ok this is a bit embarrasing but. i watched a bunch of videos about cinematic flight techniques, the slow reveals, orbit shots, the push-in-while-tilting-down thing everyone does, spent like two weeks practicing. and when i went back and looked at my old footage from before i knew any of this stuff it actually looked... more natural? the new stuff is stiff and you can tell im concentrating too hard. like theres this weird hesitation at the start of every move where im thinking about what im supposed to do.

anyone else go through this kind of regression phase or did i just learn it wrong. i dropped my expo settings down thinking that would help smooth things out but now small corrections feel mushy and its throwing me off more

you basically described learning to drive stick shift. it gets worse before it gets better because your brain is now thinking about the thing instead of just doing it. the expo thing though, i wouldnt mess with that until the movements themselves are more automatic, youre adding another variable and its probably making it harder to diagnose whats actually off. id put it back to default and just keep doing the moves until theyre boring

the hesitation at the start of moves is super common and tbh some of it you just edit around in post, like trim the first half second off. but if you really want to fix it mechanically try starting your movement before the camera is pointed where you want, so youre already in motion when the interesting part of the shot begins. takes some spatial awareness to get used to but it removes that standing-start problem. also what are you flying, some craft are just smoother than others for this kind of stuff regardless of how good your stick inputs are