. If you stick with the camera’s default view, you can use the footage right away, just like a regular camera. But if you want to take advantage of everything a 360 camera has to offer, you are going to need to spend some time reframing your shots before exporting them. That takes real time.
Ben’s counterpoint is that the time buys you something a traditional camera drone simply cannot offer. You have full control to decide every angle and change the camera movement after you have already flown. You get extreme flexibility to grab a camera angle anywhere at any time from a single shot. I see that as a pro too. It is one of the biggest elements of this drone and a huge part of the selling package.
There is a catch, though. You still have to fly the shot. Some people think they can fly from a distance and zoom into a place the drone never went. You can’t. If you are flying over a river on the right side and you look over, you cannot turn the camera to the left side of the river if your drone was never there.
The editing does get faster with practice. When Ben started, he had only edited a little bit of 360 footage before, and certainly not to this extent. His learning curve was one to two hours to get basic-level knowledge, and after that the more advanced things came quicker as he picked up the command sets. You can also choose how much time you spend depending on how creative you want to be. You can get a straight shot out of the camera pretty quickly if you just want the kind of shot you would normally get with a drone. The creative stuff is what takes more time. You can do a couple of little keyframes, maybe a flip, or you can go crazy and pull a bunch of shots out of one clip.
Once you have done some editing, you start thinking about your shots differently because you know what you can do in post. When we first started testing, we were flying at Watson Lake next to a paddleboarder wondering what we could do with the shot later. After editing those clips, Ben went back out flying with a plan for exactly what he would do with each clip. It really helps you plan your shots and get the most out of them.
Another pro is that you can film for both horizontal and vertical video in one flight with easy cropping in post. That is a big deal if you are producing for different types of social media. For us, we may film a long-form video in horizontal but want to pull pieces out for short content, and we can crop vertical in post.
DJI Studio: Free, but With Limitations
Ben has been using DJI Studio primarily. There are other options. You can edit in Final Cut, and there is a plugin for Adobe, and we tested both a little, but he really wanted to get familiar with DJI Studio and find out what it is like. It is also free, which is a big deal. People always ask what software they should use to edit their videos. This one comes for free, and if you find it too limiting you can spend the money on something like Final Cut, which is what we use in the office alongside the occasional Adobe product.
Ben found a couple of limitations. There is no histogram, so you cannot check your luma values, and he uses that as a guide more often than not rather than eyeballing it. Copying and pasting attributes is also less flexible. There is an option to copy attributes across all the clips in the project, say if you change a color value or apply a LUT, but it is not a simple command-C, command-V onto one clip. It spreads across everything, so you have less control. Still, it is free and it gets you started.
The power you have in the edit is real, even if it takes more time. We have one clip where we fly over a river and see some people out by the water. We can orbit around them, turn the camera as we come back to get a view of the mountains in the background, and then keep editing that same flight as we go under a bridge and do some creative stuff there. All from one clip. Ben doesn’t think he could have pulled that off with a regular camera in one flight, and if he could, it would have taken several takes. That creative flexibility is just really fun to play with.
Image Quality: Unbeatable on Paper, With Some Buts
On paper, this drone sounds unbeatable. 8K at 60 frames per second. Dual 1/1.1-inch sensors, which is fairly big, almost a 1-inch sensor. 120-megapixel stills. But there are some buts.
That 8K describes the full sphere of footage. The moment you start cropping into a single angle, which is what you want to do for almost every usable shot, the image can start to get soft or a little muddy at times, especially around the edges of the frame, because you are cropping in so much.
We have a tip that might sound counterintuitive but really helps: drop the in-camera sharpening all the way down to -1 or -2. That sounds like it would make your footage worse, but it actually cleans it up, because otherwise the footage is oversharpened and overprocessed, and turning it down makes it easier to work with afterwards. This is not just this drone. It is a common technique with newer cameras that tend to oversharpen, and I personally don’t like the look. The nice thing is you can adjust the sharpening in your editing software later, so you still have that flexibility.
Something to keep in mind: this is not your Air 3S. This is not your Mini 5 Pro. The image quality is not going to look as good as those drones, and we said this when the Avata 360 came out. This is not a drone designed to replace the Air 3S. It is an action camera you are going to fly close to the ground doing crazy maneuvers. It is an FPV drone. It is not designed to be the fixed-frame real estate camera.
And again, you can alter the angle as much as you want in post, but if you didn’t fly close enough to your subject, you are not going to be able to zoom in and scale correctly. You will have to punch in more, and you will lose more image quality. It all comes down to your flight and doing the right thing from the get-go. You are going to do a couple of passes, do some testing, and figure out how close you need to be.
A big pro is the 10-bit D-Log M. That is actually unusual for 360 cameras, and it really helps in post to bring life to the footage. You shoot in D-Log M, apply a LUT, and you have more flexibility. In DJI Studio, when you add a LUT you can dial it back from 100 percent, which is not always an option in editing software, and there is a color recovery slider as well. You have a lot of options for how saturated you make the footage.
One unique feature is the tiny planet view. It is very clear and it is an angle you cannot get with other drones. But I think it is a pro as much as it is a con. That angle gets old pretty quickly. It was really cool when it first came out, and like a lot of things it got overused. Use it sparingly, maybe once per video and that is it. Ben’s suggestion is to use the tiny planet view as a starting point to push into the footage rather than sitting on it.
Tracking Might Be What This Drone Does Best
Just like other DJI drones, you can use Spotlight or ActiveTrack to lock onto a subject while you fly. But with 360 footage, you can also track during your edit, which is a pretty big deal, because tracking a subject is not always easy and doing it in post is a lot easier.
When you use ActiveTrack 360° in flight, it locks onto a subject and keeps it centered no matter which direction the drone turns. And because you are reframing from a full sphere, that same tracking carries into post-production. It is not perfect yet, don’t get us wrong, but it is probably the most advanced tracking we have seen, especially with the ability to track in post. For people who struggle with chasing a subject and predicting where it will go, this solves a lot of that.
One of the cool things is that ActiveTrack comes with a secondary window, a dual view with picture-in-picture, so you can still watch where you are flying while the drone tracks. You can swap the views so the big window shows where you are actually flying, and the small window shows what the drone is tracking, which can be directly behind you. That is exactly what Ben and Jason did when they were tracking the Wildcat, and it is such a cool tool.
Tracking in post through DJI Studio is intuitive and pretty easy. DJI Studio often recognizes subjects like people or cars and gives you the little plus sign, just like ActiveTrack on the controller. Sometimes it struggles, but a lot of the time you can manually draw a box, just like the Spotlight feature, hit go, and it tracks that subject the whole time. You still have the option to track manually as well.
The Flight Experience Is a Matter of Preference
The flight experience might be the best part for some and the worst for others. Flying FPV with the Avata 360 really comes down to personal preference. You can fly with a standard controller and joysticks, or go full FPV with the motion controller and the goggles. Well, not full FPV entirely, because you are not going to flip it around like an FPV quad, but you are steering with your wrist movements instead of the sticks. You can also use the FPV Remote Controller 3 or the RC-N3 with the goggles if you don’t like the motion controller.
There is no manual mode, so it is not real FPV in that sense. I don’t think that is what this drone was designed for. A lot of people probably wanted it, but Ben isn’t missing it personally, and FPV flyers typically don’t buy DJI drones. They build their own. That said, imagine being able to do all those tricks with a 360 camera on top. That is possible if you build your own drone, just not with this one.
A bit of a con is the power. It doesn’t seem to be as strong as it could be. It is heavier than the Avata 2 and heavier than any sub-250-gram drone, obviously. It is rated Level 5 for wind, which is up to 24 miles per hour, so it can struggle in some cases. There is certain weather Ben still won’t take it out in, like light rain. He also put it up in roughly 20 mph wind, without a barometer or windsock to confirm, and it definitely struggled from time to time. When you let go of the sticks in heavy wind, there is some drift and it takes a little bit to settle.
With all the options to fly, my favorite is honestly the DJI RC 2 without the goggles. I know that sounds weird for an FPV drone. But the RC 2 means I can clearly see the footage just like I would with my Air 3S, and I don’t need a visual observer, which means I can go out by myself.
Head tracking is available, but personally it felt a little weird, and as I mentioned in our review, it made me queasy pretty quickly. That is going to depend on you. Be careful with it, too. The drone is moving in one direction while you look around, and even though there is obstacle avoidance, you could still hit something because you are looking elsewhere. It is like driving your car and turning your head to talk to a passenger for five minutes like they do in old movies.
Obstacle Avoidance: Yes, We Crashed a Couple of Times
We want to give you our honest hands-on experience here rather than repeating the spec sheet DJI gave us. Ben crashed a couple of times. He took his daughter up to Mingus Mountain above Jerome, an area with a lot of pine trees, and was flying around with obstacle avoidance set to Bypass. Coming down into the tree line, he was trying to avoid a tree and expecting the drone to shift a little. It absolutely did not. It ran straight into that tree. He took his hands off the sticks right away so it could catch itself and adjust, but there were so many obstacles around it that it had nowhere to go. It hit a few pine needles and fell.
That speaks to the durability of this drone. We got a couple of scratches, but the lenses are still in good shape. And those lenses can be replaced with a kit, though we haven’t had to do that yet. We have put it on the ground a couple of times, and that wasn’t the only time.
With Bypass enabled, we also flew big orbits around trees and around solar panels at a school, and it handled really well and avoided everything. If it had been set to Brake in that tree line, Ben thinks it would have stopped. Because there were so many obstacles, it just didn’t know what to do. I had the same experience with the Neo 2 when I was running fast with it on Bypass. It doesn’t stop, it just bypasses, and when I was going too fast it clipped trees trying to get in front of me. Same thing with this drone. Pick it up, put it back up, and it just flies again, which is amazing. Usually when you hit something you break props or legs, and this doesn’t really have either exposed. The props are there, but they are tucked away.
If you are trying to fly through small gaps, turn obstacle avoidance off, and obviously be careful. It comes down to piloting skill. Ben was trying to fly through a doorway three and a half to four feet wide, and it wouldn’t do it on Brake or Bypass. He had to turn obstacle avoidance off to get through.
Two Lenses Means Twice the Glass Exposed to Everything
Here is an issue you can’t really avoid. With two lenses facing opposite directions, there is more glass exposed to the elements than on any other drone. That means more chances for dirt, moisture, and lens flare, and all of that shows up in your footage like a sore thumb.
That exposure also means the lenses are easier to damage. We have crashed it a couple of times, and a hard landing or even a small bump can crack a lens. You have to protect it more. It has been quite durable in our testing, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way. The replacement lens kit is fairly cheap, so buy a couple and you are good to go. The combo pack we purchased also came with a lens wipe and a little blower bulb. Wiping the lenses and clearing any dirt or debris should be on your checklist before every flight.
On lens flare: you can look around 360 degrees in post, but for the angles pointing directly at the sun, the flares are going to be pretty intense. It is not the nice star flare you sometimes want with a camera. Sometimes it just ruins the angle you are looking for. And if you are flying in person, you may not notice it because you weren’t looking at that angle until you got to the edit.
Also, because the camera is trying to expose for everything in the sphere at once, you have to be careful outdoors. You only have so much dynamic range. If you have bright sun on one side and heavy shadows on the other, the camera eventually has to average them out, and you may not get the best result everywhere. You can play with exposure in post, but keep in mind that this drone handles exposure differently than a traditional camera.
One way to keep dust and debris off those lenses is a landing pad. I cannot recommend it enough. We are in Arizona and we take off from dirt a lot. Pilot Institute sells one, and we spent a lot of time sourcing and testing it, so you can find it linked in the video description.
Night Footage and Where to Put the Strobe
A lot of you have been asking about the strobe light: where to put it and what it looks like in the footage. If you put it on top of the drone, it will show up, which makes sense because the camera records above and below the drone and stitches the body out. So we have been telling people to put it on the back.
Ben tested this in the studio. With the camera facing forward and the strobe on top, it doesn’t really get into the shot, though you will see the light flashing off the studio ceiling, which we couldn’t avoid. But rotate the camera to look behind the drone and you absolutely see the strobe, with no way to get rid of it. With the strobe on the back of the battery, you rotate the camera backward, up, and down and really can’t see it anywhere. That worked. What Ben doesn’t like is that you have to tape it over the battery’s power button, which is not ideal, but if you make it removable you can use it when you need it. You could also find a really tiny one to fit in there, but then it won’t be visible from three statute miles.
Night flying is going to be tougher with this drone, and it is probably not what it was designed for. Unless you are in a very bright city environment, I don’t know what footage you would get. ISO coverage is limited and it gets grainy. We have already had people asking why their footage is so grainy. Limit your maximum ISO when you fly at night.
Price, Batteries, and the Weight Problem
The pricing is actually really good, especially compared to the competitor we haven’t reviewed, the Antigravity, which is almost twice the price. The combo pack on the Avata 360 is somewhere around $900, so you get a lot for the money.
You will want extra batteries. With any drone, Ben never wants a single battery, and with this one, if you are really buzzing around, you are getting maybe about 20 minutes or so. For the fun he wants to have and the shots he wants to play with in post, he swaps batteries every time. He has never taken it out and flown only one.
The last bit is weight. This drone is not under 250 grams. It might look like it is, but it isn’t, which means it is not a Category 1 drone. It has the prop guards, which would help with Category 1 classification for flying over people, but this drone is not approved to fly over people. It is also bigger than it needs to be to get a waiver from the FAA without a parachute, so it will be very difficult to convince the FAA to let you fly it over people. And if you put a parachute on top, it ruins the 360-degree view. If you want to fly over people, I recommend a Mini-type drone right around 250 grams. Under 400 grams, you can apply to the FAA for a waiver to fly over people.
The weight also means you have to register the drone, which has consequences in other areas as well. The nice thing is that it has Remote ID built in, so you don’t need a module strapped to the drone somewhere risking it showing up in the 360 footage.
Who Is the Avata 360 Actually For?
After everything we have covered, you might be asking who this drone is actually for. My honest answer is that this is not a general-purpose drone, and it isn’t trying to be. It is built for people who want to be creative and get some really cool footage. If that is your use case, the tracking, the editing flexibility, and the ability to shoot once and pull multiple angles later make it the perfect tool. DJI has never released anything like this.
But if you want pixel-perfect image quality straight out of the drone, or if you are chasing true manual FPV, this is not the drone for you. And that is fine. It doesn’t have to do everything.
This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full Avata 360 review on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.
