This one is rugged. Notes to self......

[SmilingOgre]

1. Write down my settings for everything e.g. stick sensitivity, gimble sensitivity, camera settings etc. Got my drone back from repair. Did I remember any settings? Nope. My flying shows it to. Pretty jerky. Back to the drawing board.

2. Ditch auto exposure. It made a real mess in this case.

3. When color grading in Premiere Pro only copy and paste attributes once. OMG! I thought you could just re-copy and paste after subsequent adjustments to the first file. Oh no, not so. Looked fine while editing but after render the brightness looked like it was throbbing. Nasty mess.

4. Plan on revisiting the shoot a few times.......

Almost forgot. This is a wetlands project near by.

 

[Phantomrain.org]

1. Write down my settings for everything e.g. stick sensitivity, gimble sensitivity, camera settings etc. Got my drone back from repair. Did I remember any settings? Nope. My flying shows it to. Pretty jerky. Back to the drawing board.

2. Ditch auto exposure. It made a real mess in this case.

3. When color grading in Premiere Pro only copy and paste attributes once. OMG! I thought you could just re-copy and paste after subsequent adjustments to the first file. Oh no, not so. Looked fine while editing but after render the brightness looked like it was throbbing. Nasty mess.

4. Plan on revisiting the shoot a few times.......

Almost forgot. This is a wetlands project near by.

Your being to hard on yourself, this was not that bad , video was clean and turns were slow and smooth.
The exposure is tricky , when you move that camera around to high and it captures the sky its going to change so next time just try to keep the same camera angle going for as long as you can , Than you can change the Camera angle and make it a smooth edit or transitions. To much of the camera going up and down can make it difficult for anyone in the exposure dept.

Great job , your getting better.

 

[SmilingOgre]

Your being to hard on yourself, this was not that bad , video was clean and turns were slow and smooth.
The exposure is tricky , when you move that camera around to high and it captures the sky its going to change so next time just try to keep the same camera angle going for as long as you can , Than you can change the Camera angle and make it a smooth edit or transitions. To much of the camera going up and down can make it difficult for anyone in the exposure dept.

Great job , your getting better.

You made my morning! I did go back into it and started playing around with keyframing some of the luminosity adjustments. Also watched a few more videos on fine tuning controller sensitivity and made some adjustments to the drone. On the upside, I need to fly more. I can take that!!!

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

Hi Ogre!
Try using manual exposure instead of automatic. That will keep it from changing exposure on you when you catch the sun. Point the camera to what you want to be most prominent and set your exposure to that. In most cases, the camera won't be able to handle that much dynamic range but if you have an MA2, you could try HDR video. It may be a little more forgiving if you're shooting LOG or D-Cinelike. Then it's a matter of color grading. You can save your settings as a preset in Premiere then they will be in your preset folder that you can just drag and drop to any clip.

 

[SmilingOgre]

Hi Ogre!
Try using manual exposure instead of automatic. That will keep it from changing exposure on you when you catch the sun. Point the camera to what you want to be most prominent and set your exposure to that. In most cases, the camera won't be able to handle that much dynamic range but if you have an MA2, you could try HDR video. It may be a little more forgiving if you're shooting LOG or D-Cinelike. Then it's a matter of color grading. You can save your settings as a preset in Premiere then they will be in your preset folder that you can just drag and drop to any clip.

I wondered how that worked. I tried saving one as a preset and PP prompted me to tell it where to save it. I don't know where PP saves it's presets so I gave up. I flew today with a manual exposure for testing and learned how to "Nest" clips in PP so I can do color correction to all of the clips at once. That worked pretty good. The other thing I can't find is where PP stores it's luts. I want to save these things in the same spot so they come up with the PP provided stuff.

 

[Greekislandlover]

Hi,

There was some nice smooth photography there, and the music was a good choice!

A few thoughts:-

Does it all need to be one long, continuous shot? Chopping it into smaller bits would help you resolve an awful lot of things you mention!

Whilst the photography is nice and smooth, there are a couple of bits where you move faster than others when changing direction, and I personally would cut them to make it uniformly smooth.

The advantages of a series of cuts to you would be that if one shot is over or under exposed you don't need to do any complicated corrections - just that shot to match the rest. I also use Premiere Pro BTW.

It's a personal beef of mine that I prefer to see smooth shot transitions. IE I always cut whilst the shot is moving so I don't get the effect of movement - stop - cut. A smooth transition doesn't jar!

The other thing I'd mention is that sometimes you get the odd shot when taking off / landing that is good, so can be included if you are cutting the film. For example, I used a shot where the drone was landing as the end shot, and rolled titles on it. I noticed that a bush came into view very nearly when the titles rolled, so adjusted it so that the titles rolled at the same time as the bush ascended, and then faded the shot and let the titles run.

How I approach editing.

1, cut out anything I can't use such as jerky footage.

2, assemble it into grouped similar shots, use the best and ditch the rest.

3, assemble in a logical sequence to tell a story. In my case it's a rising shot, some flying around and a descending or orbit to finish.

4, go through it to trim shots to the minimum length. Some shots can be long and swooping, but others only need to be short.

5, when I'm happy with how the general layout, do transitions and cut to music if that's what I'm going to do.

6, when I'm happy with what will be the final product, go through colour and exposure corrections.

HTH

 

[SmilingOgre]

Hi,

There was some nice smooth photography there, and the music was a good choice!

A few thoughts:-

Does it all need to be one long, continuous shot? Chopping it into smaller bits would help you resolve an awful lot of things you mention!

Whilst the photography is nice and smooth, there are a couple of bits where you move faster than others when changing direction, and I personally would cut them to make it uniformly smooth.

The advantages of a series of cuts to you would be that if one shot is over or under exposed you don't need to do any complicated corrections - just that shot to match the rest. I also use Premiere Pro BTW.

It's a personal beef of mine that I prefer to see smooth shot transitions. IE I always cut whilst the shot is moving so I don't get the effect of movement - stop - cut. A smooth transition doesn't jar!

The other thing I'd mention is that sometimes you get the odd shot when taking off / landing that is good, so can be included if you are cutting the film. For example, I used a shot where the drone was landing as the end shot, and rolled titles on it. I noticed that a bush came into view very nearly when the titles rolled, so adjusted it so that the titles rolled at the same time as the bush ascended, and then faded the shot and let the titles run.

How I approach editing.

1, cut out anything I can't use such as jerky footage.

2, assemble it into grouped similar shots, use the best and ditch the rest.

3, assemble in a logical sequence to tell a story. In my case it's a rising shot, some flying around and a descending or orbit to finish.

4, go through it to trim shots to the minimum length. Some shots can be long and swooping, but others only need to be short.

5, when I'm happy with how the general layout, do transitions and cut to music if that's what I'm going to do.

6, when I'm happy with what will be the final product, go through colour and exposure corrections.

HTH

Sincerely appreciate you taking the time to note all of that. There's a lot there to digest and ponder. Will be doing just that!

 

[Dbez1]

Hi,

There was some nice smooth photography there, and the music was a good choice!

A few thoughts:-

Does it all need to be one long, continuous shot? Chopping it into smaller bits would help you resolve an awful lot of things you mention!

Whilst the photography is nice and smooth, there are a couple of bits where you move faster than others when changing direction, and I personally would cut them to make it uniformly smooth.

The advantages of a series of cuts to you would be that if one shot is over or under exposed you don't need to do any complicated corrections - just that shot to match the rest. I also use Premiere Pro BTW.

It's a personal beef of mine that I prefer to see smooth shot transitions. IE I always cut whilst the shot is moving so I don't get the effect of movement - stop - cut. A smooth transition doesn't jar!

The other thing I'd mention is that sometimes you get the odd shot when taking off / landing that is good, so can be included if you are cutting the film. For example, I used a shot where the drone was landing as the end shot, and rolled titles on it. I noticed that a bush came into view very nearly when the titles rolled, so adjusted it so that the titles rolled at the same time as the bush ascended, and then faded the shot and let the titles run.

How I approach editing.

1, cut out anything I can't use such as jerky footage.

2, assemble it into grouped similar shots, use the best and ditch the rest.

3, assemble in a logical sequence to tell a story. In my case it's a rising shot, some flying around and a descending or orbit to finish.

4, go through it to trim shots to the minimum length. Some shots can be long and swooping, but others only need to be short.

5, when I'm happy with how the general layout, do transitions and cut to music if that's what I'm going to do.

6, when I'm happy with what will be the final product, go through colour and exposure corrections.

HTH

Many good points there Greek. I would just like to add that shorter is usually better. Leave your audience wanting more. Incidentally, nice filming in heavy wind.

 

[SmilingOgre]

Many good points there Greek. I would just like to add that shorter is usually better. Leave your audience wanting more. Incidentally, nice filming in heavy wind.

Thanks!!! Still just working on flying, exposure correction, color correction and the like. Learning a lot about creating an actual "video" here on this forum and giving it a lot of thought. Starting to think more in terms of getting shots and assembly in post. Appreciate the commentary. There's a lot to consider.