All right, so you've chosen your country, you've made sure that you can fly your drone there, you know how to get those fantastic shots. So now we're getting into the actual pre planning and the more sort of management side of things. So, obviously, when you're taking your drone out, you want to make sure that the battery is fully charged. Hopefully, it's a pretty obvious thing for most people. If you've got multiple batteries, make sure they're charged the night before. One thing I will say is that when it comes to firmware updates, you know, I would recommend before you actually leave the country, you know, maybe a week or so before, make sure that your batteries, your drone, your phone, all those sorts of things that interact with it, have the latest firmware updates, and that you're happy with the status of that and what it is.

Maybe go up and fly it once or so just to make sure that there's no problems before you actually leave the country. Once you do leave the country though. I'd recommend not updating anything. Now, while it hasn't been a huge sort of issue for me or a lot of other people that I've talked to in the past, you know, there is always that potential that you're overseas updated firmware comes out and you try and update it. Maybe it might break the actual controller or the drone, or maybe there's some problems, you need to hook it up to a computer and do some diagnostics on it, send it back or something like that. It's a very sort of, not risky process.

But while you're overseas, I would just recommend not doing any firmware updates until you get back home, you know, you've got the drone, you're on your trip for a very specific reason of taking awesome drone shots. If something bad happens to that update process, or maybe the battery dies out halfway through or you know, lots of things can go wrong. It's not very likely, but you know, I prefer to just not even take the chance at all. Usually it comes up saying Do you want to update and you just press no do it later or something like that. Just started give you that peace of mind that your drawing is stable and won't have any issues. Now, before you actually go to the place and go to the area that you want to actually film The night before, you want to make sure as I said, all your batteries are on charge, you want to make sure your phones on charge nor stable and all that sort of stuff.

If you've got some extra battery banks for your phone itself, you might take that along, maybe bring that with you on the trip itself. Usually when you're, you know, controlling your drone, you'll have maybe an iPad or a phone or something in the actual controller. These DJI ones do actually charge the phone at the same time. But do remember that when you're traveling out and about I find that we use our phones quite a lot more you know, you're maybe using the GPS to see where it is you're going around the place you don't know maybe you're looking at train times or bus times or you know, calling for an Uber or something like that. Looking up shops or all these sorts of things. I find that we go through our phone batteries, quite A lot quicker when we're overseas.

So that combined with the fact that you'll be using it to actually fly your drone as well, maybe you know, have a think about investing in one of those battery banks for your phone so that you can have that on charge maybe before or after you do your actual flying so that, you know, the tourism and the actual vacationing part of it before and after your drone flight is still not too bad itself. Now the other thing is the actual SD card for the drone. So for the drones here, you've got the micro SD cards. Now these need to be pretty decently big. You should know about this before you leave, but if it's not too big, you might want to get sort of two or so the other thing you need to do the day before is just make sure that there is actually enough room on it.

You know, it might be a 512 gig microSD card or something ridiculously big like that, but you might have got a whole bunch of data clogged up in it and all that sort of stuff. So when you go out to fly, you don't have any room to take your actual videos. So just sort of have a quick look at it and make sure there's either, you know, total free space on there, or if there's stuff on there that you do want, just take it off, put it onto a hard drive or something like that. So that when you actually go out there, you've got enough sort of room on your memory card to take all the videos and pictures that you want. So as a quick recap, and just to make sure that on the day, you know, you're not thinking of 1000 different things I find it's also good to just have a small checklist of things when you're going out just to make sure you don't forget anything.

So on this checklist, you might do things like check your drone batteries are all charged, check that your phone is all charged, check that you have your phone battery bank, if that's something you want, check to make sure that you not only have your micro SD card or your SD card and that it's in your journal in your bag with you. A lot of people can forget them. You know you Go out, you take some great shots, you come home, you take it out, you put it in your laptop or something like that to transfer all the data over and then you go out the next day and the card is still in your laptop and you forgotten it and you can't take the next day shot. So have it on your checklist. Always check that your memory card or memory cards are they're sometimes you might need bigger ones, I think with the maverick Pro, the record right for about 4k footage is about 500 meg, per minute.

For the Mavic two Pro, it's actually a lot more, it's about 800 megabytes per minute. So you know, if you want to go up there and you know, maybe you've got two or three of these batteries and you're flying for maybe an hour and an hour and a half, that's you know, quite a lot of storage that you're actually going to need so always make sure you've got enough room. And finally, you just want to make sure as I said that you don't do those firmware updates while you're overseas. So it is good to have that sort of change. list with those top bullet points on there decide that when you're, you know, rushing out the door or leaving the door in a place you don't know with all these things that you're trying to keep track of, you know which bus Do you have to catch?

Which train? Do you have to catch? You know, to get to your location? How do you get there, when do you have to leave all that sort of stuff, it's very easy to forget, you know, just a small thing like an SD card or maybe you know, your extra batteries that are on the charger in the other room or something like that. So I find having a checklist is just a really fantastic way of making sure that you don't forget anything. So will now be going on to the next part of the course which is actually the day of the actual flight and how to sort of manage things while you're actually there on the scene.