ok so ive been flying my mini 3 for about 6 months now and the footage looks decent but nothing like what i see on youtube where everything flows super smoothly and looks almost like a movie. i have the gimbal on obviously but theres something about the way the camera moves that still looks... drone-y? like you can tell its a drone and not in a cool way.

ive tried flying slower which helped a bit but im wondering if its something im doing wrong in the editing too. i use resolve but honestly im still pretty new to it. do people use warp stabilizer or something? or is the smoothness coming from the flying itself and im just a bad pilot lol. any tips would be great, im trying to do some stuff for a friends small business and want it to actually look good

the drone-y look you're describing is almost always a combination of things ? flying too fast, too jerky on the sticks, and usually not enough thought about the actual movement having a purpose. cinematic stuff tends to have a very clear direction of travel, like a slow reveal or a push forward while the subject stays centered. once you start thinking about it as "the camera is telling a story" instead of just flying around, it starts to click.

for the editing side, if you shot in d-log or any flat profile, make sure you're actually color grading it and not just slapping it on the timeline raw because flat footage looks terrible until you do something with it. also try slowing your clips down to like 80% if you shot in 4k60 ? that alone gives it a much more floaty cinematic feel without any plugins. warp stabilizer is fine for small corrections but if you're relying on it to fix shaky footage it'll start looking weird and wavy at the edges.

same boat as you a few months ago honestly. what helped me was watching my footage back and being really honest about where i was overcorrecting on the sticks. like even tiny little twitches show up way more than you think on camera. i started flying with expo turned up a bit and it made my movements way smoother just because the sticks felt less twitchy in the center.

also someone told me to try the hyperlapse modes for certain shots even if you dont actually want a hyperlapse ? sometimes just doing a slow steady push manually while thinking about it like a hyperlapse makes you fly more deliberately if that makes sense