Aerial footage of beach and surf in Portugal

Hello world!

I have been away for a few weeks but I’m back with another post.

This time i will not post a picture, but my first attempt to make a movie. I already have taken a bunch of videos with the drone but without great content, because most of the time i was still learning how to fly it, not getting very focus on the footage i made.

(There are some long reading, so feel free to skip directly to the video) 

Before i try to give an insight of what was my goal to this video, first i have to say I have blast taking this footages! Since i make surf too, the drill was first surf… than fly!

The small length of the video (2:28) is on purpose, because in my experience a very long movie don’t catch the attention of the viewer, and most of the time, even before you open the video, if you see huge length, you don’t even bother to open it.

The Beach

Fonte da Telha is beach with a huge extension of sand and a small fisherman’s village, just around 20 km of Lisbon.
Since my family have a house near this beach (and i live in Lisbon) i go there a bunch of times over the year. Sometimes to surf, sometimes to ride my bike in the top of the cliff that you can see in the footage.
Fonte da Telha also gave some of the most memorable days of surf in my life. When the waves are huge in Costa da Caparica (famous beach break 15 km north), this beach can provide you some epic surf sessions.

The Movie

Like i say before, this is my first attempt to make a movie. I have take a lot of different shots, but sometimes just to catch a surfer in a wave you have to hoover the drone for 5 or more minutes to take the shot... so if you only have one battery... it's... just let's say booring :).
My goal for the movies was to capture images of the beautiful sea and how the humans can "play" in a wonderful way without spoiling it.

Editing

Since im a completely newbie on video editing, i will write the method i use, and cross my fingers to someone reply with a better method.

So let's start. I’m shooting with a DJI Phantom 3 standard this drone is equipped with a 2k / 30FPS camera. Of course you can record in different formats, but this is the best resolution possible.
After i capture the movie i want, i have cropped all the parts i want with Windows Movie Maker. After this step i am using DaVinci Resolve (free version) do compose the video and apply some effects.
I have tried to use Resolve to do all the job of trimming the parts want, but in my humble opinion it’s a mess, and that why i decided o use Movie Maker for that job.
But this have a huge drawback... Movie Maker only allows to export at 1080P. So if I’m filming at 2K, i lose a lot of information just to crop the videos. Any tips how to solve this?

Music credits: Coldplay - Life in Technicolor

I hope you enjoy this movie :)

See you soon!