First location shoot - Upper Nidderdale, North Yorkshire

Videos by Drone
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I took advantage of the good weather on Wednesday, took the afternoon off and set out to take some actual footage, instead of just flying around for practice. In the end I didn’t get a lot of usable material, but I certainly learnt a lot.

  1. Always record everything.
    The first place I stopped was up on the top of the valley. I thought I’d spend a little while flying around and getting comfortable with the location before I cued up any shots. Within minutes a couple of fighter jets on training runs tore up the valley below. I’d almost certainly have missed the first, but they always come in pairs, so I’d probably have got the second.

  2. Check your levels.
    The first 5 minutes or more was woefully overexposed because I didn’t think to check the level from last time I was out.

  3. Don’t touch the yaw.
    That probably just needs to be translated as, I need a lot more practice getting a soft touch with the yaw control. Every time I use it seems very jerky, even in cine mode. I’m not sure there’s any setting that I haven’t tweaked already that can help with this.

  4. Sports mode is fast.
    High speed low level flights might look cool but the ground can come up to meet you really fast. Fortunately I only ditched it into some springy heather, and it was a good opportunity to test “Find my drone”.

By the time I was getting my eye/hand in at the second location, the wind had really picked up and the poor little mite was struggling to make headway into it, so I didn’t stay too long. But I did get enough to put together this very short piece that also served to help me up the DaVinci Resolve learning curve.

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I think you can change the control sensitivity and other characteristics in settings to make smooth movements easier and with more gradual initiation and completion.

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Thanks. As a Mini (1) owner with DJI Fly, I don’t think there is anything. Is it worth me looking into Litchi? Having only had the thing a few weeks I thought my best bet would be to learn how to use what I have before rushing into 3rd party stuff.

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Ah - OK - yeah, I believe you’re correct.

Didn’t they replace this with “Cinematic Mode” or something … that invokes a non-modifiable desensitising?

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Yes. Everything in C Mode is slower. The main issue is really the instant acceleration/deceleration which makes for very jerky start-stop pans if you’re even slightly heavy-thumbed. Looks like more practice is the answer. Longer thumb-sticks might help a bit too.

Never mind, I still need plenty of practice to break my years of gaming muscle memory that says forward is down. I get the altitude and camera angle controls wrong 100% of the time at the minute.

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Good points, thanks.
Like you I am starting out with all of this.
Do like the intro shot zooming in on location. How do you do that?
Reminds me of Abandoned Engineering o Yesterday TV. Now they have some fantastic locations for flying!

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That’s a screen recording from Google Earth with the dross cropped out. I used Camtasia, but others should work.
Abandoned Engineering was definitely the inspiration.

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