Halifax Hottest Day Ever! with the DJI Mavic Mini 3 Pro

Is this the best drone if you want to be a drone pilot?

For drone filming I found the 1080HD video to be excellent but in reality due to the smaller sensor than our larger aircraft I think I’d be recommending using the 4k option for any quality shoots. This gives very pleasing results even when filmed in a Normal colour profile however there is an option to film in D-Cinelike to give you more control of the image. The camera also gives you the option also to film in either H264 or H265 in either MOV or MP4 and with a fairly good histogram you can easily get the exposure pretty much spot on, even on an iPad mini or phone if you use these.

One thing essential on this aircraft is the use of ND filters for drone filming. Its got a great wide f-stop of 1.7 but as there is no iris control you have to add ND filters especially when shooting video. And because its such a wide open lens I found using a ND32 to be pretty good at getting me to the 180 degree rule or in simple terms double the frame rate. Shutter at 50, frame rate 25fps and ISO 100.

Obviously at night you take the ND filter off to get as much light into the camera as you can which I’m sure will achieve some great results but I’ll leave that for another test day.

Battery wise I found it a little  little disappointing.

As a professional drone pilot I always , always take off on a full battery and I usually bring it in to land when the battery goes down to 30%. This stops the batteries discharging too much keeping them in a good state and it also means you’ll have enough power to get you back to your home point. Nothing worse than dropping out of the sky on a dead battery as they soon discharge very quick after the 20-10% level.

So why disappointing, well unless I have duff batteries which I don’t think I have, I’m only getting 20 minutes flight time tops at my rates which we just spoke about. Today it was just 16 minutes in the hot weather with no wind, which was rather poor however even with this flight time there’s plenty of time to complete most filming missions. Just take plenty of spare batteries and you’ll have no issues.As a drone pilot you can never have too many batteries . They even charge from my cars USB outputs so really easy to charge on the go, if not just a little slow. Its also super quiet drone when it’s flown and flys very very well and super stable.

This is a short edit of the footage taken this morning to give you an idea of the quality of the lens and sensor, best played in the 4k option.

The still images are Raw files mainly shot as 48mp images and then processed through light room to give them a little tweak and turn them into Jpegs.

Our website will have reduced the files down to make them more user friendly on our website but if anyone would like a sample image please feel free to email info@halovue.co.uk or DM through social media and I’ll send a file over.

In my opinion as a professional drone pilot it is excellent for what it can achieve, for the price of the drone and the size of the drone and will be used as a get out of jail drone, metaphorically speaking where the larger drones are not an option without an OSC.

 Its rare we need this size of mini drone but its always good to have it in a camera bag just incase an amazing photo opportunity occurs whilst out and about.

A perfect first aircraft for new drone pilots looking to get into the business and professionals too. I love it!

Check out the full DJI Mavic Mini 3 pro spec at DJI.

Please not all images and video are protected under copyright and may not be copied or used without exception unless prior agreement by Philip Fearnley and Halo Vue Aerial Photography.

www.halovue.co.uk