okay so ive been flying for about 8 months now and i feel like my footage still looks kinda flat and overexposed compared to what i see other people posting. im shooting on a mini 3 pro and i thought i had the settings dialed in but honestly every time i go out i come back with something that looks way too bright or just... off. like the sky is always blown out even when i drop the EV down.

i shoot in normal color profile mostly because i tried d-log m once and it looked even worse when i edited it, i think i was doing something wrong there. shutter speed i usually just leave on auto because i was never totally sure what to set it to manually. aperture is fixed on the mini 3 so thats not really a variable i have to worry about. anyway does anyone have a starting point i can work from because im kind of going in circles here

the shutter speed thing is probably your main issue honestly. the general rule people use is double your frame rate so if youre shooting 30fps your shutter should be around 1/60, 24fps means 1/50 etc. if you leave it on auto itll just expose for brightness and you lose that natural motion blur that makes footage look cinematic. you'll almost certainly need an ND filter to pull that off in daylight though, without one theres no way to get shutter that slow without blowing everything out.

for d-log m ? yeah it looks terrible straight out of camera thats kind of the point, you need to apply a LUT in post or do a proper color grade. there are free DJI ones you can download. once you start grading d-log footage you probably wont go back to normal profile

i had the exact same problem when i started and it turned out i just didnt have ND filters and was fighting a losing battle trying to fix it in editing. got a cheap set off amazon and it made such a huge difference. also worth checking if your histogram is showing clipping in the highlights ? i used to just go by eye on the live view and the screen on the controller made everything look darker than it actually was recording