DJI Neo Drone – Tracking With A Controller Using “Focus Track”

DJI Neo Focus Track: A Comprehensive Guide

Good day, folks! Shawn here from Air Photography. A couple of days ago, I uploaded a video demonstrating the DJI Neo following me on a bike. The DJI Neo does an excellent job at tracking; it’s super easy to deploy. Press a button, and it will automatically start tracking you. The movements are very smooth, and it does a good job staying away from obstacles because, as long as you’re avoiding obstacles, for the most part, it will as well.

Controller Compatibility

I’ve had a couple of questions about whether you can track while using the controller, and indeed you can. In fact, when using the controller connected to the Neo, such as the DJI RC2, RC-N3, or RC-N2, it essentially has the full Focus Track tools that we have on other drones like the Mavic 3 Series, Air 3, and Mini 4 Pro. While they’re not as advanced and don’t have all the capabilities and features of those other drones, it actually works quite well.

Demonstration Setup

In this video, I’m going to demonstrate how Focus Track works with the DJI Neo, and I’ll be using the DJI RC2. I’m going to put the drone up here and switch over to a screen recording so I can demonstrate it. I apologize in advance for the drone noise you’ll hear during the demonstration.

Subject Scanning

The first thing I want to show you is how to turn on subject scanning. With subject scanning, it’s going to look for trackable objects and put a plus sign on them so you can easily select them to track. Let’s go over to settings, and if we go to control, you can see we have an option there for subject scanning. I’m going to toggle that on, and you can see right away it’s put a plus sign in front of me.

Spotlight Mode

I can click on that plus sign, and you can see it’s now tracking me. If I move to the side, it’s essentially in Spotlight mode, which is the default option when you first launch it. You can stop selecting by pressing the X, which will stop it from tracking. The other way is just by drawing a box around yourself. You can see it’s now locked onto me again in Spotlight mode.

Point of Interest

The other thing we can do is a Point of Interest. When I click on it, we get some new tools. We have speed controls, can go back and forth depending on what direction we want it to move, and then we can hit go. Now the drone is just going to rotate around us while it’s flying. We can speed it up, bring it in closer, or pull it farther back away from us.

Active Track

Active Track is essentially the same as the tracking we’ve already seen. The drone will now follow and track me. The nice thing is I can change the distance; you can see I’ve pulled back on the stick, which will make it follow me from a further distance.

Tracking Objects

One last interesting thing about using the controller with the Neo and tracking: when using it in autonomous mode and launching it from the palm of your hand, it has to lock onto you. If it can’t find a human, it won’t work. But with Spotlight, you can actually lock onto objects and still use that tracking. I haven’t tried it with a car or anything fast-moving, as it doesn’t fly terribly fast, but if you’re just wanting to capture some nice, interesting cinematic b-roll shots, it works fantastically.

As you can see, when using the controller, we have full access to Focus Track, including Active Track, Point of Interest, and Spotlight. What a powerful tool the Neo is! Whether you’re flying it autonomously without a controller, just launching it from the palm of your hand, you can get all these incredible shots. You don’t have to have a lot of skill or experience with drones to still get some nice footage. On top of that, you can fly with a controller if you want more precision, or even fly with goggles and an FPV controller if you want a completely immersive flight.

That is Focus Track on the DJI Neo. I want to thank you for taking the time to watch this video. Give it a thumbs up if you found it had value.

Thanks a lot for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one!