so ive had my setup running pretty well for a few months now but lately the gimbal on my camera drone has been drifting horizontally, like its not actually holding the horizon the way it used to. i calibrate it on a flat surface every time before i fly and it looks fine on the bench but then once im in the air for a few minutes it slowly starts to tilt and by the time im doing any kind of cinematic pass the footage is already crooked.

im running a 3-axis gimbal with a mirrorless on it, nothing crazy heavy, well within the payload rating. i dont think its a motor issue because all three axes respond fine when i push them manually. could it be the IMU inside the gimbal itself going bad? or maybe something with how i have the camera mounted and the balance is slightly off even though i went through the whole balancing process. anyone dealt with this before

had almost the exact same thing happen and it drove me nuts for weeks. turned out my camera wasnt balanced quite right even though i thought it was ? the lens i was using had a different weight distribution than what i had set up the gimbal for originally. even a tiny imbalance puts constant strain on the motors and they start to lose the fight against it over time, especially in the roll axis. try rebalancing with the exact lens you fly with, and i mean be pedantic about it, like let go completely and see if it stays put before you even power up the motors. also worth checking if the gimbal firmware is up to date because some manufacturers push imu corrections in updates that actually make a real difference.

what gimbal is it? because some of the cheaper ones just have garbage imu drift issues baked in and no amount of calibrating fixes it properly. ive seen people spend hours trying to tune a mid-range gimbal and eventually just accept that its never going to hold perfectly. if its a known brand there might be specific community firmware or config files floating around that other people have dialed in for your exact camera combo.