How to do a drone vortex effect!

[Rocco Germani]

Hey everyone, it was requested I make a tutorial on how I made my rotating drone vortex shot, so here it is!

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[Peter Goldwing]

Interesting,, just not my cup of tea.

 

[Rocco Germani]

Interesting,, just not my cup of tea.

Yeah it certainly isn't for everyone

 

[Deleted member 6303]

Yeah it certainly isn't for everyone

Good job - keep it up as you are a smart young man with a lifetime ahead of you.

 

[UasDriver]

Nice!
I just did my 1st fast circles filming and reversing clips for effect, lovin the edit!
I use Corel's videostudio, even spent $50 to get the manual in hardcopy because I like a BOOK vs on-line, data plan sucking tutorials!
I find I can't really edit til I settle on music, then the world is good
keep learnin by doing, you have a good eye

 

[herein2021]

Nice!
I just did my 1st fast circles filming and reversing clips for effect, lovin the edit!
I use Corel's videostudio, even spent $50 to get the manual in hardcopy because I like a BOOK vs on-line, data plan sucking tutorials!
I find I can't really edit til I settle on music, then the world is good
keep learnin by doing, you have a good eye

Corel VideoStudio isn't bad, I still use it to this day if a client needs a slideshow; but if you are planning on doing professional work and want an NLE that you will never outgrow, then I recommend Davinci Resolve. The free version is still incredibly powerful and has nearly all the features of the Studio version. Corel VideoStudio will fall apart very quickly if you try to do any real color grading, SFX work, multi-cam editing, compositing, motion tracking, masking, green screen work, audio sweetening, etc.

A final thought...if you decide to buy the Studio version of Resolve it is a one time cost with free upgrades for life; vs. Corel which will charge you around $90 to upgrade every year or so. Resolve is definitely more demanding in the HW department and you will need to ensure your system is properly set up to meet its HW requirements (Puget Systems is your friend) but once you do, its capabilities are nearly endless.

Also, "fast circles" or circling an object with a camera is typically called an orbit. Standard Hollywood camera movement terms are Truck, Dolly, Tilt, Pan, Orbit, Pedestal, Zoom.

Hey everyone, it was requested I make a tutorial on how I made my rotating drone vortex shot, so here it is!

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BTW this effect is typically called the inception effect when you replace the sky with a mirror of the ground.

 

[UasDriver]

Corel VideoStudio will fall apart very quickly if you try to do any real color grading,

Yup, that wasn't advertised when I bought it!!!! Still learnin the "process" of editing, thanks for the SW choices. my last 4 minute clip, finished, is 800meg file!!!! that's the next learn, how to get good clips at 1/2 the megabytes ?

 

[herein2021]

Yup, that wasn't advertised when I bought it!!!! Still learnin the "process" of editing, thanks for the SW choices. my last 4 minute clip, finished, is 800meg file!!!! that's the next learn, how to get good clips at 1/2 the megabytes ?

Corel does have some great marketing materials, but any NLE that falls apart in the color grading department is doing your footage an injustice especially if you are shooting a flat profile like ALOG. It's probably impossible to properly grade ALOG in Corel.

To get a smaller file you just need to reduce the bitrate. Even in Corel VideoStudio you can go into the deliver / export portion and change the bitrate to something more reasonable. I don't know about the recent versions of VideoStudio but that was another area where it falls apart, it used to have terrible render performance and the bitrate was capped at 20Mbps which is too low for things like timelapses.

Below is a link to the bitrates that Google recommends for YouTube, personally I go even lower than their recommendations and the video still looks fine. I use 16Mbps for 4K and 2K videos, and 8Mbps for 1080P videos. If you go over their recommended bitrates your video will have a lot of strange problems on YouTube like banding, macroblocking, etc. because YouTube will throw away data until it gets it down to one of their preferred bitrate/resolution combinations. If your video does not have a lot of motion in it you can go even lower into the 4Mbps and 2Mbps range to really save file space.

Recommended upload encoding settings - YouTube Help (google.com)

 

[UasDriver]

Thanks, you hit on a question I haven't "answered" yet;
If i'm going to render at say 1080p, is it better to shoot original at 1080p or "assume" SW will do a good job at squashing it down?

 

[herein2021]

Thanks, you hit on a question I haven't "answered" yet;
If i'm going to render at say 1080p, is it better to shoot original at 1080p or "assume" SW will do a good job at squashing it down?

I always recommend shooting at 4K. The biggest thing is with 4K you can recompose or zoom into a frame by up to 50% without losing resolution. I recommend always shooting in 4K because you can save the footage for later projects as stock footage. if you start with 1080P footage and want to use it in a 4K project later, you will have lower quality footage. Also, a lot of modern cameras shoot 1080P footage at lower quality than they do 4K footage meaning their 4K footage downsampled to 1080P within the NLE will look better than 1080P straight out of the camera.

All modern NLEs will have no problem resizing the resolution to 1080P to conform to the timeline resolution. Speaking of which there are two main ways to downsample 4K footage to 1080P:

1 - Create a timeline in the NLE and set the resolution to 1080P. As you add footage you will need to resize the footage to conform to the timeline or the NLE will do it automatically for you. This is the way I do it in Davinci Resolve so that I have higher resolution source footage but will deliver at 1080P, when you do it this way you also can recompose shots, pan, zoom, truck, etc. to some degree without losing resolution.

2 - Create a 4K project but export as 1080P. This method works too, but you lose the recomposition benefits of using a 1080P timeline.

 

[UasDriver]

thanks again!
I only fly default (AC-RC no tab) for now which is, i believe 4k30fps
I changed my timeline setting to match actual raw footage, gets cranky when I'm in a hurry but I can "see" what the post clip will be like easier.