been at this for maybe 8 months, got a whoop for indoor stuff and a 5inch freestyle quad i take to the field on weekends. my problem is my footage and even just my general flying looks really jerky and choppy. i watch videos of people doing these long smooth arcs and flowing lines and then i look at my DVR and im all over the place with little micro corrections constantly happening.

ive done the simulator thing, probably 40 hours in velocidrone at this point and im decent in there but it doesnt seem to fully translate. wondering if theres like specific exercises people do at the field that actually helped them smooth out. i try to do slow low passes and that helps a little but im just not sure what to focus on. is it a rates thing, a throttle curve thing, or is it just more hours

its mostly just hours but there are things that speed up the process. one thing that genuinely helped me was setting a lower rate temporarily ? like uncomfortably low where you feel like you cant flip fast enough ? and just cruising around doing big wide turns for a whole session. forces you to use the full range of the stick instead of making those tiny twitchy inputs. after a few sessions you go back to normal rates and suddenly you have way more control over the middle of the stick travel.

also check your throttle curve if you havent. a lot of default tune have pretty linear throttle which means small inputs near hover point make bigger changes than you expect. some people put a slight expo on throttle and it smooths everything out at the mid range. its a small thing but combined with deliberate slow flying practice it adds up.

velodcidrone not translating is a known thing tbh, the physics are decent but its still not the same as feeling the quad move under you. i switched to liftoff for a while and felt like that helped the transition more but honestly nothing beats just going out and doing the same line over and over at a spot you know really well. pick one tree or one gap and just do passes through it a hundred times. boring but it works, you stop thinking about control inputs and start thinking about the line