Hello... fellow Mavic Mini pilot here.

Grading my footage I've quickly found out that... while I'd truly like to apply LUTs to my videos, I probably couldn't find anything universal that could suit my mood, my scenes, lights and so on. So I resort to manual everything instead.




As for the software, I use Sony Movie Studio Platinum 13 (from 2013)... I don't plan a paying upgrade right now and as much as I like DaVinci Resolve to color grade my footage I am not comfortable with it, I have my small share of knowledge with MS acquired in years and I don't want to give that up and spend months learning again from the basics.

So here I am, sharing my stack to improve my drone videos with a focus on Cinema like pictures. Please consider that I've barely ever checked a tutorial and learnt most of it the hard way.

So I start with a straight out of the camera (Mavic Mini) motion picture still frame (grab), that is my base.




After the basic RAW footage has been trimmed to length there are several passages:

• Crop 21:9 aspect ratio (Cinemascope like)
• Levels: pretty much self explanatory and quite conservative, I increase the gamma and touch the in/out level marginally (more to be worked upon later)
• HF Color Temperature (it seems to introduce a bit of a reddish hue but I like it better than the Sony one)
• Color Corrector: this helps greatly not only balancing and enhancing the colours for highlights, midtones and shadows but also gaining more gamma without impacting the midtones details
• Color Curves: I use it to soften the highlights without flattening them or spacing them apart.
• Glow: used with discretion can help bring back the sky before grading it, use it too much and you're in for big artifacts
• HSL adjust: useful to give the last bit of shine to the picture
  

Don't tell me they're in the wrong order, but they do apply quite good in my workflow, and if I try shuffling them around I end up with unsatisfactory results.

Then... I make a copy of it all, and use it as a base for the Sony Gaussian blur filter. That (source alpha, compositing child) track layer is applied selectively with an upper track layer (multiply mask, compositing parent) with a Sony Color gradient mask applied with Fx Mask generator (Alpha). This allows me to simulate the depth of field of a 35mm Cinema camera with Guassian filter of just 0.0015 to 0.0030 range (both horizontal and vertical).

The uppermost layer is just a regular alpha channel with a Color gradient mask to better grade wider regions (e.g. skies, dark expanses).




So far this worked ok for me and I am decently pleased with the result. I could surely improve, save for the fact that I am using outdated software, but I am far more interested in making videos rather than learning new techniques right now. I hope you can enjoy this insight into a stranger's workflow.


--
m80 on YouTube - My useless RUBBISH
https://www.youtube.com/user/m80116/videos

Very nice work.
I'm on the same page regarding my editor.
I love the Sony Vegas Pro 14 workflow.
I can work so quickly with it that I only use Resolve for things Vegas can't do (well). (like motion tracking)

Resolve is promising but before I could commit to it I'd really like to understand where it stands compared to Movie Studio...still I feel MS would suit me the best.

I think the latest Movie Studio could be a nice upgrade, (being already very powerful), probably should invest money into filters.
I installed the latest trial and never used it except for a very short try.

very nice work indeed buddy ! keep them great pictures coming !

Its great that everything is working for you buddy! keep changing and experimenting ! Those who dont like your pictures discard their coments like a snotty tissue  

very nice work indeed.

Excellent thread

I would avoid LUTs for drone footage altogether

Thanks for providing the optins here.