Aerial and Drone Filmmaking
Help your footage take flight – the sky’s the limit!
Learn how to create your own spectacular aerial films as Karl and the team capture some incredible footage with drone cameras.
You’ll cover what to consider before a shoot, from weather and local aviation regulations to essential equipment and accessories. Also explained in this class is the value of working in manual mode and the settings to keep in mind when doing so.
As the team fly the drone over some stunning local scenery, you’ll see them demonstrate a range of its features and capabilities, including the Circle, Rocket, Boomerang and Helix modes.
In this class, the drone used is the DJI Mavic 2 Pro (the newest comparable model is the DJI Mavic 3 Cine). The DJI Mavic is our preferred drone due to its many features, ease of flying, and the quality of video that can be captured.
In this class:
- How to capture beautiful drone footage
- Tips and techniques for drone filmmaking
- Aerial videography methods
- Equipment and accessories for drone videography
If you enjoy this class, you may also like to check out Real Estate Filmmaking.
Questions? Please post them in the comments section below.
Comments
On the intro drone footage which I believe is shot at 24fps I’m seeing a slight stutter every 24-30 frames or so. I see this in YouTube drone videos all the time and I have no idea what causes this. Can you tell me what the cause is and how to avoid it?
The only reason I can think that could cause that is if the drone frame rate doesn’t match the frame rate of the timeline you are editing/ exporting in, we usually film everything in 25fps (unless filming for slow mo) and then edit and export in 25fps, the clip you mentioned in the intro may have still be set in 24fps if it was a new drone at the time or there had been a recent update that defaulted back to the factory 24fps setting, if you find that your drone footage does not match your other camera frame rates in an edit you can interpret the footage to be which ever frame you like which can help, results do vary but it can be a fix, ideally you want to set your drone to match whatever frame rate you will be editing in for the final piece or if its purely drone footage make sure the editing sequence is set to that frame rate. Hope this helps
400 feet height, not 400 metres
Hi Karl,
Thanks for the information.
Fabulous!
Do you generally record in 4k 24 fps?
Thank you for this presentation.
Hi Francois, generally 4K at 25fps and either 1/30th or 1/50th of a second shutter speeds on Sony cameras and I’m pretty sure that’s what Ben does on the drones too.
What made you decide to use 24fps at 30th shutter? Usually 50th for 24fps.
Hi Kevin, I use 25fps (as that’s standard in UK), sometimes 50fps so I can slow to half speed if needed and on drone footage 50fps doesn’t seem to look too sharp if you don’t slow it down. For the shutter yes usually double is best (180 degree rule etc) so ill use a mix between 1/50th and 1/30th, 1/30th you just get a little more motion blur and obviously a bit extra light, so depending on the situation (if im filming on a boat and im just about to get the shot and the sun goes behind a cloud I’d rather trade off dropping the shutter down to 1/30th and having extra motion blur than landing the drone and swapping the ND filter and missing the shot, or in some cases you may just want that slight extra motion blur, there isn’t too much in it to be honest, if you check the ‘Frame Rates, Shutter Speeds and Slow Motion’ there is a direct comparison between filming at 30fps 1/30th and 30fps 1/60th if you want to see the difference. Hope this helps