okay so background: i fly a mavic 3 cine and have been for about a year and a half. im comfortable with the basics, can do orbits and reveals without embarrassing myself, know how to set up a good reveal shot. but my throttle control during stuff like crane up moves or the classic pedestal shot is just inconsistent. sometimes buttery smooth and sometimes it just has this slight lurch somewhere in the middle that ruins it

ive watched a bunch of tutorials and they all basically say the same thing about smooth expo curves and slow inputs but nobody really explains what to actually practice to build the muscle memory. like what did you specifically do to get better at this. was it just hours of flying or is there some drill or exercise that accelerated it

i tried flying in normal mode for a while to force smoother inputs but im not sure it helped or if i just got bored and went back to cine mode

the drill that actually made a difference for me was hovering at one altitude and trying to do a full 360 yaw while keeping the exact same height - sounds boring but throttle bleed on yaw is a real thing and fixing that muscle memory carries over to everything else. do like 10 minutes of that a session for a couple weeks and you start to feel where the inputs are bleeding into each other

also for the lurch specifically, check your expo settings. a lot of people set throttle expo too aggressive thinking it helps with cinematic stuff but it creates this dead zone in the middle of the stick travel where small corrections basically do nothing and then suddenly the drone responds. i backed mine way off and it smoothed out a lot

simulators get a bad rep from the fpv crowd but for this kind of thing i actually think they help. i spent like 2 weeks just doing slow vertical moves in liftoff before ever touching my real bird again and something clicked. its not about the physics being perfect, its just about your brain learning to pre-empt the input rather than react to drift

that said there is probably a ceiling to sim training for this stuff and eventually you just need real air time in boring conditions, not interesting locations, just a flat field with nothing to distract you from what your hands are doing