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Shooting Video with a Drone

Lesson 13 from: Create Stunning Drone Images with Adobe Creative Cloud

Colin Smith

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Lesson Info

13. Shooting Video with a Drone

Lesson Info

Shooting Video with a Drone

One of the questions that people ask me is, Do you prefer to shoot photos or do you prefer to shoot video? And the answer there is Depends what I'm shooting. If I'm shooting photos, I prefer to shoot photos. If I'm shooting video, I prefer to shoot video. I love them, but as you can tell, I have a lot of fun with my videos. And I also have a lot of form of my photos. So they both Great. So we got a few minutes of what we're gonna do is I'm gonna talk about shooting videos with a drone because people might be asking, Well, how are you getting these video shots? So let's just power through this. You can get things like goggles and stuff if you want to look through them. DJ, I just released the goggles. Or you can do if PV um, here. You can see this is the controllers an earlier one there? But I'm sitting waypoints and letting the drone fly between those waypoints. And then I can manually tilt the camera and get shots like that in video sighs. So you notice I'm not showing. It's the like,...

that's That's the difference between HD and four K? Yes, the size indifference. So I always shooting for K because I can always crop it down later, and you know what makes it look like I'm closer and it makes it look like I'm a better pilot and I really had and you can pan things. You can zoom in and out. You could do stuff like that. So always shooting for K. I'm showing HD. There's HD 7 20 down. I'm not showing you, Steve, because as far as I'm concerned, it's absolutely moving on shutter speed. Very important when you're shooting video, do not use the normal shutter speed that you use on your camera for taking photographs. People like take a still frame from video. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. What you want is natural motion. Berg blur. So you want to drag that shutter a little bit? So what I'm doing? As you can see, I'm shooting a slow it frame rate. Slow a shutter speed. Sorry to get motion Blur in between those shots makes it look better. Indie filters. You've heard of them that enables you to, um, slow down your shutter speed and get that and I shot darkens the lens changes your exposure. Moving on Taking a shot is like a golf swing. I mean, this is one of things a lot of people don't get. But this is the key to beautiful video. When someone does go off, what do they do? They take it back all the way back Further back Swing Bang! Hit that book and follow through. I don't play golf, but it was pretty good in all. The Gulf is right now. It was terrible. So anyway, it's the same thing when you're taking a shot. I do like this is this is what I do. I do three steps. I do this, set up the shot and follow through. Why did I do that? Because when you're doing the shot, you want to do almost no movements. If you're moving forward, move forward. Nice and smoothly. Slowly Get that shot. Nice. Smooth. You don't wanna be adjusting changing course. You do that in the set up. You figure out where you're going to get all your adjustments on to set up their when you're doing the shot. Keep it smooth, then follow through. Just let it go a little bit longer. It would close the shut off nicely and give a little buffer on either sides. Really important drone shots. What type of drones? Us. Do we have what we're talking about? Video. Now we have different types of shots. Static shots, which is when you just hover and shoot. That happens a lot when you've got movement happening in front of you. You don't always have to move the camera. You want to move hearts. You don't want to move stomachs moving on pan pan shot is when you are literally your uring or panning following the action. Motor racing is a good shot for that tilting until the camera pinned down follows. Follow the action. Now. What I'm doing here is traditional shots. Remember what I said earlier on about not knowing the rules before you break the rules? So, you know, follow some rules. If you look at my drum videos, you'll see a lot of traditional kind of shots in there and an occasional do something different, like my kind of signature shots. When I snap into myself from way in the distance, you know you couldn't do that without a drone, so there's, like little shots that you can do. But sometimes you just do traditional shots and Dolly side to side movement. You get some nice Parallax just like a city slider in the air Zoom. How do you zoom? How do you zoom in for prime lands if you're beat? How do you do if you term if you control it? Me that the drone in and out We are not looking through your window and spying on you. You're a tiny little dot in the distance and besides, is more interesting things to look at. So moving on roll site decide you can change the role like, Is that a thing? Yes, it's two murders. You can shoot f PV or follow mode following mode keeps a level stable if you change into if BV in the app the water will do is a locket and we'll bank with this And it looks like you're playing a flight simulator or doing an aircraft. And sometimes that's the shot you want. Establishing shot. Most important shot and video. When you look at these videos, every time is a location. If we're gonna be filming their action and hear what better way to stop the tent. You know the location. Your favorite TV show. Look at its episodic television. Every time they change location, they're they're they're flying in. Usually it's an aerial shot and then they're in the room in the same studio in the next room. But you think you're the other side of the world because they showed that establishing shot established the location anchored down. You know where you are, What time of the day it is? Tells a story. Big story, Reveal. Reveal. Shot is where you start with something and then you bring it up and then you show what you are right here. We're in The trees were in a forest Suddenly rise up. Never undressing park. We're in the rainforest orbit. One of the things I love now I shot this many years ago is one of my first door sites. I would never fly near the Griffith Observatory today. I'm just tell you that right now. Funny thing, Google. Plus put this image up. I got three now. I got two million views on this photo in three days. A little late to bed. I work up in this morning. I had a 1,000,000 views on this father is like, I've never had that kind of using the photos. Man. People appreciate my photography is reading the comments. Dude, it's the building out of G T A. So you know, yet I didn't care about my father. Grand Theft Auto for those who don't know. All right, so flights, there is a flight through shot pretty stuff. Explain for your flight through your filming. Nice straight. You don't move a lot. You don't do a lot then something as a fly by a fly by is where you target an object and you fly in. That now is different flight modes, attitude mode. And then we've got another two modes in there. The fly by essentially changed a different flight mode, and instead of the front or was being the front, you can have it spinning like a first. Be moving in one direction on that helps you do fly buys. There's a lot of different flight modes and things you can change in the apse and on the controllers to do a lot of stuff with ease moving on elevator tilt. So the elevator told us when you lock on and This is fun. It's hard, but it's a real from one to practice, cause you can do it anywhere. And what you're doing is you're rising the cupped up and down as you're doing it. You're turning and tilting the cameras. You got em bad. You saw the shots. I had a couple in the video. It's such a beautiful shot because it's creating all the background is moving. And it's not just creating this incredible parallax while you're changing altitude and I just I get off on it said, I love it so exciting and it's really easy to do just up and down, keeping that thing in the middle of the camera practice. It will take you like 10 goes and then you'll get it. Chase, not chest Jervis, but chasing an object. You can chase a boat, you can chase a car, you can chase a person, but do not chase a wild animal or a police officer. All right, so we can do that. That's a great shot. You can get some fun stuff of that. Also, the reverse chase, which I didn't shown here, which is really nice, is when you fly backwards while you're filming it, the front of a vehicle or something. Moving forward, of course. A bird's eye. Everybody loves the bird's eye. That's the same kind of thing. You know, photography. The bird's eye straight down. It's a specialty shot. That's a drone shot. It looks amazing. But my suggestion is use it sparingly. Has a lot of punch. But if you use it all the time, it will lose that. You know that punch? Then we've got free style. Freestyle is the holy Grail of drone photography. When you do freestyle, that means you fly anywhere you want your film anywhere you want. This is where you break the rules. And if you know the rules, you're gonna break those rules spectacularly. Because now you know, had a flying a smooth line, you're gonna have orbit. You know, you had to grab things as you're going by and and then you can get like, a really, really epic freestyle. But you need to really learn how to fly smoothly and precisely before you can pull off a freestyle. Me, you can do if we stop, but it's gonna be boring unless you really got that. So we're moving right on

Ratings and Reviews

user-74999c
 

I love this class. I have learned so much, and have already started using some of the techniques to shoot better photos. I just need more practice flying. I'm looking for the FB 360 template. Was it supposed to be in downloads and don't see it.? It's almost sunset so I'm headed out to fly and shoot! Thanks for the class!!

~user-cbe549
 

Really enjoyed this class. After using Photoshop professionally for over 25 years, if I learn a new trick or technique from a class, then I know it's money well spent, so Thank you Colin, I did learn a new technique. Really looking forward to putting more of these ideas into practice.

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