Dji osmo

[Andy Wilkinson]

Engadget DJI Osmo review here - they seem to like it.

DJI Osmo review: A hand-held stabilized camera worthy of its price

I should add that I've just read the first few customer reviews of it on amazon.com - seems there are issues with the app crashing/freezing.

I'm interested in this device but I will await further real owner reviews - proceed with caution!

[Dan Brockett]

Mine arrives on Thursday, will report back as soon as I get to play with it. The bummer I am reading from early adopters is that the fan makes it too loud to shoot dialogue, possibly even with plugging in a wireless mic, people are still reporting that the fan would be too loud to shoot talent even from 5'-10' away.

Second thing I am seeing repeatedly is that the compression looks worse in 4k, that if you are going to use 1080, shoot 1080. It maxes out at 60 Mbps. I am still looking forward to using it in my work and for travel/fun but I have a client who wanted to shoot a walk and talk with a quality wireless mic, not sure if that will work? We'll see. The compression looks only marginally better than Go Pro, which is pretty crappy but what do you want for $649.00?

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Marc Salvatore

I shot some video recently with the GoPro using a Feiyu-Tech GS4 mounted on a monopod.

Looks great, I am still amazed how they manage to get that videoquality out of that small box. I also have the same handheld gimbal, not perfect but fits in the smallest backpack and you can use it in public places without anyone noticing.

[Murray Christian]

Originally Posted by Dan Brockett

Second thing I am seeing repeatedly is that the compression looks worse in 4k, that if you are going to use 1080, shoot 1080. It maxes out at 60 Mbps. ...The compression looks only marginally better than Go Pro, which is pretty crappy but what do you want for $649.00?

That wouldn't hold for the higher end cameras you can get, I assume, would it? Or do they all have the same data pathway to storage?

[Nate Haustein]

Here's a quick test with the OSMO and the RodeLink wireless lav. Nothing special, just hooked it up and hit record. I didn't find the fan to be much of a problem (outdoors at least). Raw out of the camera.

OSMO RodeLink Test - YouTube

[Dan Brockett]

My Osmo arrived on Friday. Worst out of box experience I have ever had with a new piece of gear. Instructions are limited, confusing, make little sense. After charging the battery overnight, I tried to initialize and link to my iPhone, Osmo kept just shutting down. The phone bracket basically won't hold my iPhone with the case on it, I am going to have to ditch my battery case when I use the iPhone with the Osmo because if I don't, the iPhone is basically falling out of the bracket on the Osmo. Even when the Osmo did power up, I only saw picture on my phone for perhaps 1-2 seconds, then the Osmo would power down like the battery was dead, so I am not even sure if it ever initialized? Battery charged all weekend as I was out doing family stuff, going to try it again tomorrow.

If it doesn't start behaving this morning when I have an hour or two to mess with it, it's getting shipped back to B&H for a refund. Not a good experience at all, DJI needs some lessons from the other manufacturers and Apple on how to create a positive out of box experience for their customers. Too bad, I was pretty hyped to fall in love with the Osmo but now, I am shipping it back unless it behaves.

[Andy Wilkinson]

Sorry to read of your bad experience but this kind of thing/reading of some other experiences with them is one of the reasons I steered away.

Sure, I got pretty interested in the DJI Osmo when it was announced (and we are starting to see some "OKish footage" from it)... but by the time you've bought the X5 camera (and even that will be limited to 60Mbps) it's serious money that can be spent in other ways to getting professional grade gimbal shots - in my view.

I decided to go a different route. My Letus Helix Jr Aluminium arrived this morning, along with the Pelican case I had bought with it and a few extras. Nice instruction handbook inside, plus good resources on the web for set-up. What a beautifully designed, well thought out and superbly engineered piece of kit.

Can't wait to fly my Canon C100 and new Sony FS5 on it - when the latter arrives - soon I hope!

I wanted the flexibility to be able to fly decent cams and glass of my choice, not be limited to a "locked-in DJI camera only" type of choice. Sure, others will love the simplicity and very small form factor - and I understand that. Time will tell if I made the right choice - but right now I feel I did for the applications I'm going to use it for.

Not wishing to hijack this thread, just reminding people thinking of allocating the money required for the Osmo and better X5 cam that there are some good alternative choices out there, made by very well respected companies that pride themselves on customer service.

[Kyle Root]

Two of my second shooters have gotten theirs. One was doing a commercial project this weekend with it. Will have to call him later today to get his experiences. The other shot a wedding in Antigua last weekend and I haven't heard how his experience was with the Osmo, but will check today as well.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Andy Wilkinson

Not wishing to hijack this thread, just reminding people thinking of allocating the money required for the Osmo and better X5 cam that there are some good alternative choices out there, made by very well respected companies that pride themselves on customer service.

The osmo x3 is actually quite cheap (cost the same as a nebula 4000) considering it includes a 4K camera, once you go the x5 route and especially for the raw version then I agree there might be more interesting options depending on what you want to achieve but there is none that has the same small size, a big advantage for videographers that need to travel light. Who know the x5 might surprise us all.

[Robin Davies-Rollinson]

Well, after a glowing report on the Osmo last week, I seem to have come across a problem:
After powering the unit up today, I had two steady green lights either side of the handle base.
The wifi connection was good from the iphone to the unit, able to control gimbal movements etc, just no picture from camera!
Besides that, after opening the camera dialogue page, there was nothing that I could do there to change settings. Last week, the camera was shooting in PAL, today it had reverted to NTSC with no way of altering it. In fact, the base controller didn't want to recognise a camera at all, even though as I said, I could operate the gimbal from the phone.
It's probably too early for there to be any public help posts yet, but I have contacted DJI Support EU.
Time will tell...

[Josh Bass]

can anyone tell me if the mp4 and mov options ate different quality/bitrate etc. or just different wrappers for NLE convenience? nothing in the manual about one vs the other, nothing in Google search results either. thanks.

[Dan Brockett]

After a few hours of troubleshooting, found the source of my Osmo's erratic behavior. Upon booting it up, I would see picture on my iPhone, then it would cut out, then it would come back. I removed the gimbal head from the handle and lo and behold, there was a small piece of lint or paper in the area of the handle where the gimbal screws into it. There are small circuit boards that allow the handle to talk to the gimbal and vice versa, and evidently the small piece of lint/paper was blocking the transmission between the two. I removed the small piece of paper and now it behaves fine. Robin, have you removed the gimbal from the handle to check for this?

Images, to me, look about the same as the GoPro, not great but usable for a few seconds here and there. The fan is on most of the time and is pretty noisy, agreed. This will not be a dialog camera. I shot 1080 24p, it looks good but when I switched to 4k, I too see these microjitters when playing images back from the memory card on my late 2012 i7 iMac. I agree, the 4k images actually look worse than just shooting 1080 for 1080 use, at least so far, they seem noisier and more compressed. I ran out of time to really put this thing through it's paces but it seems like a fun toy at this point, that I will occasionally use for work. Not a pro piece of gear, relatively fragile, but a consumer level piece of gear that can sometimes be leveraged for pro work. I had to calibrate the horizon, it was definitely biased toward the left.

I have to say, after playing with this, if I had it to do over again, I would consider a Go Pro Hero Silver and one of the newer, better gimbals as just as good, possibly better, and definitely more versatile. The sound is terrible on this, the images, to me look the same as a modern Go Pro and the integration that I thought would be so cool is okay but not much better than Go Pro. Plus, if you are familiar with Go Pros, there is a familiarity there that this lacks. Seeing the image on your phone is good but their silly phone bracket will not hold my iPhone with the battery case on it, it falls out and either way I mount the iPhone, the bracket wants to hit the power button so it accidentally shut down my phone several times. The software is okay, but nothing great, needs some refinement. So my iPhone 5S without the battery pack will not last very long while using their app, perhaps 45 minutes. The phone bracket is only designed for THIN smartphones, so if you have much of a protective case or a battery case, forget it, you are going to have to strip your phone to use it with this thing.

I will probably keep this but may end up buying a Go Pro Hero Silver anyway as for certain things, this will be better but for other things, the Go Pro will still be superior. I bought the two lens filter DJI setup, one UV and one ND (it didn't say what ND level the filter is.) I tried it outside and it works okay but I wish they made Vari NDs in this tiny size. This helps but in bright mid-day sun, this is still not enough ND to operate at ISO 100, 1/50th shutter, I still ended up having to put the camera at something like 1/320th shutter, which I don't like. Out of a score of 1-5 stars, I give the Osmo 3 stars. It's nicely engineered, the integration is cool, using a smartphone as a control screen is clever but overall, this definitely feels like V 1.0, it needs refinement, the fan noise is obnoxious and ever present, as usual, audio is a distant afterthought, I don't even think you could use a wireless mic unless the talent was about 15-20' from camera. Even for bloggers, the sound sucks, you would have to use a wireless or 2nd system sound. The phone bracket is ill conceived, they should have made the phone depth variable by spring loading the support pads on the back of the phone so thin phones wouldn't flop around and thick phones or phones with battery cases could be used. The gimbal itself functions well, the motion is smooth and usable although perhaps it is just me but it will take a while to get the hang of smoothly keeping moving subjects in frame and framed correctly, still learning how to do that but I have only used it once and the only moving subject I had was my cat following me around so perhaps something larger like a person would be easier?

If you are thinking about getting one, just be aware of all of the limitations. It's definitely not the be-all, end-all in small gimbals, but it is quick to setup and deploy at half of the cost of a Ronin-M and it includes the camera. Picture is just okay, compression is pretty severe and audio is lousy. More feedback as I get some time later this week to really put this through it's paces. Editing hell this week through Wed, then a two day writing gig. I really need a full day to see all of the things this can do.

[Nate Haustein]

Loving this thing. Stuck it out the window of a taxi today and got a bunch of great city shots for the conference I'm shooting. Definitely an outdoor tool, and it could really use some picture controls, but really it's just stupid easy to get moving shots. Pulled this from the UHD video and applied a quick grade.