Florida Flight

[Dulcimer Drone]

I've been accumulating footage while practicing with the Solo since I received it as a gift in December and this is the first compilation video that I've produced. I've already got 3 PolarPro ND filters, prop balancer and rod on order. Most of this footage was shot with the GoPro Hero 4 Black with the following settings:

Resolution - 2.7K
FPS - 60
FOV - Medium
Low Light - Off
Spot Meter - Off
Protune - On
White Balance - Auto
Color - GoPro Color
Shutter - Auto
ISO Limit - 400
Sharpness - Medium

Some of this footage used a GoPro Hero 3+ Silver with the following settings:

Video Resolution - 1080
FPS - 60
FOV - Medium
Resolution - 10MP Wide



I'm using Final Cut Pro X version 10.3.2 and this is the first in-depth work I've done with color correction, stabilization, outputting to different aspect ratios, etc. It's all a little overwhelming, but I'm trying to read as much as I can here in the forums without pestering folks. I stabilized one shot using "automatic" (am going back to do "Inertia Cam" to see how that works.) When I did my master output on this project, it came out to 2048 X 1536 and looked astonishing. I'm getting some jello on some shots, but not others. The worst vibration visible is on the pullback shot between 2:58 - 3:07 where I was flying in the same direction as 22 mph winds (though the other Florida Keys shots don't seem to be as shaky.) To see how it looked on YouTube, I uploaded the master output.

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Looking at other folks' 2048 X 1536 footage on YouTube, seems that this sort of cropping is standard. I re-rendered the project at 16:9 and uploaded that as well.

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Any helpful observations are welcome; I appreciate the input received thus far on my Solo journey. Thanks, all!

[EDIT] I went back to the "Suggested GoPro Settings for Solo" thread and realized that I had a couple of things wrong in the "Very Good" column. White Balance is now set to "Native", Color is now set to "Flat" and EV Comp is set to -0.5.

 

[davemh]

Nice footage plus I recognize some of the areas. Monkey Island and surrounding area for one.
Was looking for "The Freezer" LOL

 

[Dulcimer Drone]

Nice footage plus I recognize some of the areas. Monkey Island and surrounding area for one.
Was looking for "The Freezer" LOL

Thank you! Now I've got a hankerin' for The Freezer's boiled shrimp.

 

[Dulcimer Drone]

I went back and did some work on this video; stabilized some shots, used rolling shutter, got rid of some fish-eye, cropped out some props, dropped some scenes and lengthened other ones. I've never worked with most of these techniques in post and I see how some more tweaking could polish things even more.

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All of the research I did yesterday on balancing props, motors and gimbals, looking at filters and lenses, got me thinking about how much I could do in post. Pretty encouraging, except for the fish-eye reduction. It looks like the higher the shot, the harder it is to get a flat horizon. Or maybe it's the plug-ins I'm using. Anyway - if you've the time or inclination to compare the 1080 footage and let me know where I could've done better, let me know. Rolling shutter really cleaned up a lot of the jello, but created some instability towards other areas of the shot. Thanks, again, for checking out my footage. I appreciate it!