Looking for some critique and advice on this, my first video produced for a customer. I went to this job at the request or a real estate agent on behalf of the farm owner who wanted some drone shots of their recently expanded property. I was expecting it to be my typical photography package. The agent said to go ahead with any other custom work the owner wanted as well when I get there. So the owner wanted a full video tour of the property, which caught me by surprise. I am not very experienced in videography, and done never anything lengthy or for a customer. Any videos I've made in the past have been purely for hobby purposes, only a few minutes, and had a defined target, like combine harvesting wheat or something.
Drone is an Autel
Evo 2 Pro. All of this was shot in 4K 30fps, onboard color, using precision flight mode. Used all 4 of my batteries down to failsafe getting all this. Edited in Premiere. I have never done color grading on video before, so I wasn't about to make this my learning experience. I shoot photos exposure bracketed in raw log color and use lightroom to grade. But video is another animal. My major accomplishment was editing the cuts with beats in the music. Beyond that, a little over and/or underwhelmed.
First off, great first effort, the only reason I am commenting at all is because you asked on ways to improve and I always enjoy helping others improve. I have shot literally hundreds of properties both video and photos and commercial as well as residential so below is what I would recommend for the future:
1 - Length - RE videos should not be over 2:30s max unless it is a multi-million dollar property and shot with a full production team (models, cars, boats, etc.). In this day and age no one will watch 7 minutes of anything. For this video, since there was no interior or ground video I would not have gone over 60 seconds. Intro dolly in clip down the driveway, a few orbits around the main structures on the property, a few closeups of the water features, and a closing crane up dolly out shot with a cross fade to the property address would have been it. 1 battery, 8 - 10 min in the air...done.
2 - Interior - Sometimes people find the video without it being accompanied by the interior photos, since there was no interior video, after 30-45s of showing the exterior, I would have dollied in to the front door then cross faded to a slideshow showing the interior and used the Ken Burns effect to give it a video feel. For the slideshow I would have stuck to no more than 5 slides (Kitchen, Master Bedroom, Master Bathroom, Living Room, maybe the barn), then cross faded to the crane up dolly out shot into the address cross fade. 5s per slide 5 slides, would have put the total video length around 1m30s.
3 - Jello - Not sure why but the video had quite a bit of jello in it. Something is going on with your gimbal bushings or maybe one of the props is nicked. Jello is the wavy look in the footage caused by micro vibrations from the drone making their way past the gimbal's bushings combined with a rolling shutter sensor. I haven't seen jello like that in years, back in the DJI P1 days it was really bad. There is not much you can do in post to remove it, but while filming you can try filming in 60FPS then slowing it down to 30FPS in post but that's still just a bandaid to try to fix the real problem which is something is wrong with your gimbal bushings or props.
4 - Macro blocking - Something was wrong with your export settings, I saw a lot of stuttering and macro blocking in the footage, usually that is caused by a bitrate that is too low. For YouTube I use AV1, 16MB/s bitrate, 4K30FPS resolution. If you do not have an AV1 capable GPU then you should use H.265, 16MB/s bitrate, and 4K30FPS.
5 - Color - It could obviously be improved but color grading is a whole discussion in and of itself. The very short answer is shoot in LOG, edit using the parade, add saturation, contrast, fine tune with curves, add a creative LUT...done.
6 - NLE - If you are getting into video editing my #1 advice for you is to ditch PremierPro and its endless subscription as fast as possible and buy Davinci Resolve. There is no comparison in cost, features, stability, etc. etc, you get the point.
7 - Audio License - make sure that you use properly licensed audio. YouTube has a free library and there are subscription sites out there. You do not want to deliver a video to a client and it gets muted or taken down when they try to post it somewhere. More and more sites perform content ID checks and immediately mute or strike down any content that is copyright protected.
8 - Motion Graphics - simple motion graphics can make a huge difference in the production quality of a video with little additional effort. At a minimum you should add the property address for the opening and closing. For Davinci Resolve,
here is one of the best motion graphics packs that I have found. I would add a few showing total acreage, freeze frame to show a few key features, and close out with a call to action. For the video portion on site you would have spent about 20min total, in post around an hour and had a polished product.
