How to use Active Track on Ronin-S | Force Mobile and Active Track Tutorial

Wouldn't it be nice to have somebody who helps you to record footage where you're talking to the camera and it's hard to position yourself right in the middle of the frame all the time? What if I tell you that this scene here is done only by myself with the help of the Ronin-S and its new firmware where DJI introduced ActiveTrack 3.0 for it? What up guys, welcome back to yet another episode, my name is EddyBear and today we're going to talk about the newly released DJI Ronin-S firmware update. So it looks like Christmas came early this year cause DJI surprised us with a new firmware update where the Ronin-S pretty much receives every feature from the Ronin-SC without the need to buy any upgrades. In today's video I will not only show you how you can use the ActiveTrack 3.0 Enforce Mobile feature on the Ronin-S, I will also give you some pro tips how you can balance the gimbal cause with the added weight it's way heavier to balance and it will definitely take you some trial and error to get the best out of these new features. Alright so let me give you a quick rundown of today's setup. So here on the top we have the iPhone 11 Pro, a Canon EOS R with a 16-35mm lens on top of it. Now let's talk about how ActiveTrack 3.0 works within the Ronin-S. So you pretty much use also your phone for all the tracking activity like you do it with the Ronin-SC. The only difference is that you now can put a way higher payload on the Ronin-S instead of the Ronin-SC but you're also missing the lock access feature that the Ronin-SC offers you. In order for the tracking to work your phone's camera needs to have pretty much the same view field like your camera does. So if you're using a telephoto lens on your camera it will not work as good as if you're using a wide angle lens. So I pretty much tried in this scene here to align the field of view from my phone with the one from the Canon EOS R. So here's my first pro tip how you need to align your equipment in order to have a centered image. So as you can see here I aligned the camera from the iPhone here on the bottom so it's closer to the sensor from the Canon EOS R. If I have the camera of the iPhone up here I have the issue that the difference between the two sensors is too wide and I will not be able to align the image properly. You can see in this shot that ActiveTrack 3.0 is doing a pretty good job keeping me in the middle of the frame but the further I walk away the more headspace I gain and there's a pretty good reason why this is the case. If you take a look at the phone screen you will notice that the tracking area is not only limited to my head it's also extended to the upper body part here. So this means the further I walk away this part will stay in the middle of the frame so it will not adjust the height of the camera so much but the closer I get the more it will rise the camera over time. It also works the other way around if I go down to the bottom or to the floor you can see that the camera adjusts accordingly. Also if I get back up again it does a flawless job tracking me. But as you can see also the movement is pretty slow and what if you want to record high-paced movement well there is also a fast option but there is a big downside to it. Now I switched ActiveTrack into fast mode unfortunately depending on your setup and how well your gimbal is calibrated there can be a certain downside to it. So if I'm moving fast into a direction the camera will estimate my movement and will overshoot my position and will then slightly drift back to the point where I'm standing to center me. Also if I move into the other direction the camera will track me but at a certain point it will stop and sometimes it's overshooting and it then drifts back to me so I will be back in the center of the frame. This can be noticeable but only if you have a rapid stop and sometimes it can be seen sometimes not but depending on your scene if you have a lot of movement in your scene your viewer will not be able to notice this shift. By now DJI developed the ActiveTrack capabilities to a certain point where the software is able to predict where an object is leaving the scene and where it could re-enter it. So meaning if I'm moving around and even if I'm running through the room ActiveTrack is still able to track me even though I'm partially leaving the scene and the moment I'm leaving the frame the camera is still able to track me and even the littlest things are enough for the camera to track me. The moment I'm leaving completely the frame you can see that the camera is starting to look for the object to track but the moment I re-enter the scene it will automatically re-engage in tracking me. What I don't like about the Ronin-S and ActiveTrack combination is the way how it adds extra weight on top of your camera. If you're trying to balance your camera it will be harder to achieve the right balance cause your phone is on top of the camera and you cannot turn the camera all the way around. So this means you will not have the sweet spot where the balance test will give you an excellent rating. So basically what you need to do is to guess the right position for your gimbal and then run a balance test and then hope that it will tell you that everything is excellent. Once you successfully completed the balance test you also need to auto-tune the motor settings cause with the additional weight you also need stiffer motors and more power so they stay in line. Another newly added feature is Force Mobile. This feature adds the possibility for another user to remotely control all the movements of your gimbal. As you can see in the basic settings it's very responsive and if you're trying to nail this by hand I guess even if you have the steadiest hands you will have a hard time to get smooth movements. You also can enable the smoothening options but I would rather mount the phone onto a tripod and do all the movements through a fluid head instead of doing it by hand. If we consider all the new features that get into the Ronin-S through firmware updates and all the new cameras that receive still support for the Ronin-S you can say that DJI is doing a pretty good job keeping the Ronin-S up to date. Even though a lot of people are starting to ask in whether there will be a Ronin-S2 or a Ronin-S Pro I mean come on they still need to save some nice features for their future products and just imagine your Ronin would be able to acquire an HDMI signal and you could connect your phone to the Ronin so the phone could do all the active track features from a remote position. Wouldn't that be something? Alright so what is your opinion about the newest firmware update for the DJI Ronin-S? Have you guys been waiting for these features or don't you even care anymore because you already got yourself a Ronin-SC? Let me know down in the comments what you think about the newest firmware and also if you have any questions feel free to hit me up anytime and with that said thanks for watching don't forget to like, share, subscribe and I see you in the next one. Peace!