That ive learned over many years of flying drones, which has helped me take my videos from this. To this now, in my hand, is the mini 3 pro, but these tips will work for any drone. It does not matter what drone you are flying. These tips will improve your videos now before i get into them 12 tips. I want to take 30 seconds to tell you about todays sponsor who can actually help you turn them awesome video clips into some side income, and that is wire stock. Now wirestock helps creators and drone pilots, like you, sell photos and videos online easily. The benefits of wire stock are that they distribute your videos and photos to all major marketplaces from one single account. You can upload your best clips, which takes seconds and they take care of the rest. They offer high royalty rates and discoverability, which is important as you want people to be able to find your content, you can build a beautiful portfolio and share and showcase your content through that portfolio. All payments are also sent to one single account and trackable on one dashboard in terms of commission, its 15 of paid royalties. They only make money when you do so a big thank you to wirestop for sponsoring this video. If you want to try out their platform theres a link in the description down below now, with all that out of the way lets talk about the first step that is going to level up your drone videos record at the right time of day recording at the Right time of day is super important if you want cinematic videos, because its all to do with where the sun is at in the sky.

The worst time of day you can record is in the middle of the day when the sun is highest in the sky. Everything will be lit, really harsh everything will look very flat, and i find it very hard to expose, for the best time of day to record is what we call golden are thats directly after sunrise or directly before sunset. Everything will be. Let really soft youll have a really nice lighting and everything will look absolutely beautiful if you cant record at golden r, i find anytime early in the morning or any time later in the evening will result in really nice cinematic videos. Now, if you want the most beautiful videos possible, you want to record when theres a beautiful sunrise or beautiful sunset, with lots of color in the sky. But how do you predict a nice sunset? Well, over the years, ive tried many apps sky candy, album glow to name a few, and these claim to be able to protect if theres going to be a nice sunset. However, in my experience i find theyre usually wrong. If it says theres going to be a nice sunset, there usually isnt and if it says there isnt going to be a nice sunset. There usually is so over the years. Ive kind of come up with my own little method for predicting a colorful sunset and it seems to work fairly well. The first thing i do is i check the weather forecast around the time of sunset, so 9, 10 11 oclock at night during summer for the area youre going to be recording.

You want the weather app to say that theres going to be a nice sunny forecast. The next thing you want to do is you want to check how much clouds are going to be in the sky, so i use an app called clear outside and it shows you the lower medium and upper level clouds in a certain area. You want to make sure theres not very many to no lower or medium level clouds. It doesnt really matter how many clouds are showing for high. But if it says theres going to be a lot of clouds for low, then youre, probably not going to be able to see that sunset so make sure that the lower a medium atmosphere or medium levels have little to no cloud. And if youve got a combination of sunny weather during the time of sunset and little to no cloud, then ive usually find you get a nice sunset, one, consistent movement. This is the biggest mistake. I see. New drone pilots make ive, had loads of friends, go and buy a drone theyre going to record some videos, put some music in it, create a little edit and send it to me and ask my opinion and the one thing i see them do all the time Is its one long, video, with no cuts and loads of drone movements happening throughout that video, so theyre, maybe flying forward then all of a sudden they fly left to right. Then they start waving along following a river, and this is just not very cinematic.

You want to pick one drone movement. One consistent drum movement pair, shot. Think, okay for this one clip im going to do a push forward and just keep that one consistent movement then maybe find a new angle or new perspective and think okay im going to do an orbit put your thumbs in that position start the orbit hit record And just keep your thumbs in that position: do not change direction and have a nice smooth orbit so keep that kind of tagline in mind when youre out flying one movement pair, shot, lock exposure or use manual settings. So if youre, not using manual settings and not logging, your exposure and your camera isnt, auto youll notice, a few things happen that can ruin the cinematic feel of your videos. The first thing that can happen is the white balance: can change so the temperature of your video can change from color to warmer as youre recording your clip. The other thing that can happen is the exposure can change, so the image can get brighter or darker, as youre recording now theres two ways to stop this happening. The first is to lock exposure. The way you can do this is you can press the c2 button on your controller, if its programmed to do so or you can press and hold on the screen to lock your exposure. The other way you can stop this happening is to use manual, video settings and if you manually program your camera settings and then these will not change while youre recording – and you will not get these chefs and exposure and color on your video clips as youre recording Giving you much more cinematic videos, get unique perspectives and, more importantly, get perspectives which are only possible with a flying camera such as a drone one of the biggest mistakes i made as a beginner was.

I got lots of nice videos, but they were low to the ground. They were over land and you could have probably got the same videos with a camera and a slider. If you looked at the video you, maybe wouldnt even have known that they came from a drone one of the biggest advantages of a flying camera such as a drone, as we can put them in perspectives and areas. You cant normally put a traditional camera, so get perspectives. People are not used to seeing and on that note, try different angles. We can make mistakes, sometimes as drone pilots, where we think were getting lots of different types of videos, but then come back and they all look the same so ill. Give you an example. We maybe find an angle or perspective we like of a subject, but we do different drone moves, so we do a rise up. We do an orbit, we do a pull back, but we do all them moves looking at an object from the same perspective, the same way off the ground now when were playing, these will feel like lots of really different and unique videos, but when we come back Theyre all of the same perspective and really theyre, not that unique at all so make sure whenever youre out recording your videos that you are continually changing angles and perspectives, use color grading now dont worry, i know. Color grading can be scary as a beginner and im, not talking about d log or even cine, like color grading.

Here, im talking about subtle, color grading, which you can use on the normal color profile to either bring the image closer to what you see with your eye or make it pop. So the clip were looking at is a orange sunset background of muslim temple in northern ireland. Firstly, i brought the black stein to make the temple itself much more like a silhouette, and then i increased the saturation just a little bit to make the sky more orange. Look at the difference the before and after is on this clip. It makes a massive difference and those were two minor tweaks, wind and dweller. This point requires discipline, but i promise you it will make the biggest difference to the cinematic feel and quality of your video clips and just how good your video clips look in general. I made this mistake all the time as a beginner and i still make it every now and then i have to be honest, and that is sometimes you can go to a location when you get there its a gray, dull rubbish looking day, the weathers bad. But you think, when you record your video clips with your drone, whenever you get back to the computer, theyll magically look better or you may think youll do some color grade and youll boost the saturation and youll make them look amazing. The reality is the drone. Just sees what you see if its a gray dull, boring day, thats, probably going to be mimicked in your video clips, if its not a specific event that you need to record at a specific time, wait until you get a nice sunny day or the weathers nice To go out recording your video clips wind too, you can get to a location sometimes and its super windy and your drone might be fine flying in the air, but getting cinematic a video clips is a different story altogether.

I find when flying my drone in wind. Even though the drone can handle okay, theres, usually a bit of bumpiness in the video itself, and i find that, if youre trying to do smooth subtle movements and its windy its hard to do that when it is that windy. So again, preference is to fly your drone whenever the wind is as little as possible. Now, sometimes no matter how hard you try, you still get shaky video you maybe werent smooth enough on the controller. You maybe did go flying in the wind, and in these cases you need to stabilize your video in post. If youve come back and youve got a really nice video clip, but its slightly shaky dont throw it away, you can stabilize it using two methods. The first method is using warp, stabilizer and premiere pro. This is really good if youve only got a small amount of movement in your clip, and you want to smooth that out its also really easy to do. This simply drag the warp stabilizer effect onto your clip. In premiere pro that analyze, your clip and after a few minutes, it will have stabilized your video now in some cases this is just not good enough. It can stabilize all the motion in your clip heres an example of a hyperlapse. I dont have a sunset and for some reason, the sunset drifted off center. Now to stabilize this. I used a stabilized motion effect in after effects to do this.

You put your clip in the timeline. You select the stabilize motion effect. You draw a box around the area, you want to track, and then you put an x marker on the subject. You want to track and make the center of your video you let it analyze your clip and then after effects will make the area you place. The x, the center of your video clip and stabilize everything around it, be deliberate with each shot. So tell me: if you can relate to this, you go out. You put your drone up in the air, you just hit record and you start recording lots of stuff. You come back home and you have hundreds of video clips, but only two or three of them are actually usable. I used to do this all the time and its an incredibly inefficient way of filming subjects with your drone. You want to be deliberate with each shot. It saves so much of your battery. It gives you more flying time to get better shots in general. That means youre not filling your video card with clips that youre not actually going to use. Think, okay for this angle, im going to do a push forward. Then im going to do an orbit round the subject which is going to bring me over here then im going to move to top down im going to do a top down. Then, once ive done that im going to start a pullback gimbal up and it just means whenever you bring the drum back whenever you come home, you have lots of video clips lots of high quality and cinematic video clips and all of them are usable and you Dont spend hours watching through each one and deleting the majority of them so be deliberate with each video clap record longer than you think you need.

I cant tell you the amount of times ive made this mistake. Ive, come home, ive been watching a video clip and i think thats absolutely perfect, absolutely beautiful, but its only like three seconds long, and that is just not enough. If youre putting a cinematic sequence together, whenever youre flying in your recording in your head, you feel like youve, recorded much more than you actually have whenever you come back home and look at the video clip its just too short. So over the years ive learned to record much longer than i think i need, because you can always trim a long clip down, but you cant extend a short clap out fly close to objects. If you want the ultimate cinematic video clip possible, then i recommend you fly close to the objects. Look at this example here. Look how close the leaves are to the drone im flying in a tight space. Just look how cinematic it looks now if youre going to do this, i have a couple of tips. Firstly, if youre flying close to a clef face, youre going to be fine with obstacle vines turn on, but if youre flying in tight spaces such as this example here, youre probably going to have to turn it off, and this is for a few reasons. If you have it on and set to break mode, sometimes it can think an obstacle is more of an obstruction than it is so it can think that leaves that are close to.

You are actually kind of in front of it and it can break prematurely when it could probably just fly past fine, so you dont want that if you have it in bypass mode, the drum will automatically weave around these objects, which is fine if youre right in The open, but if youre, trying to get a smooth cinematic shot, you want it to fly straight and if its in bypass mode, it will wave around these obstacles and not give you that nice straight tracking shot. So i find i just turn off in these scenarios. Do be careful, i find it much easier to actually fly the drone by watching it in real life and watching it fly straight and through these obstacles, instead of relying on the screen of the drone. The other thing that i find is the downward obstacle, avoiding sensors. Always seem to be on regardless, if you have obstacle, vines turned off, so i find when flying close to the ground. If i maybe fly over the top of a rock, the drum will automatically rise up over it, and this is great for obstacle avoidance. But again it means youre not getting a smooth cinematic move because the drones moving up and down so rise. The drone up to thats not getting any detection on them downward obstacle. Vine, sensors – and so you dont, get this bobbing up and down motion the last thing. Ill say is: if you are going to do this, just be super careful.

You dont want to damage your drone. You wont want to damage the obstacles that youre flying through so just be really cautious when getting these types of shots, but they do look absolutely awesome. So those are my 12 easy tips to get cinematic drone footage head out. There give them a go id love it. If you came back into the comments – and let me know how you got on or theres – maybe some tips you have learned over the years of flying your own drone, which have helped you get awesome, video clips id love it. If you commented some of them tips down below to help others get awesome, video clips with their drone. Now, if youve liked, this video and youve learned something new, please let me know by giving me the thumbs up and clicking that like button down below and if youve liked this video and you want to learn more about getting awesome photos with your drone and getting More cinematic video clips and have a ton of other content on my channel to help you level up your drone game that i recommend you check out. If you want to stick around and see a few more of them now heres a few, i personally recommend and ill keep you back any further.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ulZOXTtZxg