#goprotutorials

How to Go Social with GoPro

Drone based video and photography has become very popular recently. If you didn’t try it yet, you are probably wondering how you can take best footage from a flying machine. However, no matter how good your footage or images are, probably you’ll still need to correct and edit them in various ways afterwards.

You can use a GoPro camera for shooting with a drone. We will take here the example of using a GoPro Hero 3+ with a Phantom 2 quadcopter drone. GoPro 3+ works in the 2.7k mode and can shoot at 24fps or 25fps.

A Phantom drone can carry well the GoPro Hero 3+ camera to film aerial video. Its body has a slick design and the quadcopter has a small size, making it easy to transport around. The Phantom drone also has a good flight performance. Some models, such as the DJI Phantom are equipped with a compass, GPS and a gyro. These tools combined along with some good controlling features make the drone extremely easy to fly. You can mount on a Phantom drone a GoPro Hero 1, 2, 3 or 4. The DJI Phantom 1 features a GoPro camera mount, while the Phantom 2 gives you the choice to purchase one with it or a separate one. 

We selected for this tutorial the Hero 3+ because of its 2.7K video recording capabilities. The Phantom drones come with a simple mount system for GoPro cameras. If you want to take an exact shot, this quadcopter can work literally like a steadicam. However, for a an exact shot you’ll need to use the first person view kit and see a live video feed in real time.

If your drone comes with a special mount, mounting a GoPro camera is quite simple. Because of their motors drones can vibrate a lot. In order to avoid that in your videos, you may use soft mounts. However, for still photos a soft mount doesn’t make big difference.

Set the “Protune” flat for color grading professional recording mode. This will give you the best dynamic range. As the bitrate is not so high the grading will be good with a flat image but will needs some additional editing later. We recommend you to set your GoPro camera to ISO 400 max and turn off white balance. Set it manually depending on where you are filming. The exposure compensation is also up to you. Sometimes when you take video footage with a drone you can can’t have the WiFi on when, as it can interfere with the radio signal. In this case you will not be able to change settings whilst in the air. 

Filming over water is dangerous. Do you know how to film underwater? haha

We will use for our tutorial a Phantom drone with first person view video downlink, and a 2 axis zenmuse gimbal on it. The FPV system includes a Black Pearl Monitor RX and a Boscam TX. For telemetry purposes, the Phantom also has an iosd device. You can also use a Phantom without a FPV system. In case that you use the first person view video downlink take care to monitor the battery level and fly the drone pretty close to your location, because it may be left without power fast. A FPV system is not only helpful to let you know where your drone is flying but it also can help you compose properly your shots. Transport your Phantom drone to the place you want to start your footage and take some extra batteries with you if you want to fly for most of the day. Each battery will last only around 20 minutes of flight.

Protune is key to amazing colored videos.

The secret of becoming good with drone footage consists in doing lots of practice. Only if you put many hours in the results will improve. Of course, anyone can take a Phantom 2 in the air and bring it back down. But the real skill is to control and get the right composition of your shots. The key here is to learn fine control. Learn how to make your drone circle an object, learn how to land it exactly where you want to. Not everything has to be a sweeping motion but some subtle jib like shots are cool.