DJI Mavic 3 Pro FULL ActiveTrack Flight With New Lens

Alright, so I have an idea. With the new DJI Mavic 3 Pro, you can now use Active Track, Spotlight, and Point of Interest with the 70-millimeter medium tele lens. So, in this video, we’re going to do a full flight using that medium tele camera lens to track us on our usual ride.

DJI Mavic 3 Pro ActiveTrack video

Now, this right here is the wide camera, but if we flip over to the medium tele camera, it punches in very far, so we’re going to have to back way up. It’s going to be an entirely different experience. I mean, the drone is now, I would say, ten times as far away. So, we’ll go ahead, track ourselves, hit Active Track, go, and start recording.

We’ve done this route quite a bit. This route has been done with the Skydio 2, it’s been done with this drone, the Mavic 3 Pro, except with the 24-millimeter lens. So, it’s going to be very interesting to see how this drone does now, being so much further away from me.

It’s cool that DJI gives you the ability to use these intelligent flight modes with the medium tele lens. I think there’s going to be a tough spot right here. How you doing? Yeah, like for me, I think that this is better suited for more open areas and not tight areas like this. But it’s actually doing a really good job at going around the trees. Let’s see what it does here. No way. Oh no. What? That’s insane. Go around the tree. No way.

Alright, I feel like I could just end the video right here. It bobbed and weaved around the trees using the medium tele camera. That’s insane. Alright, so usually I go down on the golf course here, but I don’t want to disrupt these guys’ game here, so we’re gonna spin around.

Alright, mic drop, right there. So obviously, you know, this has omnidirectional obstacle avoidance. Oh, and it’s going to lose me there around a little simple tree. It did all of that and lost me here. Well, we spoke too soon.

Alright, so I’m spinning us around. I didn’t really know what to expect when using the medium tele camera. I guess the one thing I thought of in the beginning is that it’s more well-suited for open areas rather than tight areas like this. Oh, I’ve gotta hit Active Track. There we are. Go.

Now, you’ve got a lot of the same options here when using the medium tele camera. You can have the drone track you, like, say, from the left here, so I can now have the drone shoot to the left side if I tap it on the controller, which is not doing… Oh, there it goes. Now it’s starting to go.

Let’s give it a challenge. We’ve got a tree here on the left side. We’ve got the drone tracking you from the left side. Let’s see what it does. The compression on the medium tele camera is my favorite.

Alright, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? It picks me back up. There you go. Now we have another tree here. This is gonna be too hard for it, I think. Oh, yup. Oh, man.”

Alright, so I would like to take full responsibility for that crash. I was just not in the right area, the right setting for using Active Track with the 70-millimeter lens. So, I’ve brought it over to a new spot. This is like the tail end of our usual test with Active Track, which I’ve got to enable here. There we are, and now we’re off.

So, I don’t want that crash to take away from this drone’s amazing move at the beginning of our flight. Because the fact that it went around all those trees and dodged and weaved with the 70-millimeter lens really is incredible.

So, honestly, I probably could have just guessed this from the start, but the 70-millimeter lens is just going to be most well-suited for an open area. Right? I mean, even here seems to be a little tight for me.

See, I want to push the drone up a bit because we’ve got a car coming. It doesn’t seem to want to catch up. It’s so funny because I think that the drone is so far away from me, and I’m so used to using the wider camera. There we are. I’m so used to using the wider camera, so I’m like, ‘Hey, come on, catch up.’ But I remember that we’re zoomed in so far.

It’s like right here, right where we have all this open road. This is the perfect use case for the 70-millimeter lens. Do you think this dog is going to chase after me? No.

So, we’ve got some cars, but again, like this here, a nice open road and open air definitely will be your best bet when tracking with the 70-millimeter lens.

Also, I’ve got to comment on the resilience of this drone. I mean, it took a pretty hard fall. I would say it was probably about 10-15 feet high; clipped some branches, clipped the tree, and then fell into the grass, ultimately.

Now that we’ve got it in its environment, in a nice open area, it’s excelling. It’s performing much better. I would even say this is a little bit too tight.

Alright, so after this car – this car went after this car – I’m gonna spin around, and we’ll see how it handles when I totally spin around. Oh, it’s getting a little bit stuck back there, but again, it’s doing a good job at keeping me in the frame and understanding that it needs to follow me. Lagging a little bit behind. See, this still is a little bit too tight for it.

Alright, let’s spin around. Continues to keep me in the frame. Let’s see what it does when I get closer to it. Like, what is it going to do here?

Oh, it’s flying between those trees. Holy crap. Alright, around those trees. Nah, alright, is this going to be greatness-times-two or a failure-times-two? Around the tree. Oh, I don’t know. There it is, it’s coming through the trees. Oh, it’s dodging, bobbing and weaving. I’m over here, I’m over here, I’m over here. Subject lost. Alright, it lost me. I’ll give it an A for effort.

It’s nice to at least have the controller in your hand, so you can reframe here. So I guess initially, kind of what I’m thinking here is, like, the drone does a really good job at trying to keep you in frame.

However, because of how tight the framing is, it’s a bit challenging for it to keep you in the frame, especially in these tight areas. I think we’ve got to get this out in a more open area, almost like the desert. We’ve really got to use this in a much wider, open area, such as some farmland, in order to truly get the best results from it.

Even right now, it seems so far away, but it’s doing a good job at understanding that I’m the subject. It almost wants to stay to the left there, and I’m not sure why. I think I mentioned earlier that the resilience of this drone is great. I mean, it took a hard fall, and it’s totally handling and operating perfectly fine. I don’t understand why it’s staying so far back. To the point where I kind of want to stop it, but I kind of want to see what it does.

We do have a car coming up here, so I’m going to have to take control here because we’ve got this car coming and I don’t want the car to hit it because it’s very low to the ground. So, we’re gonna take control, move it out of the way. We’ve got two cars coming. Let’s go and shoot the drone up, way over the tree.

Why don’t we try a tracking clip from way high like this, right? So, we’re up very high, we’ll point the camera down and then we’ll track us as a subject. Maybe this whole time, we’ve been using it a little bit wrong.

I will fly a little bit closer to us. Maybe we’ve been using it wrong. Maybe we’re supposed to put it higher up in the sky. Track us. Track us. There we are. It’s Active Track. Go.

So now, the drone is higher. We do have some trees, but I wonder if the drone is going to perform better now. Because we were trying to keep it lower to the ground, now we’re putting it up and over the trees so it can track us.

To me, personally, I don’t think that this is as dynamic as a clip. Like, to me, I’d want it lower down to the ground with me. How you doing?

Like, if you notice when I was down low, you got all that compression, right? Like you could still see me and everything that was further away. I’ve got to say that already, it’s handling much better than it was when it was down on the ground.

So maybe this is probably the better way to use it. Yeah, it’s performing much better. We do have a bunch of trees coming up here, though. So, what’s it gonna do? Continue to move forward? Is it going to pick us up? Ah, it lost us. Totally lost us.

This is a tough area here. See, now here’s like a double-edged sword, right? You guys are already looking at me. You’re just like, “Yeah, subject lost.” So, it’s kind of—oh, it’s actually right there. So, it pitched the gimbal down a little bit too far.

So, it’s like while it’s great that it’s so high and while it’s great that it’s so tight, I feel like the wide-angle nature of the camera allows it to track you better.

In fact, why don’t we stop recording here? Why don’t we flip over to our one camera, our wide camera, and do some tracking this way? Just kind of for the tail end of this video, just to get a sense of, you know, how it fares.

I mean, already right now, you can just tell that with it being so wide, it’s so much easier for the drone to keep you in the frame. And it’s so much easier for the drone to find you again. I’ve got to hit Active Track. I always do that. I wish you could choose Active Track as your default. Alright, so here we go.

So, this is like how Active Track started, right? With this wider angle camera. I mean, you can see – oh, there are some trees, go under. Nice!

See, that’s the one issue with Active Track. I feel like it makes a quick move like that and needs to come to almost a complete stop in order to regain its bearings; it doesn’t just keep moving.

It is a little bit further away now. Of course, of course, it opens up so perfectly to the point where this would be great for the 3x camera. It is going to get a little bit more congested up here with trees, so we’ll kind of power through this open area.

For me personally, I’ll give some final verdicts here. I think the 3x camera is more well-suited for open areas, and I think the 1x camera is more well-suited for congested areas.

This kind of gets the drone down in the action, whereas the 3x camera is going to be much higher and above the action. Because the focal length is so tight, if you make any quick moves and if you have a bunch of trees or a patch of trees that is going to cover you, it’s going to lose you from the frame very quickly.

You guys have seen my previous Active Track videos. You know I’ve had a lot of issues with my OneWheel here, and it’s given me a lot of issues. The motor seems to be kicking. I think I only have about 900 miles on this thing too, which is a shame.

Alright, so we’ll go to the end of this road, dodge through some of these trees, and then we’ll call it a video.

I do have to say that just looking at the framing of this and seeing how wide the camera is, it really does give the drone a much better chance at keeping you in the frame, dodging obstacles.

I think it’s great that DJI allows us to use the 70-millimeter lens for not only Point of Interest, Active Track, and Spotlight but also for hyperlapses. Right, so you’d imagine that because it’s this new lens, it’s a little bit tighter, it might only be limited to using the standard lens.

It’s kind of lagging behind now. I’ll tell you what, though, I am far away, and I’m impressed that with that green box, it still knows to track me. Oh, those branches, close!

We are flying kind of at dusk here, so the lighting is not the best, but the drone is doing a good job, you know, not crashing. What are you going to do? Are you going to lose me? No, nice! See, that was a good maneuver.

Okay, so we’ll end it there. I’m happy that the video started with a bang, right? I mean, that initial maneuver was awesome.

So alright, thank you guys so much for watching. Let me know your thoughts on Active Track here with the Mavic 3 Pro. It just continues to get better, and yeah, I’ll talk to you guys in the next one.

Peace. Thank you.