Devotion, patience, endurance, and happiness — all these are hallmarks of love. If you do something you love, you approach it with the same traits. The same goes for drones. When we fall in love with drones, we fall for the incredible footage that they can capture from the sky. Life on the ground suddenly becomes a thing of abstract beauty.

But, except your parents, everything you love is a result of your time and effort. As you rack up your flight logs, you’ll soon wish you knew these five tips to take your pro-level aerial drone footage to the next level. Without further adieu, here they are:

1. Don’t sweat it, just relax

Flying a drone is a stressful endeavor as you’re doing so much at once — flying, monitoring the live feed, composing a shot, and keeping a line of sight. So before flying, why not take a few minutes to make sure you’re chill enough so that you might just spot that next mind-blowing aerial you’ve been looking for.

2. Planning is everything

Before you even hit the record button, be sure you’ve got your route worked out and what kinds of angles you want your camera to shoot. Planning will help you prevent jarring changes to your flight footage, resulting in smoother shots, taking the viewer on a well-planned ride.

3. Hit record before your route

It’s every editor’s nightmare to work with ‘not quite enough’ when putting together pro-level aerial footage. With drones, you’re probably going to be editing footage by yourself, so the next tip is to start recording a bit before your planned clip so that the camera captures everything with enough room for the edit suite. We suggest having 12-15 seconds of footage to work with even if you only plan on using a few seconds from the clip. Again, post editing is a terrific way to remove extra footage, but you need that footage to edit to get to the smoothest center.

4. Repeat until you’re satisfied

The benefits of repetition are in the refining processes of doing something over and over again until you get a polished result. With drones, it’s good practice to do this because it allows you iterate and polish your footage with lots of insurance footage to work with later on. Why not film your footage four to five times, so you have enough backup if something isn’t great with the original.

5. Ease up on the controls after you start recording

Not feeling the control sticks? Well, then don’t move them! When recording, it’s imperative to avoid as much stick movement as possible; otherwise, your clip will look like a drone shot it and that’s not what we want. Any jerky control stick movements will shake the viewer from the intention of the project, i.e., to capture and suspend their amazement while viewing.

So there you have it, drones can give you pro-level aerial videos, but you need to practice and know how to use them. Now, get out there and show your viewers that you know what you’re doing so they won’t second guess how professional your drone footage is!

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