How To Get Cinematic Footage With A Drone

How to get cinematic footage with a drone?

Having a drone with a camera lets you take amazing impressive videos and pictures from the sky and with unique angles. But having a drone doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna automatically get cinematic looking footage.

I recommend exploring your filming location before filming so you know the best spots and locations where flying your drone could be dangerous or will not give you good results and take into account the limitations of the area. Knowing what you will need in advance will also help you optimize the battery life of your drone as well since you are not going to be looking where to record.

If we ask ourselves what is one of the main reasons to buy a drone, we highlight the idea of being able to take high-quality photographs and videos. Most drones come with a camera already incorporated in the drone and others allow you to mount your action camera or GoPro to the drone getting excellent footage along with a great drone.

In this blog, we help you to record amazing cinematic looking footage with your drone quality. It’s important to have the right settings and have the right drone and camera with it.

Tips For Gettings Cinematic Footage

Time

Selecting the right time is important, with the right weather and the right time you can get impressive sky colors and impressive looks. The most common time to film is daytime when it’s mid-day and the sun is above shining and its maximum power, but you should also consider shooting during the “Golden Hour”, the golden hour is the name given to the hours of the day when the sun is setting or sunrise, it will really help your clip stand out.

The shadows will be highly visible, which will help define the characteristics of the terrain that are not so visible during the afternoon, the colors are also another impressive characteristic about the golden hour, you will have beautiful orange sun and a cyan-blue sky which are complementary colors and go amazing with each other.

There aren’t that many people filming at this moment, especially at sunrise, so just by doing this, you already are going to stand-out from other people and give a great cinematic look.

Movement

Moving slowly and filming in slow-motion is a must when trying to get cinematic footage. Slow is more cinematic and gives the viewer the impression that he is viewing a higher-end video. This unconsciously increases the production value and makes the shot seem more controlled and elaborated.

Another important step to getting cinematic footage is using gradual movements and accelerating and decelerating, this will give a nice cinematic effect. Shaky and fast movement will give you bad results and will increase the chances of distortion or “jelly effects” in the images.

Adding depth to your shots is another great technique to making a video look cinematic, often with objects like trees or buildings close to the drone give depth to the shot, which helps provide a visual guide to the viewer about the size of the surrounding landscape.

Trying getting different angle shots, for example, a 360-degree video where you have your drone orbiting around your location. If you are more experienced you can also try flying your drone with FPV (First Person View) and getting high-speeds close up looks, but I don’t recommend this if you are just starting out or don’t have any experience.

Weather

Weather is a really important factor when flying a drone logically, bad weather can lead you to lose your drone and lose all of our footage and money, so choosing the right day with a good weather is important.

The wind is the biggest enemy when it comes to getting distorted video footage. Avoid trying to get any of your drone shots on a windy day. Most quality drones are qualified to fly with winds of up to 35 mph, but the images you record at these higher wind speeds are probably gonna look as good as if you were filming in steady conditions.

Post-process

When you are done filming if you want to take your recordings to the next level editing is a must. Editing the video is the final touch to getting a great cinematic video, from adding music to color grading and cutting out the bad parts and choosing the best ones will take your video from average-looking to high-end professional looking.

If you don’t know much about editing you can always search in YouTube a tutorial and learn the basics, I really recommend this since it can take your video to the next level, and maybe you will enjoy it a lot as well! If you don’t have any video editing software or want to get a better one we recommend to check out our blog about the best editing software (Click Here)

Recommended Drones

DJI Phantom 4

DJI Phantom 4 is another amazing drone with a camera incorporated, it takes stunning photos and allows you to easily share them live on social media. Thanks to the 5 optical sensors, Phantom can see the obstacles and stop or evade them as appropriate
It records at 4K videos at 30 fps or Full HD, 120 fps for clear images and takes photos in RAW format.

The new “sports” mode will make the drone move at more than 70 km / h, high-speed fun

DJI Mavic Air Quadcopter The DJI Mavic comes with an own camera with 180° panoramas, Mavic Air stitches 25 photos together in just eight seconds to create a crystal clear 32.0MP sphere panoramas. It supports video up to 4K video at 30 fps and a 12MP camera with RAW support is ready to shoot.

It also has a three-axis gimbal that is capable of stabilizing the camera even during high-speed motion for smooth video and sharp photos.

DJI Spark is the best drone that adapts to all skill levels. DJI is a big drone brand with a lot of different types of drones, the most knows drones are the DJI Phantom, DJI Mavic Pro, and more.

It’s an easy drone to fly and comes with a lot of safety features, flight autonomy, return to the point of origin, flight protection and smart battery. The lower part of the Spark captures images of the area surrounding the point of origin and takes these reference images during the RTH to achieve a safe landing.

Of course, being a medium-end drone doesn’t expect a camera like the DJI Phantom but it definitely meets the basic requirements and gets good video quality and pictures. The camera comes with a small gimbal which stabilizes the footage pretty well.

DJI Mavic Pro is the improved version of the DJI Mavic Air. It delivers great quality and sharp videos. It also comes with a gimbal-stabilized Hasselblad camera that delivers a great smooth video. Pictures are brighter, sharper, and more detailed than the Mavic

It can fly up to 31 minutes flight and reach speeds of 44 mph max speed, 98GB internal storage, and SD card support up to 128 GB. The Mavic Pro also comes with live view in real-time during flight and records 4K videos at higher bitrates with advanced H.265 compression. Operating in a temperature range of -10°C to 40°C.

The Mavic Pro comes with an intelligent flight battery, gimbal protector, remote controller, 3x propellers, battery charger, and more.