“I didn’t know it did that”…

Every year or so for the last umpteen years I have written an article that broadly speaking, has had the same substance each time.

“Read the manual”.

It has never been an intention to chide anyone who has a problem and can’t simply be bothered to look up the documentation and see if there is a solution in an FAQ or whatever.

Instead, I try and exhort people to see what other hidden gems that piece of software or gadget can do. Whenever I sit down and simply peruse a manual, I nearly always find something I did not know, and this started way back in the early 90s with a Sharp PDA that I suddenly discovered could have its fields mapped to Microsoft Outlook and the data transferred via a serial cable, thus effectively synching my PDA and my computer.

Wonderful stuff at the time.

Today though, things are a bit different aren’t they? We no longer have “paper” manuals, just small Quick Starts with miniscule writing – and we are often lucky to get that!

Which leads me to …

Over the last few weeks I have done a number of stories on GoPro cameras and the DJI Pocket 2 gimbal camera.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up with an idea to shoot some stuff inside a light box that was lit by the recently reviewed Zhiyun Fiveray using different colours, and for a giggle, a smoke machine, using the DJI Pocket 2.

The concept was to try and mimic those superb Top Gear shots where they pan very close to the contours of a car under lighting, with smoke and other effects, and gradually tease out what this new brand or model is.

Before I started however, I thought I’d just go through a few online tutorials to see if there was anything about the Pocket 2, despite intensive playing with it, that I maybe had missed.

Ha!

Turns out there is lots, much tucked away in menus I didn’t even know existed! So my shooting has been a tad delayed, but all being well, will be all the better for it.

After that, I’ll go back and look at the GoPro Hero 10 Black, my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro, the Loupedeck CT, the Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro, DaVinci Speed Editor, Air2S drone – the list is endless. If these are par for the course, I am probably only using about 30% of capacity!

But hey, if you spend the money, you may as well extract as much as you can, right?

So what apps, gadgets or software do you have that is worth another look?

Like me, lots I’ll wager.