We have all seen those incredible images and video captured by what appears to have been a camera floating in mid-air, circling the subjects as they trek through some amazing country, or drive down the highway on an adventure. The proliferation of affordable drones within the budget of hobbyists has also meant a rise in this sort of footage on YouTube and other platforms. Maybe you are reading this very post because you have a new hobbyist drone like the DJI Phantom series and you are interested in getting better video out of it.
Ben Schmanke, from the YouTube channel authen.tech and drone pilot of four years, brings us 5 tips for capturing better video footage from our drones. To start, Schmanke suggests taking advantage of one of the many advanced cinematic features that your drone likely has built into it. Features like locking onto a subject and orbiting it, or locking onto a point and following slowly across a field. These tools are designed specifically to make capturing those sort of epic aerial shots easier for inexperienced and intermediate pilots.
Another really important tip according to Schmanke is to make sure to manually set your video recording settings. The exposure and those settings will be different in every situation you shoot in, but Schmanke recommends that you routinely change the camera to a neutral picture style to allow for more room to post-process the video.
On a side note, if you are not planning to spend much time processing the video, a standard picture style is best as it will look better straight out of the camera and require less of your attention in post-processing.
Some other tips that get covered include a suggestion that you fly in sport mode (which causes the drone to fly fast), and that you then record the video at 60fps or 120fps in order to get some silky smooth slow motion, and that you utilize a VR headset, which will best equip you to fly the drone through its camera.
These tips, as well as some other great tidbits shared throughout Schmanke’s video, should help you improve your drone piloting skills, and raise the quality of your aerial drone footage.
