ok so ive been flying my mini 3 pro for about 4 months now and the footage is technically fine i guess but it never looks like what i see other people posting. like it always looks either too bright or just kind of flat and boring. im shooting in auto everything which i know is probably the problem but every time i try to go manual i get confused about what to prioritize first.

someone at my local club mentioned shooting in d-log m and doing color grading after but honestly that looked even worse to me because the footage was so washed out and i didnt know what to do with it in post. do i need to learn premiere just to make decent looking drone shots or is there something simpler. also does shutter speed even matter that much when youre just doing slow cinematic flyovers

shutter speed absolutely matters, probably more than anything else actually. the general rule most people use is the 180 degree rule ? so if youre shooting at 30fps you want your shutter at 1/60, at 24fps go 1/50. it gives you that natural motion blur that makes footage feel cinematic instead of that weird choppy strobing look you get when the shutter is too fast. you might need ND filters to pull this off in bright daylight which is a whole other rabbit hole but worth it.

for the dlog m stuff, yeah it looks terrible straight out of the camera thats kind of the point. you need to apply a LUT in whatever editing software youre using. capcut actually has some decent built-in drone LUTs if you dont want to deal with premiere yet, and davinci resolve is free and has a pretty solid color page once you get used to it. dont stress about learning everything at once, just fix the shutter speed thing first and youll notice a huge difference.

i was in the exact same boat a few months ago honestly. what helped me was just picking one thing to change at a time instead of trying to fix everything. i started with just getting exposure right in normal color profile before i even touched dlog. once shots started looking good straight out of camera i felt way more confident messing with log footage. also capcut is genuinely fine for drone edits dont let anyone make you feel bad for using it