Creating Cinematic Drone Footage - Hints, tips and a video dissection.

Hey guys,

I've been wanting to do this for ages but just haven't gotten around to it. Rewatching my Iceland drone video has put me back in the mood so I thought that I would share my thoughts and observations on what I think makes a good "cinematic drone video".

It was my Iceland drone video that kickstarted me here on Steemit thanks to a whopping @curie upvote. Never before had I been rewarded for any kind of photo or video work so it was a revelation for me. Now I am honoured to be part of the curie community and finding awesome content from all of you guys every day.

Ok, onto the drone stuff

Some basic hints and tips.

• Get yourself a set of ND filters for your drone camera
  There's a rule of thumb in videography that your shutter speed should be double your expected frame rate. I tend to shoot at 25fps, so my suggested shutter speed should be set to 1/50 of a second. In really bright conditions, this sort of shutter speed is going to be impossible to obtain and you will often be getting shutter speed in the range of 1/500 or 1/1000 of a second. This can lead to an effect called "rolling shutter". I'm not going to explain the technicalities behind this effect, but basically, it leads to a kind of "jello" effect in your footage.

This is a good article on rolling shutter and ND filters. I have the Polar Pro set.

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• Learn to fly a drone.
  Well, that's a bit obvious you might say! However, what I truly believe is that anyone who flies a Mavic/ Phantom etc should have spent an considerable amount of time learning to fly with a drone that doesn't do all the work for you. I flew a Husban X4 for months before I even went near the Mavic. Controlling something that is far more erratic hones your skills and builds muscle memory. In turn, that allows the smooth control of the Mavic when you do come to fly it. Having flight as second nature to you allows you to concentrate more on the filming aspect and fine control

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• Plan your flights
  This encompasses a lot of things for me. Nothing bugs me more than seeing drone footage where the camera moves erratically or the drone changes direction quickly. Those kinds of movements are distracting to the eye. If you have those kinds of movements in your footage, cut them out and join the smoother portions of your flight with fades/wipes. For a lot of the footage in my Iceland video, I flew the drone half a dozen times on the same path just to be sure that my start and end position was achievable and that the footage between the start and the end was satisfactory without any sudden gimbal movement or change of drone direction.

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• Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey
  Do things slowly. You can adjust the gimbal settings on the Mavic so that when you use the controller to adjust the position, it does it a lot slower than the default speed. You can also adjust the amount of acceleration that occurs on the gimbal when you start or stop its movement. There are a ton of tutorials and instructional videos on drone gimbal settings online so I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here. Just make sure that it's something you set up so that your movements are not jarring to the eye.

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So, I'm going to pull out a few short clips and discuss them in turn.

This one was a bit of a no-brainer really, as soon as I saw this long shallow falls it was pretty obvious that this had to be a sideways pan shot. I wanted to get close so as to give the viewer the thought of, "when will this waterfall ever end". Getting too close did, however, bring rise to a moment of panic. The mist that was being thrown up from the falls caused the Mavic to go into a mode of constant obstacle avoidance. At one point, it would not move at all and I had to think on my feet. Putting the drone in sport mode turns off obstacle avoidance, so a quick flick of that switch allowed me to regain control.

The geometric nature of this church and its surrounding fencing, along with the fact that it had a turfed roof instantly made me think of shooting it from above. There were a couple of options, descending down to the church, some kind of static height with rotation or the one that I chose, the rise away from the structure to reveal the shape and gravestones/tree.

This is possibly my favourite shot and sort of came out of no-where. I was doing some manual tracking of my wife as she climbed out of this crater and as she got to the top she stopped and stared out over the Icelandic wilderness. Luckily for me, I continued to move the drone over the top of the crater rim and the crater in the distance just came beatifully into view. This was one of those times where I lucked out without any planning of the shot at all.

This waterfall has a weird shape. Being a sort of semi-circle, I wanted to enhance the shape of it by moving the drone in a similar fashion. Anyone who has flown a drone knows that this is one of the hardest movements to accomplish. You are effectively moving the drone left or right at the same time as rotating the drone in the opposite direction to maintain your subject in the center of the frame. This kind of shot is prone to drift; the drone often either moves closer to the subject or further away depending on the rotation and lateral movement speeds. You often have to feed in a bit of forward or backward motion to maintain distance from the subject. Took me a good few tries to get this as smooth as i wanted it. A similar type of shot was this one of Hvitsekur.

This also took me a good few attempts, not to mention having to cut filming short due to a few over-excited arctic terns.

Back to that lovely grass church....

I wanted a single shot that both showed the church as the main subject and also the rolling landscape behind as another so a flyover was required. This one incorporated a small amount of upward motion just as the drone was approaching the church but I was careful to feed that motion in as slowly as possible so as not to give any real sense of directional change. This is quite a simple shot but can be quite hard to execute fluidly. I had a good half a dozen flyovers before i had a start and finish position that I was happy with

I wanted to try something a bit different at the glacial lakes rather than the usual flyover shots. This was the first time I had tried this "rising spin" and it really surprised me. I guess just to the abstract and somewhat chaotic nature of the icebergs worked perfectly. The spin effect really adds something to this shot over and above a normal rising shot.

In a similar vein, this looking down flyover really looked great over the Jokulsarlon lagoon. Obviously, for this shot, you have to have a good view of the drone as you cannot see what is potentially coming in the camera. It took me a good 30 minutes to find a set of bergs that I was happy with and to plan a route over them without any directional changes.

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That a small overview of some of the shots in the video

Editing

I am now a big fan of Final Cut Pro on my Mac for editing. I've used lots of applications for video editing - Pinnacle, Adobe Premier Pro, Sony Vegas to name a few, but in my opinion, nothing comes close to Final Cut Pro for ease of use and speed of putting something together. I'm sure there are anti-Maccers out there who would wax lyrical about the benefits of using a windows based app such as the Adobe suite. I used to be in the same camp.

My video editing workflow is pretty straightforward

• Find appropriate music. I always like to set my videos to appropriate music and cut the scenes around the music too. Finding this track (Stormur by Sigur Ros) took me hours. I tried loads of different Icelandic music but in the end, nothing came close to the grandeur of this song. It just seemed to fit with what I had in mind.

• Choosing and editing clips. This is the time-consuming bit. With so much footage, selecting what you want can be hard. I wanted to have one clip from every place we went to if possible and I also wanted the clips to be smooth with no jerky camera movement. Once I had my selected clips, i shortened them down to fit in with the rhythm of the music. I also added a few non-drone clips in the middle to break things up a bit. That coincides nicely with the change of music about halfway through.

• Once I'm happy with the flow of the clips and how they fit with the music I then add transitions and colour grading. For this video, the transitions are sharp cuts, apart from the non-drone section which are flash cuts. I liked the variation here; I really didn't want the video to get boring :)
  The grading is pretty lightweight. I just added a very simple contrast filter to give it a more cinematic feel. I added the same grading to each clip after first adjusting the curves to get some consistency of luminosity across all clips. None of the short clips her are colour graded - you can tell the difference between these and the ones in the final video.

• The final stage is the titles. I don't usually do much in the way of titles, just a simple font and simple text prevents distraction from the main footage.

That's pretty much all there is to it. In terms of the time it took me to do this, you might be surprised. Other than the hours spent actually taking the footage, I'd estimate it took me 2 hours to decide on music, and about the same to edit it all together. All of that was done in one evening in the hotel in Reykjavik as we were waiting to come home.

Thanks for looking

Mark