so ive been flying for about a year now and my footage is... fine i guess. like technically its not blurry or anything but when i watch it back it just feels kinda flat and boring compared to stuff i see on youtube. i think the problem is i just take off and start recording without really thinking about what shot im going for

like do you guys actually plan this stuff out beforehand or is it more just feeling it out in the moment? i tried storyboarding once but it felt way too complicated for a solo shoot. theres gotta be a middle ground between winging it completely and doing a full film production thing right

also related question ? does the 180 degree shutter rule actually matter that much for drone footage or is that more of a cinema camera thing. ive been shooting at whatever shutter speed looks exposed correctly and maybe thats part of why it feels weird

the shutter rule absolutely matters, probably more for drones than anything else honestly. when youre moving through the air and your shutter is too fast everything looks weirdly crisp and stuttery in a way that your brain just reads as wrong even if it cant explain why. 2x your frame rate is the rule ? so if youre at 24fps you want 1/50, at 30fps use 1/60 and so on. you'll need ND filters to pull this off in daylight which i know is annoying to buy but its genuinely not optional if you want that smooth cinematic look

as for planning ? i do kind of a loose scout first if i can. either physically walking the location or just google earth and some youtube searches to see what others have done there. then i make a rough mental list of maybe 5 shots i definitely want and let everything else be spontaneous. that way you have a backbone for the edit but youre not robotically executing a shot list the whole time

yeah same boat as you honestly, been trying to figure this out for months. what helped me was just watching a lot of the footage i liked and trying to reverse engineer what the move actually was ? like is it a reveal shot, is it an orbit, is it just a slow push in. once you start naming the moves it gets easier to go out with a specific intention instead of just flying around hoping something looks cool