so ive been flying for about 8 months now mostly just messing around but lately ive been trying to actually get usable footage for a short travel video im putting together. i shoot in d-log on my mini 4 pro and i know you're supposed to color grade it but honestly every time i try in premiere it just looks kind of washed out and weird. like i add a lut and sometimes it looks okay but other times it just looks fake and oversaturated, not the moody cinematic vibe i'm going for.

also my actual flight paths feel boring, i do a lot of just flying forward or pulling back slowly which i know is basic. ive seen people talk about the orbit shot and the dronie but every time i try the orbit it drifts a little and i cant get it smooth. not sure if thats a settings thing or just practice. anyway if anyone has tips for either the color stuff or making the movements feel more interesting id really appreciate it, been watching youtube tutorials for weeks and feel like im going in circles no pun intended

the flat look is super normal when you first start grading d-log, honestly it took me a solid few months before my grades started looking natural. one thing that helped me a ton was stopping relying on luts as a final step and instead treating them as a starting point. like apply the lut at maybe 60-70% opacity and then go in and manually adjust your shadows and highlights separately, d-log tends to have a lot of info in the shadows that gets crushed if you just slam a lut on full strength.

for the movement stuff, try combining shots instead of doing one long move. like a slow push forward into a subject and then cut to an orbit or a low to high reveal, the variety is what makes it feel cinematic not any single move being perfect. the drift on orbits is almost always a calibration thing, check your compass and imu before flying in a new spot and also make sure you're not too close to structures when you activate it. closer than like 8 meters and it gets a bit sketchy with the obstacle avoidance interfering.

omg im in basically the same boat lol been struggling with the exact same lut problem. what luts are you using? i switched to a free one called vision color and it felt a bit more natural to me than some of the paid ones i tried weirdly enough. still not perfect but better. also someone told me to make sure your white balance is locked before you take off not on auto because apparently it shifts mid clip in auto and then nothing matches in the edit which was a big problem for me