Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey guys, welcome to drone
videography for beginners. My name is Adam Barton egg. I am a traveler, a cinematographer and YouTuber over at the channel
atom ventures. And about six months ago, I added a drone to
my camera Bragg. And since then I've flown
almost a 100 hours. So I have done a lot of drone flying in the last six
months in this course, I'm going to teach you
step-by-step what you have to do to make
your drone shots look better from how to
just simply being more comfortable flying a drone
in sketchy situations, doing things like hand
launches and hand catches. I'm gonna walk you through
all of the best moves, like how to fly your drone to
create the most epic shots, as well as different
elements of composition. How to line up your
subject in a drone shot to make your shot look
as epic as possible. I'm extremely
excited to help you level up your drone
flying skills and to see the work that you end up producing with your drone
after watching this course. So with no further
ado, let's dive into the next lesson where I will be introducing the class project.
2. Class Project: And again, this course
is project-based. So at the end of
taking this class, you're actually going
to take your drone, go out into your city and practice capturing
each type of shot that you learned how to perform in this class at the very
end of this class, the last lesson is a PDF
for you to download, which is a shortlist
of every shot that you learn how to perform
in this class. And I want you to go
out into your city, practice each type of
shot and put it together into a town real that you'll
share as a class project.
3. Flying Your Drone- Guide to First Flight: In this lesson, we're
going to go over the absolute fundamentals
of how to fly your drone. We're going to start with
what all the buttons on your controller do. Then we're gonna talk about
how to launch your drone, how to land your drone, and how to perform a
compass calibration. So if you already know
how to do all of that, feel free to skip on
to the next lesson. But if you're due
for a refresher or this is all new
information to you. Stick around and
let's dive right into the controller as
far as the controls go, this left stick here. When you push this
up, you're just moving the drone up
as you can see here. And you push that stick down, you're moving the drone down. Then when you go left and right, this is called yaw. You're literally just spinning
the drone side-to-side. And then this is your hand motion right
here and say this is your, this is how you do a dolly shot. This is just moving
the drone forward. Moving the drone back. And think of this
whole right stick. Easy way to remember
it is just this moves the drone on the horizontal plane and you go to the right. It moves the whole
drone to the right. Left it moves the whole
drone to the left, back, backwards,
forward, forward. This is the return
to home button. This puts your drone into return to home mode
and then pauses. It also also pauses
your quick shots. We're gonna be going over all of those settings in
the next video. Right here. This is
your mode selector. All the way left is
cinematic mode for getting the slowest,
most smooth shots. Normal mode is where
you're going to want to be in most of the time. And then sport mode
when you're meeting some higher paste action shots. Another thing to keep in mind
is sport mode is going to drain your battery
significantly faster. Then cinematic mode or
normal mode is going to. Then on the back of the drone, you can see that right here
you have the gimbal and right here you have
the record button, the Start Stop Record button. You can quickly tell right
now that the drone is in video mode because you
have the red circle there. And if I hit this button, it's going to switch the
drone to camera mode, where now it's
gonna take photos. Right here on the controller. You have this one X button. You can click that and
it's going to zoom in the camera to zoom
present one more time, and that goes back to
the default setting. So like I said earlier,
this is the gimbal and when I push it to the left, you can see here what that does. That lowers the gimbal pretty slowly when you're
in cinematic mode and when you're in sport mode, the gimbal is gonna
raise a lot quicker. This feature button
can be programmed to do anything you wanted to, but straight out of the box, what it does is it will,
when you press it once, it will bring the
camera straight down, more features you're
gonna want to know about, is that down here, you have your maps
and you can actually click that to see
where your drone is, which can allow you to fly. By the map, you can
see where your drone is exactly really good if you are outside
of visual range, which you're really not
supposed to do legally Into? Yeah. Just to the right of the maps, this H represents what
your elevation is relative to the height
that you took off at. So if your one-foot
above where you took off that that is going
to be one foot. D is your distance right now I'm 350 feet away from
where I started. And then here you can
see that I am now moving forward at around
30 miles per hour. And now I am moving up
at 11 miles an hour. Up here you have your battery and then just next
to it you have an estimated amount of
how much longer you're going to be able to
stay in the air until you absolutely have to land. And as you can see, as I
start to fly faster and more aggressively, that
number decreases. To the right of that is the signal strength from your
drone to your controller. And to the right of that is how many satellites your
drone is connected to. One thing to note here is it's
not a good idea to launch your drone if your drone is connected to less
than six satellites. Because if it's connected to the less than six satellites, the return to home feature
is not going to work. If you ever let your
battery dropped below 20%. Your controller is gonna make this loud pitch noise
until he went under drone. Now that you know how
to actually control your drone when it's in the air, it's him a takeoff
for the first time. The first thing you're going
to want to do is you're going to want to
connect to your phone, the controller, and
opened a DJI app. After that, you're going to
want to do the DJI to press. You're gonna want to
turn on your controller. You might think
that just pressing that power button
is gonna do it. That does not do it. That just gonna show
you how much battery your controller has left. What you're gonna wanna do
is you do a one-click press, and then you press and hold
until it gives you that beep. As you can see, my battery, my controller is getting a
little bit low on battery, but that's not gonna be
a problem for today. Next, you're going to want
to get your drone and take this protective strap that comes with it off of the drone. You're going to want
to take the gimbal, protect her off as well. That just snaps off. You're going to want
to unfold your drone. So these front ones just
fold out like this. And then the back
ones fold down. Then you turn your drone
on the same way you do controller press once, press again and hold. And once you hear
that noise there, you're gimbal will
start to move. Your drone is now on. The very first time you're
setting up your drone, it's not actually going
to say go fly here. It's going to say
connect to your drone. You're going to click that
and then you're going to select the type of
drone you have and your controller is going to search for your drone
and then parent. Once your drone is connected, you're going to
want to hit Go Fly. You're going to want to
wait for that satellite count to hit at least eight. You can see right
now, right away I have ten satellite connection,
so I'm good to go. If your controller says
take off permitted, then you are ready to take off. The first thing
you're gonna do is arm your drone to arm it. You're just getting the
propellers spinning. It's not going to
actually take off yet. So you want to
have your drone in a safe place where you're
ready to take off. And then to arm your drone. You're just gonna
push both sticks in this way, just like this. Let go. And now the propellers on my little drone
there are spinning. And now when I press
up on the controller, I'm gonna be moving
the drone straight up. Then when you're ready to land, you can just hit
the down button. And as you can see, the drone is taken care of that last little bit about that last foot or
so on it's own. Your dreams aren't always
gonna say takeoff permitted. Sometimes it's gonna say
compass calibration required. This actually happens quite
a bit when that is the case, you're just going to
want to click on it and then this screen is going to appear and you're going to want to follow the prompts and do it. It tells you to do
which looks like this. Hitting start. Then rotating the craft 360 degrees
horizontally. Simply looks like this. Until symptoms you have
to go a little bit extra until it says OK, and then rotate 360
degrees vertically. Just like that. And now the compass
calibration is complete and you're ready to
safely take off. That is how to fly
your DJI drone. I hope you found this
information helpful. And in the next
video we're gonna go over some important
features that you definitely are going
to want to know about in the DJI app.
4. DJI Drone App- Features You Should Know About: Hey guys, welcome
to the next lesson. In this lesson, we're
going to go over some DJI app features that are
really good to know about. Let's dive right into it. All of these are
in the menu tab, which is these three dots in the upper right-hand
corner of your screen. Starting with safety, a really, really good one to know about. We're gonna come back
to all the intricacies of return to home at
the end of this video. But if you scroll
down to the bottom, this is a really good
one to know about find my device if you ever crash your drone into a tree or anywhere and you're having
a hard time finding it, having a hard time
recovering it. This is going to
help you out a lot. It's going to show you exactly
where your drone is on a map and then able
to walk to it. And when you get
close, you can hit this start flashing
and beeping button. Then once you find your
drone, you can hit stop beeping and your
dremel stop beeping. All right, moving on to
some camera features. When you click on
the camera tab, this is what the top
is gonna look like. You can change all sorts
of these settings here. You can turn a histogram
on if you want to, if you're a professional user, the main one that I
would recommend turning on for beginners is gridlines. This way, you can more easily line up a subject when you're recording into
the rule of thirds. Basically, if
you're not familiar with the rule of thirds, I'm going to cover
this in another video. But if you're filming a subject, it looks a lot better to keep your subject in on this line, on a one-thirds line instead of in the
middle of your screen. So having this grid turned on just makes it a lot easier
to follow the rule of thirds when you're filming
some more camera futures to go over right now
you can see that I am set to be recording and fork at 30 frames per second. If I want to change that, I can simply click this
button right here. And I can change to 2.7 k. I can change to ten ADP, which will then allow me to record at 60 frames per second. Or I can switch to photo mode by clicking
this button here. And one setting that I really recommend you turn on for photos is it'll default to
shooting single photos. But I recommend you click AEP, in which stands for auto
exposure bracketing. Whether this is
going to do is every time you take a photo, it's actually going to
take three photos with three different exposure levels. Is it going to make it a
lot more likely that one of those three photos is gonna be exactly what you're looking for. This is also how you
take quick shots. However, you're not able to take quick shots unless your
drone is in the air. And this is how you're able
to take shots on a timer. Here when you click
the shoot button, it's not actually going to
take the photo for 15 seconds. Cancel. And saving the most
important for last next, let's talk about the
return to home altitude. This is setting the
altitude at which when you, if you lose connection
with your drone, your drone is going to fly to whatever elevation
you set right here. It's going to fly to
that, but you can go straight up to that elevation and then fly back to
you at that elevation. Usually the safe thing
to do is just to set a really high return
to home altitude. But there is one
exception to this. If it's a really windy day, you might actually want
to drop your return to home altitude because
it's a lot windier, 400 feet up in the sky. And if your drone has to return
to you against the wind, it might just not have
enough battery power or the drone might not
have enough power to make that actually happen. And that's why it's a good
idea to check your return to home altitude before
every single flight. Because if your last flight was really windy day
and you're just flying really low down near a lake and you had a really
low altitude set. And now this flight is
in a city you could very easily run into a skyscraper if you don't go back
into the setting, double-check it, and raise
your return to home altitude.
5. Avoid The 6 Types of Drone Crashes: In this video, I'm
going to go over the six most common types of drone crashes so you know what to look out for and you can better avoid making
these types of crashes. The first type of crash is we're gonna call it the newbie crash. You're pretty much only
susceptible to this when you are new to flying a drone. This is where you
don't quite understand the stick movements with the
sticks do that great yet. And let's say you're
trying to go straight up, but you'd go straight
forward into a wall. Instead. If you're new to
flying a drone and you think you would be
susceptible to this? I would recommend just staying in Sydney mode, flaying really, really slow and
flying high above objects to decrease your chance of making this type of crash. The next type of
crash we're gonna call the node look shot. This is when you've obviously
gained some experience. You're a lot more
comfortable on the drone and you started flying sideways or you
started flying backwards. And the second that
you are flying in a direction where your camera, you don't have eyes on it. You are a lot more likely to run into an object to tips I have for decreasing your chance
of making a no look crash. The first one is
to try to stand as close to the subject that
you are filming as possible. Because then you
can keep your eyes on the subject and you
can physically with your eyes see that the
drone is not going to run into anything as
it's moving to the side. Tip number two, if
your subject is far away and you can't
get your eyes on it, take some time to really just
cruise around your area, pointed forward
making sure you know the area that you are in and that you're not going
to run into any objects. That's the best way to avoid
the no look collision. Another really common way a
lot of people crash is by using DJI as automatic
flight modes. This is return to home. These are your quick shots. Anytime the drone
is flying itself, It's not able to make as good of decisions as you are as a pilot. Not yet, at least maybe
in a couple of years that self flying
technology will catch up to how well a human can fly, but it is not there yet. When you're using quick shots, make sure you fully understand what the orbit feature
is going to do when you click orbit and
make sure you know where your drone
is going to spend. I recommend that before you
try to use quick shots to capture a cool
shot of a subject, you first practice using all of these quick shots in an
open field where you have a chance to just
firsthand witness exactly how the drone is going to maneuver in that
chosen quick shot. Another type of crash to be aware of is when you try to fly through an enclosed space
with your DJI drone. I have personally done this. It can look really, really
cool to start outside and go inside a building and then fly straight out the
other side, right? You've probably
seen these types of shots on social media. These types of shots
are usually not performed with a
DJI camera drone, like the maverick
line of drones. These are usually performed
with a specific NPV drone. One thing you want
to know about your drone is when you're outside, your drone is constantly
compensating for when let's say you have
a ten mile per hour wind going this way. Your drone, the computer inside your drone is
trained to keep it in one split one place instead of flying off this way at
ten miles an hour, right? So the second you get into an enclosed space like
away from the wind, your drone is just going
to fly off into the wall. So keep your DJI drone away from enclosed
spaces and save the flying through enclosed
spaces for the NPV drones, which looks something like this. Maybe there'll be another
course that makes someday another common type
of crashes running into small little
objects in the sky. Perfect example, our electricity
lines and phone lines. Sometimes these are
just hanging out in open areas that
don't look like they should have anything
in the airspace. And they're really, really
hard to see on your cameras. So you have to be very, very diligent and paying really close attention to your
screen when you're flying. And last but not least, another huge cause of
crashes is because the DJI app glitches out. This is actually
really, really common. I have seen the DJI app glitch out probably more
than 50 times now, 11 good example of this. The one thing that I've
seen quite a bit is that sometimes I'll be
flying my drone, the battery will, the battery indicator will all of a sudden freeze at a certain number. So it'll be stuck
at 80% battery. If you're not paying
full attention, you might glance
down and think that your battery actually
has 80% left. But if it's bent at
80% for five minutes, you don't have 80%
battery left, right? If this ever happens to you, one thing that I've found
that usually works is I will close the DJI app
while I'm flying, open it back up and then
usually it will give me the correct
battery indicator. Another thing to watch
out for is sometimes the app will just
completely freeze. The picture on the app
will just stay the same. It'll be just a still shot. And this can be really
confusing if you are flying over a long,
monotonous place, like I was when I
was flying over the ocean and didn't realize that the image
wasn't changing and then I crashed into a building. So when you're applying definite want to pay
a lot of attention to the app because it can
malfunction on you. And one thing that I've
done to kind of get around this that I've found
is working a lot better for me is I've actually uninstalled the app and
I've reinstalled it and I no longer allow the
updates to install on the app. I found that the
updates actually significantly decrease the
performance in the app, may lose a couple of features, a couple of quick
shots here and there. But I found the
app tends to be a lot more responsive
on the base version. So sticking with the
base version of the app might be something that
works better for you.
6. Master the Hand Launch and Hand Catch: Hey guys, welcome back
to the next module. This is a really important one. In this lesson, we're gonna
be learning how to hand launch and hand catch
your DJI drone. And at least for me once I learned how to hand launch
in hand catch my drone. I hardly ever take off
from the ground anymore. Hand launching just
has a lot of benefits. For one, you can handle
launch in a lot of places where you just can't
launch from the ground. Like if you're oftentimes
I'm applying my drone, him taking off from the
beach or from a place that has really tall grass or from a place where the ground
is just really dirty and I wouldn't want to be
setting my drone on it. So that's the first CHRO of hand launching and
hand catching your drone. The next is that
you can just keep your drone a lot cleaner. And ultimately keeping
your drone cleaner is going to allow your
drone to last a lot longer. Because the reality
is when you are taking off from the ground, oftentimes you see
sand and you see dirt kind of cloud up
and around your drone. And that's getting
in the motors, that's getting in the chips, that's getting in everything, and that is shortening the
lifespan of your drone. So that is obviously not good. So I'm gonna teach you here how to hand
launch your drone. So it's really not that hard. All you need to do
is hold your drone in your hand like
this at the bottom, make sure nothing is in
the way of the propellers. I like to hold my controller
in my arm like this. And then you just
want to make sure, make sure Absolutely
double-check, especially if you have
a larger drone than the mini tomb at this thing isn't going to hurt your
fingers or anything like this. But if you have a
Pro or even DJI air, you're gonna want to
be extra sure that the propellers are not
gonna be touching anything. Hold your controller just
like this, and launch. That's the scariest
part right here. But then because of
the DJI technology, you can literally just
let go and it will hover. Just like that. That is the hand launch. There's really not
a whole lot to it. I do recommend though, when you start launching your drone, you do it in a place with soft
grass underneath you just in case you do accidentally drop your drone or
something like that. It's all your controller, then it's not the
end of the world. All right, moving on
to the hand catch. The first part of hand catching your drone is simply to
bring your drone down, hovering down about face level, about eye level with yourself. You're going to want it to be just a little bit in front of it and then take your
hands off of the sticks. You're done hitting
the sticks for now. Alright, then what you're
gonna do is you're just gonna get your
hands underneath the drone and you're
just going to pinch the main body
of the drone here. And when you do this, the drone is going to want to take off. It's going to want
to go up because it thinks there's maybe wind
that's pushing it down. It's trying to keep it at a
level, level, vertical plane. So that can be a little scary, but all you have to do once
you get your fingers on it, you turn it to the side and then that's going to turn
off the propellers. And then you got
your drink less. Demonstrate that real quick. That's all there is to it. Again, you're going
to want to practice this one in a grassy area first. And just in case the drone
does start taking off, you want to make sure that
there's nothing above you while you're
learning this one.
7. Easy Cinematic Drone Shots: Hey guys, welcome back
to another lesson. And this is a really exciting
one because in this lesson we're actually going to
start to cover drone shots. This lesson is the
basic drone shots, which actually
happened to be some of the most common drone shots. And I recommend you stick
around even if you are an intermediate or
an advanced pilot because the moves and
the order I'm going to teach them all build off of each other so I recommend everyone starts with this video and then watch the next one and
watches the one after that. All right. Let's dive into it. All right, guys, the first
shot that we're gonna talk about is the dolly shots. Now the dolly shot is one of the easiest shots to perform, but that does not mean
that it is any less powerful than any of
the other drone shots. You can tell amazing stories. You can take amazing videos
with a simple dolly shot. Let's talk about what a
dolly shot Israel quick. Basically a dolly shot
means that the drone is moving on the
horizontal axis. It is going forward, backward, left,
right, or diagonal. The drone is not going
up and down at all. It is only moving on
the horizontal axis. And to perform this shot, you simply take the right drone, stick the raid controller, and you push it in a direction. You push it in a
direction and you hold, you're going to want to hit the Record button on your drone. And then you're going to
want to push the stick in one direction and just hold it. So that is the dolly shot. It's a very simple move. But I do recommend that you start with just the
dolly in the moving straightforward until you are very comfortable with
that before moving on to trying a dolly Back or a
dolly to the side because the second you start going backward or you start going to the side, you're not actually able to see what you're flying into, right? So it's a really
easy way to crash your drone as recovered
in an earlier video. All right, real quick, I'm
gonna give you two tips for how to level up
your dolly shot. So the easiest way to level
up your dolly shot is simply by flying a bit
lower to the ground, not too low, but a bit lower than you might feel
comfortable with. The second easy tip for
leveling up your dolly shot is just to follow a line
straight down the middle. This looks absolutely incredible when you just follow a line, just like I do in
this shot here. The next shot we're
gonna be talking about is the crane shot. The crane shot is simply
all you're doing is you're moving the drone straight
up or straight down. It's a very simple shot, but it can be extremely
powerful because it works really good
as a transition piece. Because ultimately
what you are doing is you're revealing an object. Let's say, for instance, I want to show you
maybe shooting a video in my house and
then I am about to be leaving my house and
one of my travel videos, and I want to reveal what is on the other
side of my house. It's kind of a good
representation of leaving one scene and
entering another scene. Another instance where
you might want to use a crane shot is if you are making a video
for a real estate agent, you may want to start in the
neighborhood and just simply crane down to reveal the house that you are
making a video about. And then your next clip in
the sequence could be you on the ground in
the actual house. Another way I like to use the crane shot is
to actually just land the Jerome and
to use that footage, It's a great way to close
out a little sequence of drone videos and then
be able to switch to handheld camera footage. It's a really good
transitional piece just to include you actually landing your drone to kind of close out that chapter and start a
new chapter of your video. As you can see,
the crane shot is a really powerful shot
and we'll be revisiting this later by adding
additional moves on top of it in a later video, the next shot is the
stationary shot, very easy to perform. All it takes is
getting your drone situated where you
want it to be, hitting that record button and
then taking your hands off the sticks and you can even
set your controller down. This is great for
getting time lapses. I love using the stationary
shot to get time lapses, especially on a day
when it's not windy. Because if it is
really windy day, it's going to move your drone around a bit and
it's going to be, you're not gonna get
the best shot trick to getting a good
stationary shot is to anticipate the motion
that's gonna be happening in the
frame of your camera. Want there to be an adequate
amount of motion in every video for a
video to look good. And in most drone
shots you're using the drones movement to add
that motion to the picture. But in the stationary shot, you need to rely on the
motion of the subject. So with the stationary shot, if you want to add more
motion to your video, you simply can move
closer to the subject. And if you have too much
motion in the video, you can move further back. The last super easy drone shot
that we're gonna cover in this video is the top-down shot. There's something really
special about the top-down shot because people are
very familiar with seeing what their home or their backyard or
their office or an intersection that they drive
on every day they're really familiar with that looks
like at ground level. But most people have
not seen this scene, these places from a top-down, maybe their home
from Google Maps. But if you show someone
an intersection that drive on every day from
the top-down perspective, it just show it's such a unique perspective that it really captures the eye. And it's a great type
of shot that's super easy to perform as a
beginner with your drone. So as you can see,
top-down shots look really cool when there's a
lot of motion in the shot, but how can you make
a top-down shot look cool when there isn't
any motion in the shot. That is what we're going to
cover in the next lesson.
8. Intermediate Cinematic Drone Shots: All right guys, In
the last lesson, we covered the most
basic drone shots that you can capture. Those are still very,
very powerful shots. I'm not discounting
those shots at all. But in this video we're
going to take all of those shots and
we're gonna add additional layers
of complexity onto those shots to create an
entirely different shot, an entirely different
feel in your video. Let's start right back at the beginning with
the dolly shot. There are two obvious moves
to add to the dolly shot. The first element
that you can add to your dolly shot is
a gimbal motion. And the one-year probably
going to use the most often is as
you're going forward, as you're dallying forward
to use a gimbal up when you're dallying forward
and you are having a slight gimbal up motion. The viewer can't help wondering what is going to be
revealed in the shot. It's a great way to reveal. So it's a great way to add some anticipate patient
into your shot. Having a downward
gimbal rotation to a for a dolly shot makes for a completely different feel
to the video because you already see what's
in the frame and you're just seeing it
at a new perspective. A good example of when you
might want to use a clip like this is if you
have a drone sequence, you're using a bunch
of drone clips. I'll cut to the music and
your timeline in your video. And then you want to transition
to footage on the ground, a clip like this where
you're kind of zooming in on the beach
would pair really nicely with your
next clip with you on the beach shooting
more of a vlog style, a video that is the
dolly plus gimbal. Really there is a lot more to this shot because
don't forget you also have your sideways dallies and your backwards dolly shots. But I have found that
generally speaking, a forward and a backward dolly work the best with
a gimbal rotation. A sideways dolly shot, combined with a gimbal rotation, doesn't always look
the smoothest, but if you do it real slow, you can still pull off a really
good shot at doing that. Alright, moving on. The
next shot we're gonna cover is called the Zoom shot. This is where you combine a
dolly shot with a crane up or a crane down to create a zoom in or zoom out type of effect. This shot works the
best when you have a clear subject in
the shot that you are either zooming into
or zooming out of. If you're just flying
high and you are a dallying forward
and craning down. It just the shot
doesn't look good. It really does. And you kinda have to have a
subject that you were either zooming into or zooming out of. And it creates this
really cool shot that's very easy to pull off. Alright, I like to call this
next shot the showcase shot. We're building this shot
up from a crane shot. And all we're doing is we're adding a gimbal movement to it. And it's important here
that if you're creating up, then you're going to
want a gimbal down. And if you're craning down, you're going to
want to gimbal up. And what you're essentially
doing is you are trying to hold an object in the same
place on your screen. You're going to just be
watching your screen very carefully and craning down and gambling up at the
same time to create this kind of showcasing
standstill effect. This is a really powerful way
to showcase a subject and add movement to the shot even if your subject is stationary. Alright, moving on to
the top-down shot, there are several types of motions that you can
add to a top-down shot, to really add a
lot to the clip to make it a whole different
type of look and feel. The first is to add a dolly
movement to the clip. This works. You can do this with a stationary subject like
going over trees for instance, or an island or what have you. But I really like to use
this shot when you are following a moving object to make that object look like it's standing still and
everything else is moving. The next movement you can add to a top-down shot is a
little bit of movement, a little bit of just
spinning in one place. You don't want to
overuse this clip, but there is definitely a
time and a place for it. It definitely has a
unique look and feel. The last way you can
modify the top-down shot. And my personal favorite is to add a crane movement to it, to add some up and down
movement to your shot, which also creates the zoom
in and zoom out type of look, but from the top-down
perspective. All right guys, those are the
intermediate drone shots. And now I will see
you in the next lesson where we're
gonna be going over some more
advanced drone shots. I'll see you in there.
9. Advanced Cinematic Drone Shots: Hi guys. In this lesson we're
gonna be going over some more advanced
cinematic drone moves, starting with my personal favorite drone move of all time, which is the orbit, although we're doing
in this shot is rotating the drone around a stationary object
while keeping the camera pointed at that object for
how cool the shaft looks, it's really not that complicated to pull off
all you have to do if you are trying to rotate
around an object clockwise is you push the sticks
towards each other, right? So this is moving your drone in the left direction and
now you are pointing your camera to the right so
that you are rotating around that object while keeping the camera pointed at
the stationary object. And then to perform the
counterclockwise orbit, you're just going to
be pushing the sticks away from each other like this. It's really that easy
and you're going to want to find your
position and hold it. It's gonna take maybe a
little bit of fine tuning on the sticks like this to
really find the spot. And once you get
it, you just hold, make sure your
recording and then you just hold that position. As you can see, the
simple stick movement of performing the orbit shot
is not that complex, but you do really want to
pay extra close attention. Be extra careful when you're performing this
shot because it's very easy to accidentally run into an object
because your object, when you're looking at
it on your drone screen, is actually making a
much larger circle then you think it
is in real life. So it helps to
actually be able to maintain visual eye
contact with your drone, to be able to look back and
forth between your screen and the drone flying in
the air just to make sure that you're not about
to run into anything. You can make a large part of a small circle by being
really close to an object. Or you can make a really small part of a large circle by
being further away from the object hold types
of shots look really good once you're feeling more comfortable
performing the orbit, it's tempt to level
this shot up. There are two ways
that we're going to level up the orbit. And the first is the easiest. The first is just by
adding a little bit of crane motion to the shot. And this is really, really easy to do. All it means is you're
taking your left stick and you are Up a little
or down a little. The next way we are
going to level up the orbit shot is by adding a little bit of
gimbal motion to the shot. Just a little bit of
gimbal goes a long way, adds a lot more motion
into your shot. And this is great to maybe
raise your camera and reveal a sunset or reveal a skyline or reveal
anything really. Once you've completed that shot, I want you to take a second, pat yourself on the back
because this is a big step. You just completed
a move that uses all three inputs
on your drought. You use the left stick, the
right stick, and the gimbal. And this is huge
because once you no longer have to worry about the stick motions and what
type of shot you're getting. You can just focus
on the subject. And just focusing on
the subject is going to bring your drone videography
to a whole another level. Let me give you some examples. So in this shot I
am not thinking about what type of
shot I am capturing. I'm solely focused on the subject of trying to
capture my girlfriend walking into the spot and capturing a video
that is going to paint the spot in a good light. Here I am now worried about any particular drone movement. I am solely trying to capture
the best video on camera. And once you no longer have to worry about the stick movements, you can just focus on
framing up the shot and moving the drone to adjust
with the moving environment. Let me give you another
example of this. Here's a shot where it's my
girlfriend eating a bag of chips on the mountain
and it's kind of funny to zoom out from her. But this shot would get
long and boring and monotonous if it just
stayed a Zoom Out shot, what you can do to really add a lot more life to a shot is changed the
shot throughout the shot, after a bit of
zooming out, I rotate the camera to really reveal the mountains and
really kind of reveal where this shot is taking place. And this just adds a
whole lot more depth to the shot to be able to
start with the zoom-out. That's good as a
standalone clip, a short little clip to
insert into another project, but to make the shot really
live on its own as a piece, adding additional movements like this are really,
really powerful. So now that you know all of
the possible drone moves and ways of positioning your
drone and your camera. Let's move on to composition,
because composition, getting your composition is
going to be the next thing that is going to really level up your drone cinematography.
10. Composition For Drone Videos: This lesson is all
about composition. I'm first going to go
over what composition is, and then I'm going to talk about four elements of
composition that are gonna help you capture
better drone videos. Let's dive into it. All
the composition is, is how the elements in
a photo are arranged. And so you as the
drone pilot are in complete control of the
composition of your shot. You can move the drone
backward, forward, up, down. You can rotate the
gimbal however you want. You get to decide the composition that
you want in your shot. The four elements of composition
that we're gonna cover in this video are
the rule of thirds, using lines, using
shapes and patterns. Before I dive into these rules, I just wanted a quick say
that this is all subjective. There's a time and a
place for following these rules and not
following these rules. But as a general population, if you follow these rules, more people are
probably going to like the way that your
shots turned out. Now with that being
said, let's turn to the rule of thirds. As you can see right now
as I'm talking to you, I am in the middle of the frame. So the rule of thirds
would say that actually this is the way that my
camera should be positioned. Could be kinda like this. That this looks better than the way I've been filming
this course this entire time. I put chose not to do this because I have that
pillar right there. But actually, you know what, That doesn't look
so bad, does it? That is following
the rule of thirds. So as you're flying
your drone, try to, instead of flying
straight at something, fly a little bit offset. The easiest way to remember to follow the rule of thirds
when you're flying is just a turn these
grid lines on so that they're always
there and you're always getting this kind of
constant reminder to try to film as the
rule of thirds. The next rule of composition
is leading lines. Lines are powerful. There's a lot that you
can do with lines. You can find a line
and you can just fly straight down the
middle of the line like I do in this
clip right here. And that's a really
powerful shot. You can also use lines to
lead up to your subject. That's a really effective
way to use lines. The next is patterns
and textures. Patterns and textures are very powerful when you
can find patterns or textures that
compliment each other well or contrast
with each other. Try to include all
of that in one shot. Maybe go a little higher,
go a little lower, get closer to
something to really highlight the
textures of a shot. When a clip has a lot
of texture in it, it tends to look better. The last rule of
composition is shapes. The human mind loves
to see shapes. So when you're flying around, keep your eye open for anything
that resembles a square, a rectangle, a circle, a triangle, and try to
include that in your shot. And ideally if you can, maybe try to combine that shape with a texture
or with a line or with some other element of composition to make
the image really pop. Those are just the
fundamentals of composition. I encourage you to start to think about those the
next time you go out and fly and to really try
to incorporate some of these principles of composition in your photos and videos. All right, I'll see you
guys in the next lesson.
11. Lighting & ND Filters: All right guys, In this
lesson we're gonna talk about everything
lighting related. We're gonna talk
about golden hour. We're going to talk about
exposures and shutter speeds, and we're going to
talk about ND filters. But first, let's start
with golden hour. One of the easiest ways to bring your drone videography
to a whole. Another level is to simply
film during golden hour. This is the easiest thing to do. Golden hour if you're
not familiar with it, is when sunrise happens, till one hour after sunrise, and then it is also
starting one hour before sunset all the
way up until sunset. One of my favorite
examples of this is flying my drone in Cancun
straight down the beach. This is during the middle
of the day and now this is a couple hours later
during golden hour. Huge difference. Golden hour just
looks way better. Alright, now that we got
golden hour out of the way, let's talk about the 180 degree
shutter rule at its core. This is a rule to take
the most cinematic video, the video that is gonna be most pleasurable to watch
by the human eye. This rule essentially
states that the ideal shutter speed
is twice your frame rate. So if you're shooting at
30 frames per second, the ideal shutter speed
would be 160th of a second. I thought I'd come
outside to give you guys an example because when
you're flying your drone, you're outside and there's
always a lot of sun, just like there is right now. So I have my camera
set right now, 230 frames per second. That's when we're
recording this course at. And I have my shutter speed set to 160th of a
second right now. So right now I'm following
the rule and this is motion blur that
you are seeing. So this is what looks more
natural to the human eye. I just changed the
settings on my camera and I'm still shooting at
30 frames per second, but now my shutter is only
staying open for one, the two thousandth of a second. So a much smaller
window of time. And this is what that same
motion blur looks like. Now I'll try with my
fingers open a little. And as you can see, it's really choppy looking at just doesn't look as natural. Also as you can see, I lost the blurry background
effect that comes with having a low aperture because the shutter speed is so short, it has to let as much light as possible into the
lens as a canon, a very short amount
of time to do that. It has to raise the f-stop
as high as it can go so you lose that blurry
background effect, which looks so good. Okay, Now let's bring
it back to drones. When you're flying your drone on a sunny day with auto exposure turned on your drone is using a really high shutter speed, just like that choppy
finger example, this does not look good and cinematic when you switch
to manual mode and set the shutter speed to 160th of a second, everything
is overexposed. Wherever you see a zebra line, you have complete loss of information that can
never again be recovered. So this is a real problem. So how do you solve this? With ND filters? Nd filters are essentially
sunglasses for your drone. You literally just put them
over your lens like this. They make your drawing
look super cool. And then they allow
you to follow this rule and get the
most cinematic shots. Here's a clip of
me flying my drone yesterday without ND filters on. So this is just
automatic exposure and here's a clip after it
put ND filters on and you can see the colors just
pop a little bit more and you're able to get that motion blur back into the shot. Nd filters also give you more flexibility in how you
want to expose the shot. In this clip, I use a stronger ND filter
to expose for the sky. And you just can't get
a shot like this if you're using auto
exposure settings. So there you guys
have it. Lighting is extremely important to your
shot and being able to control the amount of
light that makes it to the sensor of your
camera is very, very important if
you want to get the most cinematic shots, ND filters are going to help you do this and can really help you bring your drone footage
to a whole another level.
Adam Bartnik
