so ive been flying my mini 3 pro for about 6 months now and i feel like i finally have the flying part down but my footage still looks pretty bad compared to what i see other people posting. like when its a sunny day everything just looks blown out and flat, especially anything with sky in it. i shoot in auto most of the time because honestly i was scared to mess with manual settings and break something lol

watched a bunch of youtube videos and everyone keeps saying shoot in dlog or dlog m and use nd filters but then when i do that my footage looks even worse ? like really grey and ugly. am i supposed to do something after? do i need to edit it a certain way? nobody ever explains that part clearly. any help would be great, been pretty frustrated with this

yeah the dlog thing trips everyone up at first. the grey flat look is totally normal and intentional ? its basically storing more information in the file so you have more to work with when you edit. if you just leave it grey thats where people go wrong. you have to apply a LUT in post (its a color grading preset basically) or do your own color grade to get it looking right.

for the blown out skies in auto mode, the biggest thing is ND filters like you heard. the idea is you want your shutter speed to be roughly double your framerate ? so if youre shooting 30fps you want 1/60 shutter, and an ND filter brings the exposure down to let you actually hit that number in bright sun without overexposing. ND16 or ND64 on a bright day is usually where i start. takes a bit of trial and error honestly but once it clicks it really clicks

also dont sleep on just shooting in normal color profile with a slight underexposure if editing feels overwhelming. like -0.3 or -0.7 EV on a bright day recovers a lot of highlight detail and honestly for casual stuff it looks fine straight out of camera. dlog is great but if you dont have time to color grade every clip its kinda pointless