How to Edit Your First Cinematic Drone Video | FULL TUTORIAL

In this video, I'm going to show you how to edit clean cinematic drone videos using a simple and free program called Movavi Video Editor. How you edit your drone footage into a final product can mean the difference between a super boring choppy video and something that's amazing. If you're like me, the easy part is going out and filming and flying and getting cool shots. The more challenging part for me and a lot of other people is the editing. Editing software can get super complicated, not to mention expensive, especially if you're a beginner. Programs like Final Cut, DaVinci, Premiere Pro can feel like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube. I just remember opening various different editors when I first started and just being like, there's no way I'm ever going to figure this out. But it doesn't have to be like that. Before we get into it, if you guys could do me a massive favor and hit the like button, I will put a photo of a very cute fish at the end of this video. Seriously, it helps the channel out a ton. So I really appreciate it. Last month, Movavi reached out to me to have me make this video, and I'm super stoked they did because I think a ton of people are looking for a program that's simple. I've been editing for well over a decade now. My usual editor is Final Cut Pro, but I honestly wish this was around when I first started editing. So let's hop in. I'm going to show you my entire workflow here. The footage that we're going to be editing is from a recent trip to Salt Flats down in Bolivia. My friend Jonah filmed this footage of me, and I think it's going to make a really cool edit. So the first thing that you need to do is download the software. The nice thing here is it's completely free to try out. So it's no risk to you to download, mess around with it and just see if it works for you. If you like it, then you can subscribe for an affordable yearly price. When you are on the free version, the videos do have a watermark and are limited to 60 seconds. But if you do like it and you want the full version, you can either use the link in the description or use code Danny for 25% off a yearly subscription. I'd also recommend trying the free trial of Movavi effects. Just so you can access all the super powerful features that the program has to offer. Again, if you don't like it, you can cancel. All right. So once you download and get all set up, this is what you're looking at. So I'm going to give a quick little walkthrough. So up here is your import panel. So all the stuff that you import, whether it's music clips, it's all going to be up here. Over here is your player. So when you're playing through clips in your actual timeline or in your import folder, you're going to be able to see them right here. Then down here is your actual timeline. So this is where you're going to start to build your entire video. There's a lot of other random buttons here that look pretty complicated, but I promise it's very simple. OK, so let's go ahead and add files. So I'm going to just select the clips from the drone. Boom. And now all of the clips are right here. And as you can see, you can watch the clips in the right viewer. I'm super stoked for this video. This is a really fun thing to shoot. We were on this massive salt flat where you could literally go 70 miles an hour for like an hour and not hit anything. It was really cool. You can also drag the clips here if you want. OK, so the first thing that I always do when I'm making these videos is I make a select project. Basically, you're just selecting the nicest parts of each video and you're putting them all in a big timeline. And then once you have that, you kind of get a picture of what your edit is going to look like and what different clips that you have. So you can kind of start to build a mental framework of what you want to do with your final video. Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go through all these clips, put them down in the timeline, and then we will move on to music, color grading, all that good stuff. So you can select parts of clips in different ways. So you can either move them like this, or I find a nicer way to do it is by using the I and the O keys. So think of it like in and out. So I'm going to go to where I want the clip to start, which is right here. I'm going to press I. I'm going to go to where I want it to end. I go out of frame. Oh, and then I'm going to drag it down to the timeline. So I'm just going to go through all of these clips, do all that, get all of our selects, and then we will talk about music and actually the structure. And as you can see, when you drag clips down, you can either put them in no man's land, just kind of out here, or you can also have it as like a magnetic timeline where they stick. You just got to drag it right next to it. You can also stack clips if you want to do that, but you definitely don't have to. And if you ever want to undo anything that you did, you can just hit command Z. And basically what I'm mainly looking for here when I'm looking through these clips is nice, stable sections. So a lot of times when you're getting drone clips, there's parts where it's sort of moving around and jittery. You generally want to try to avoid that unless it's some type of like look that you're going for. If it's slightly jittery, that's OK, because Movavi actually has a built in stabilizer that you can get pretty clean results from. And you can zoom out on the viewer just by pinching your fingers on the trackpad or using this control panel on the right right here. OK, so once you have your select timeline, now you're going to want to really build out your edit. For me, I kind of like to build a little bit of a story with my edits. So I'm actually going to start with one of these clips of me walking. So I got a top down of me walking. So I'm just going to put that right at the beginning. You can see it moves all the rest of the clips over. And then that's going to transition to me getting onto the bike. And then we're going to have the music build, build, build. And then the actual really cool cinematic shots aren't going to come until the drop of the music. And at the end, I'm going to try to close out on probably this shot, which is one that I got of my other two friends writing, just because it's kind of more far away and it's a good little close out shot. So what happens in the middle here is largely for me determined just by the music. So I'm going to go ahead and import a song and kind of just feel out which clips feel the best to me. OK, so again, I am going to hit add. I'm going to add the song that I chose, which is right here. And now it just shows up right here. Movavi actually has a bunch of audio that's already built in, which is really cool. So you can kind of just pick out like what you want. Like, so, for example, cinematic songs, you have to download each one, but it takes not that much time. So you can kind of like figure out which vibe you want. Again, I have a song in mind already, so I'm just going to use that one. But you do have that option. So then I'm going to come down here. I'm going to bring my audio down into the timeline. And what you'll notice here is you can actually see the sort of waveforms for the song. So from this, you can see where the drop is. So right here is about where the energy starts to really pick up. OK, so I am going to delete the beginning part here. I'm going to try to find a good spot to come in on. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit here. So I'm going to go a little bit further backwards with the music. Find a good spot. You're looking for beats to change the music on. That really helps make the edit feel just like more high quality. If you're just kind of randomly throwing clips in there, it's not going to be as nice. And something that's also super helpful here is Movavi actually has automatic beat detection for music. So if I come to tools, go to audio and go to beat detection, you can actually select the auto and auto detect the beats. I prefer to do it manually, so I'm just going to not do that. But it is a really helpful guideline for you. I'm going to bring that to the front. So that was a little bit late. So I'm going to bring that there. OK, so now it's me walking the bike and then I'm going to hit command B for blade, which basically just cuts the clip in half. So then I'm going to have me pushing off as the next clip. So I'm going to hit command B again, delete this section, bring this up. OK, and then right at the drop is where we're going to get into the more high energy clips. So I'm going to look around. Let's see. I think something kind of wide would be really nice. So I am just going to move these over to the end. Bring this in here. Actually, not going that fast there, so I'm going to start here. I'm going to command B that. Again, I'm looking for beats here. OK, let's get something else. I want to kind of change it up a little bit, so I'm going to look for a clip of me riding towards the camera, I think is really cool. So I'm going to bring that slide that in right there. Let's check that out. Another beat, find me going back and forth, play that, bring it over here. OK, and you don't want clips to last for too long because it just gets not that engaging. I kind of already have a similar clip is that this one's pretty sweet because it's different and I'm making a turn. Another beat. I think I'm going to end on this one here because we have similar shots to that. So I'm not going to use that. That one's pretty cool. But we already used one. And sometimes you just don't use all your clips, and that's totally fine. That clip is pretty sweet. So I'm going to keep that. This one's pretty similar to another one. So basically what I'm going to do is put this one next. And right at the end, I kind of go no handed, which I think is pretty cool. So let's take that off. OK, then I'm going to do this one where I fly over myself and the beat kind of or the song kind of changes here, which is really cool. So I'm going to find my ender clip and just works out well for us. So, OK, and that's pretty much the video. So I'm going to blade the song and that there. OK, sweet. So we are all good to go on this edit. So I'm going to show you how to edit the individual clips, because for some of them, you might want to stabilize crop or color grade. So if you go to tools and you switch from audio to video, you can see you have a ton of different options here. There's so much you can do. I only have time to cover some of it, but crop and rotate is definitely one you're going to want to check out. So this clip here, I'd like to center myself. I really like when things are centered. So I'm just going to go ahead and clip this clip. And then I'm going to do manual cropping. And as you can see, you get these guidelines here, which are really nice. So I'm basically just going to put myself right in the center. You can get the center line that green thing shows up. And that's really helpful. So let's check that out. That looks much better to me. So I'm going to go through and I can crop all these clips exactly how I want. Like this one, for example, is not centered again. So that crop tool is still active. And I can go in and just make this perfect, exactly how I want. Boom. And that is a lot better, in my opinion. So I can go through and crop all these clips like that position. You can sort of have these move around in different areas. So like if you're doing kind of like this video right now where the main video is playing bigger and I'm just kind of like a little bubble talking, you can do a bunch of options there. And it's just really simple. Like I don't understand why the more expensive video platforms don't have super easy tools like this. It's really, really nice. So pan and zoom. You could zoom in. You could do all these cool effects. Stabilization is a really good one. So for a clip like this, for example, has a little bit of a stutter at the end. You can then go in and stabilize. And then also for me personally, I like more clean drone videos, but you can add transitions. So let's say I wanted to add a transition in between these two clips right here. So I basically just come over here, go to the transitions tab, and there's a bunch of really interesting ones. There's cool glitch ones. There's just crossfade fast zoom in again. I like really like just clean drone videos, so I'm not going to use that. But if you want to do something like this film overlay, you can download that really quick, drag that in between two clips, and then you got boom, super simple transition. That was actually pretty sick. Not going to lie. OK, and now I want to get into color grading, which is a really big one because I shoot most of my drone videos in D-Log M, which is basically just a flatter color profile. So pretty much every single clip that I shoot, I have to color grade afterwards. So let's take one of these clips here like this one, I think will be a nice one to color grade. Basically, you just go to tools, you go to color adjustments. Let's go to manual mode. And then you just have all of these tools right here. Unfortunately, Movavi doesn't have waveforms or histograms, which basically just allows you to visually see if anything is overexposed or underexposed. So I hope that's something they do update in the future. But you can mess with the brightness. You can mess with the contrast, which I definitely will be. Saturation, highlights, gamma, shadows, hue, temperature. Like you can you actually have a lot of different controls that you can use. So I'm going to come in here for this one. Definitely going to bump that contrast up, saturation up a little bit. Not too much highlights. Let's go up a tiny little bit gamma and then shadows. You can bump up, which is a really helpful one. So already you can see the difference there. And I'm basically just kind of getting this thing balanced. Then I'm going to add a LUT, which is kind of like the real magic of color grading is adding LUTs because it gives you that cinematic look. It's basically just like a video filter. I sell a pack of four simple LUTs that I've used to color grade my footage for the last like four years. Some people sell like a bazillion LUTs, but I like to keep it simple. Link to those is down in the description if you are interested. OK, so you're just going to want to go to effects, LUTs and in here there's a couple of LUTs that are already installed. I'm going to add my own. I'm going to try this one here. OK, so I'm going to add McGee LUT two. And as you can see, that is way overboard. So I have to adjust the opacity of it. OK, then I click the clip and go apply to effects. And then you can see the LUT right here. So I like to go anywhere from like 20 percent to 30. Go like right around here. And that just gives it that like nice, clean look. So let's say I wanted to add a title. You can just easily go to the text tab. You can pick from a bunch of preset kind of animated titles. So you could do a text title. You could just do something simple. There's a ton of different options here. I usually like to go for pretty simple titles. But let's say you just want to put a normal text. So you just download that text, put that right here above the video. You can actually motion track text, which is a little bit more advanced, but is really cool. And again, I don't know why these other more expensive platforms don't have options like this. So you basically can come here, change the title text. So you can say like Bolivia, you can move this around. Boom. And now you have a nice title. Again, there's a ton of animations you can do to it as well. And then when you are ready to export, you just come over here to the export button and you can title it. So let's say Bolivia, you can figure out where you want it to go. Quality, I would always recommend saying hi. It's just takes a little bit longer to export, but it's definitely worthwhile. Resolution. I shot all my footage in 4K, so I'm definitely going to go 4K right here. 16 by nine bit rate. Just going to hit auto and then sample rate. We're just going to keep that same audio channels, stereo and hit OK and then just hit start. So before I go through, finish this edit and show you guys, I want to show you a couple other really, really sick features about Movavi that I'm definitely personally going to use just because it's so much faster than on Final Cut Pro, which is what I usually edit on. These effects that I'm about to show you are super helpful if you have any talking or speech in the video. So I'm just going to take a super quick video. All right. So I'm just going to bring this down here. As you can see, here's the video here, the waveforms for how I'm talking. And basically, you can get the software to automatically remove all the silences here, which is so nice because this takes so long if you do it manually. So obviously come to tools and I'm going to go to silence removal. I'm going to hit remove silence and boom, like instantly it removes everything perfectly. And then another thing that is actually so nice is it has an auto subtitle feature. So you can just auto detect the language and then just select all your clips. Boom, boom, boom. And then just hit generate and it makes really accurate video subtitles. And this is so helpful because it literally takes hours to do this for other videos. You can also change the style. You can give it like that nice cinema style right there. You can do something really clean like this right here. You can also move it around and all of the rest of the subtitles will follow it. So they're consistent throughout the video. These are just two of the extra features that I am going to use a ton. All right. So now I am just going to go through color grade the rest of the video, kind of polish a few things up. And this is the final result. All right, guys, that is it for this video. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this really just helped show you that with Movavi video editing doesn't have to be this insanely challenging thing. And if you just know how to do a couple of things, you can get really good results. Thank you, Movavi, for having me make this video. If you guys have any questions, make sure you leave them in the comments down below. If you liked the video, there's about to be a photo of a really cute fish. But only if you liked the video. All right. See you guys on the next one. Peace.