Our Workflow for editing Videos, DaVinci Resolve 18 – Suzanne Read, Albion Drones
Ok, before I start on the nitty-gritty of our workflow, I would like to give you a bit of our background, who we are, our equipment and experiences, and the basics of our Drone Journey, in the hopes it will help to normalise who we are and perhaps allow others to understand that with the right understanding and focus, anyone can do what we do.
I will add, I don’t claim to be an expert on Colour Grading or using DaVinci Resolve, I am just someone that is producing content that I am happy with and that others seem to think highly of, nothing more and nothing less.
I am no-one special and to be honest don’t consider my editing or workflow anything special, I am just an average woman with a lot of photography experience who 18 months ago moved into Drone flying and videography.
I don’t own any hi-tech software or use a top of the range computer, we have a 5-year-old mid-range laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3793 – Intel i5 with24GB of RAM, we use the free version of DaVinci Resolve 18, I have a 2TB external HDD, and the laptop has an internal HDD of just under 1TB and an operating system SSD of 98MB.
I tell you this just to illustrate that what I do and the results we get are nothing to do with the quality of the system or the amazing software used, instead it is about the process I follow and having an understanding of what to do to improve an image – and also perhaps the sheer bloody mindedness not to stop until I am totally happy with what I am producing.
We started our drone journey in August 2022 when after much deliberation we purchased a MINI3 Pro, having always had an interest in aviation – I had a PPL with an RAF scholarship many years ago when I was aged 17/18 – and a passion for photography. I have always been someone who has the ability to be self-critical with anything I do, so on seeing our footage I was able to critique it and to plan how to improve my flying, and also look at whether I could improve my editing to make the footage look as good as possible.
Flying a MINI3 Pro I have always been amazed with how good the footage is, I tend to leave it in AUTO for most of the settings and use the Exposure Compensation to reduce the exposure by -0.3 to -1.0 in order to prevent burnout on the highlights. I have not bothered changing the settings from what it came with – if it isn’t broke, then don’t fix it -which means I don’t use with DLog or DCinelike, instead I have recorded in the normal mode the drone came with, which means I am recording in H.264 and DaVinci YRGB Colour science with REC.709 colour space. I tend to hit record when I take off, and then record the whole of my flight and then create clips to use when I start editing – I do this prevents me from forgetting to press record, after doing that once at the Glenfinnan Viaduct and not realising until I got back to download the footage! Yes, it means have large video files, but
We added a second drone – an AIR3 – in September 2023, in order to better cope with the potential winds that we were expecting on our planned Autumn trip to Skye and Lewis and Harris – and a third drone in early October 2023 – an AVATA – in order to add another perspective to our footage – plus the AVATA is just so much fun to fly!
So, for starters, that’s the background of how we got to where we are…
Now, tomorrow I will start to share how we do what we do…