In this guide, I will be sharing my top 9 best flight tips to make cinematic drone videos.
Flying a drone can be challenging at the first time. Whether you are trying to figure out how to get stunning aerial footage with limited flight time, the extreme weather factors and battery time is ticking every second. It can look like every angle you are trying to produce a masterpiece with every shot.
Without further ado, let’s dive in and find out how my top 9 best flight tips can help you make cinematic drone videos!
1. Be Natural & Organic
From time to time, I have seen drone operators jerk the camera quickly from left to right to capture aerial footage. This is worthless because in the video editors, you need the footage to be smooth, organic and natural in order to accomplish cinematic quality.
To produce organic and natural feeling to your videos, you need to find an angle and do a nice, slow, coasting movement with subtle panning motions. You can perform camera movements within the drone’s flight path instead of moving the drone itself.
2. Let Drone do the Work
The drone shots look very nice when they roll on screen for an extended period of time. There’s a lot of information that drone captures in each frame thanks to quick shutter as movement can be disorienting sometimes.
My advice for you is to play it safe. Position the drone to get a long and coasting aerial shot that lasts more than 3 seconds. Then you can flip each frame and fly through until it loses the charm.
3. Embrace the Nature
Mother’s nature is the drones’ most powerful weapon to produce jaw-dropping photography and videography. To take advantage of this flight tip, get your drone closer to elements such as rocks and trees safely. Then glide your drone past through them as it adds depth and motion to your aerial footage.
4. Don’t Overuse It
Drone shots can be beautiful and useful. But they are completely overused.
The best filmmakers and professional aerial photographers moderate their footage. They only capture drone footage when it is necessary and handpick the best to demonstrate their masterpieces. Diversify your footage and make them unique.
5. Zoom Back
One of my favorite flight tips and believe it or not, but not many drone pilots does this kind of trick. You absolutely can fly back from the position to create a revealing shot. When your drone flies backward, it reveals details like trees, people, buildings, hills and more as opposed to focusing on just one detail.
If flying backward is difficult for you, then you can reverse your footage in the editor by using the speed duration tool.
6. Go Hyperlapse
Consumer grade drones produce videos that are a bit slower on the screen. It’s prone to large-scale environments like mountains, bustling cities, waterfronts and such. One way to do this trick to speed up your footage is add more movement in the frame. It can be done by tripling or quadruple via speed tool in the video editor.
7. Add Sound
Almost every cinematic drone video that you see comes with sound and they are there for an actual good reason. The sound effect brings soothing and builds connection to the audience who watches your drone videos. Whenever I watch a drone video and listen to the sound, it makes me feel like I am there somehow.
It’s easy to add sound to your drone videos by using free audio tracks on the search engines. If you want a completely unique audio track, you can purchase it from official stores like ShutterShock for a premium fee.
8. Go Slow
Another great flight tip that everyone should know is using the slo-mo mode feature. Almost all consumer-level drones like Phantom 4 Pro and Inspire 2 comes with the ability to produce slo-mo videos. This presents an amazing opportunity to exacerbate special moments which keeps your audience on the hook for a longer time.
If your drone doesn’t have this feature, don’t worry about that. Just capture video as you normally would do and edit the speed setting via video editor to decrease the time.
9. Vertigo Effect
Creating a vertigo effect is very easy. In fact, it doesn’t take too much effort, here’s a good tutorial on how to create vertigo effect with your drone:
Top 9 Best Flight Tips for Cinematic Videos: Conclusion
We hope that our top 9 drone flight tips help you improve your drone videos and make them more cinematic. As surprising as it sounds, producing cinematic drone videos isn’t that difficult at all. At first few attempts, you might struggle with it. But after a few practice, you will be able to churn cinematic drone videos in no time.
If you are new to drones and looking for one to start with. I recommend buy either Mavic 2 Pro or Phantom 4 Pro as they are good drones to start with. Best of all, they are made by DJI, a world-class renowned drone industry known for exceptional product quality and stellar performance.
I also recommend reading our drone tips for beginners before flying your very first quadcopter under $300! Hope you enjoyed reading our top drone flight tips and happy flying!
