so ive been flying for about a year now and my footage is technically fine i guess ? in focus, exposed ok, not too shaky ? but when i watch it back it just looks like... tourist footage. theres no drama to it. i see these videos on youtube where the drone shots genuinely give you that feeling in your chest and i have no idea how they get there.

i shoot on a mini 3 pro, mostly landscape stuff, some coastal areas near where i live. i know people say slow down the movements but even when i do that it still feels flat. is it a shooting thing or an editing thing or both? do i need to be shooting log and doing a proper grade? i've been shooting in the standard color profile because i was too scared to mess with log

any advice would genuinely help, been a bit frustrated with this for a while

honestly the biggest jump for me was switching to d-log m and actually learning to grade it properly. standard mode clips the highlights and crushes the shadows in a way that just feels... consumer. like your camera is making decisions for you. when you shoot log you get all that info back and you can actually shape the image yourself.

that said, grading log footage is its own skill and if you jump in without knowing what you're doing it can look worse than standard for a while. lutify.me has some decent free luts to get started and they have tutorials showing how to apply them properly rather than just slapping them on at 100% opacity which is what most people do at first.

but honestly even before the color stuff ? are your movements compound? like are you combining forward movement with a slow rise or a pan at the same time? single axis moves tend to look flat and workmanlike. the moments that feel cinematic are usually when theres a reveal happening, like youre coming around a headland and the coastline opens up, or youre rising and the horizon just keeps expanding. you kind of have to pre-visualize the shot rather than just flying and hoping something looks cool in the edit

im in basically the same situation lol so following this thread. one thing that helped me a little bit was just slowing the footage down in post, like 80% speed instead of real time, even if i didnt shoot at a higher frame rate. it smooths out the micro movements that make it feel handheld-y. not a fix for everything but made a noticeable difference for me