Everyone, its Matt Williams from mr. mpw, calm and welcome to today’s drone expert secrets, video in today’s video we’re going to be taking a look at the five ways to shoot drone firework footage safely, everyone, its Matt Williams from mr. npw comm, and welcome to today’s video We’Re approaching that time of year now in the UK, where we are getting in towards firework season and we’ve seen lots of people going out and using their drones to try and capture footage of fireworks. Now, if that’s all well and good, but you need to know how to do it not just safely and legally, but actually do you know what going out and if you are going to do it going out and capturing some good footage, so we’ve pulled together. Five things that you need to think about in order to be able to do it safely legally and get some awesome footage and if you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel press.

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First of all, we need to get this bit out of the way. I guess you need to make sure that you are flying safely and legally. So in the UK. That means that, to kind of capture the footage and use it for commercial gain, you need your permission for commercial operations. Things to check in UPF Co are that you are able to fly at night now for a while people.

Weren’T able to fly at night under standard permissions, so go and check your PFC o and make sure that you’re not flying without permissions to fly at night. At night, if you don’t have those permissions, it’s probably too late to get them out in time for firework nights. I’M not gon na lie to you, but we do have a video for that I’ll pop a link to it down in the description below where you can go in a meander operations manual by using the bits and pieces from there watch the video see how to Five safely at night go and grab the night flying course, if you want to – and you think that be useful and watch that and then apply to the CA to get it into your PFC. Oh, so, first of all make sure you can fly by day and by night legally then, don’t forget the highest we can go is four hundred feet above the surface more on that later on in the video and the furthest you can go from yourself is five Millimeters, this can be quite difficult at night because we can actually see our drone quite a long way away and again go watch the night video for more on that I won’t go into it here. It’S really interesting and useful for you to know next, I would say: don’t fly in and around the fireworks themselves, because if your drone wants to get hit by a firework as it raised, it was raising into a rising up into the air.

I should say 40 or if you were to be affected by the explosion, you could potentially lose you don’t and no one wants. That’S happened to make sure you stay far enough away, so you’re not impacted and kind of interfering, potentially with the display, its self. That, then leads us nicely onto scouting your location, make sure you can be far enough away to shoot the fireworks safely and make sure you do a daylight check of the flying site before you rock up to fly it with your drone. This is a legal requirement. Anyway, in the UK, if you’re going to fly your drone at night, you need to go into a daylight, recchia, daylight reconnaissance, to make sure that the area is safe to operate from operate from, but also it’s worth going and potentially I guess, if you’re doing this You’Re gon na be working with the organisers anyway, but speak to the organizers, see where they’re expecting the kind of fireworks to be, where they’re expecting to point them and roughly where you should then be to be able to capture the shots that you’re after go on.

Get landowners permission before the day, make sure that you do your plan in and work out what you can do and how to do it safely, but that daylight recce is key, because you know the UK is kind of held together with telephone lines and electricity lines That kind of thing make sure that the field you’re gon na operate from doesn’t have any of those in and around it, and that you’re not going to take off fly towards the kind of point you’re gon na position. Your drone and then hit some power lines on the way that wouldn’t be a good night for anybody. So the third thing, what type of shots are you after? Are we, after shots of the whole of the fireworks display, or we have to tighten shots of certain fireworks? What is the Edit going to look like, as is always the case, start at the end?

Work your way forward, so that you know the shots that you’re gon na go and get also think about how high the how high the fireworks are going to go typical garden. Fireworks will go up to about 100 feet, but commercial fireworks, which is what we see most people shooting videos of like those at a firework display, can go anywhere between about 500 and a thousand feet. So the other thing: how far will they spread? As I said, speak to the organizer and don’t forget that the legal maximum we can go above the surface of the earth in the UK is 400 feet. So, legally, you might not be able to get level with the explosions if they are large fireworks that you’re going to be filming.

Someone to think about. Third, your drone settings. Your drones probably going to be in GPS for the majority of this, so make sure that everything is working, as you expect other things to consider. Consider turn on the LEDs off at the front of your drone. If it’s possible to do so so that you don’t get any strange glowing on the underside from the drone or the propellers which might ruin the shot you’re trying to get.

But don’t forget to balance this with the legal and safety requirements have being able to see your drone properly and the other thing is to switch off any avoidance sensors. They probably won’t work in the dark anyway, but you might find that they react strangely, when they see the explosions and they could ruin your shots unnecessarily. The fourth thing make sure you wrap up warm and don’t fly. If the weather turns bad, it should kind of go without saying, but generally it gets pretty chilly at this time of you once the Sun Goes Down. Add to this that you might be standing in a field for an hour or so, and it can get rather unpleasant, so take more layers than you think.

You’Ll need and we’re in Britain, after all, so take a warm flask of tea and a way to keep your drone batteries warm. We also recommend taking a landing mat so that you can operate your drone from it, and this will stop the camera lens getting wet during takeoff and landing. One thing that we’ve always found useful when we’re operating at night and in moist environments is a microfiber cloth. Keep this with you and take it out so that you can keep the lens and the drone clear of moisture and residue. The fifth thing, and probably one of the most important things I would suggest once you’ve got the legal and safety things out of the way.

Are your camera settings probably, as I say, the most important part of this whole piece? If you get the opportunity beforehand, then we highly recommend taking your drone out to a fireworks display before the one you want to shoot. Take the propellers off your drone and try different settings with the drones camera, whilst you’re on the ground to see what’s going to work out best for you when it comes to crunch time. But we know that this isn’t always possible for everybody. So we’ve pulled together.

A helpful list of settings which should give you a good starter for 10. First of all in these use a slower, shutter speed. You need to get as much light onto the camera sensor as possible, so put the camera into manual mode and set the shutter to one fiftieth of a second as a maximum. Putting your camera into manual mode is super important, because if you leave it in auto you’re gon na see things ramping up and down the main thing that your camera will tend to ramp is ISO will talk about ISO in a second, but in this one we’re Going to talk about the frame rate so make sure you get your frame rate to ideally 24 frames per second, especially if you’re shooting in the UK or if you’re, going for slow motion. You want to shoot in high speed 96 frames per second works quite well.

On most drones bear in mind that it may be worth cutting halfway through to change between frame rates. No one finds ten minutes of slow motion interesting after all, and switching between the types of footage that you’re shooting at the event will allow you something to play with in the Edit to make things a bit more interesting. Also, if you can manually control the aperture on your drones, camera then open it as wide as you can to let as much light in as possible. The color and brightness of fireworks can also confuse the camera sensor in your drone, so to prevent changes in the white balance, set your white balance to manual and lock it to the daylight setting. That’S what we recommend, but you may want to adjust this if you’re going for a certain look or feel next set the focus to manual and focus to infinity.

The last thing you want is your camera hunting for focus as the fireworks are exploding, so set your focus to manual on the ground and then focus your camera. One trick we use to do this in the dark is to focus on a light source like a street light in the distance or, if one of those isn’t around, get someone to stand 50 or 100 meters away shine a torch at you or kind of sideways. So that you can see it on the camera screen and focus on that, one way to improve the shots you can get in the dog is to increase the sensor sensitivity to light. We normally crank up the ISO to achieve this, but it’s worth bearing in mind that as you increase, the ISO you’ll also create more noise on the sensor. So there’s a balance to be had here.

We recommend a setting of around 1600 as a good balance between noise and sensor sensitivity, but you’ll need to see what works best for your drone and again we recommend trying different settings and deciding what you’re going to use before the night of the shoot. So why not go out into the garden tonight after dinner, once the sun’s gone down and see what dock footage looks like on your drone at various ISO settings then, finally consider shooting in a flat color profile. Yes, you’ll need to do some color correcting in post-production as part of the Edit, and if this scares you then just set the color profile to vivid and let it do its thing. But if you shoot in a setting like D log on a DJI drone, this will allow you to capture the most data possible from the sensor and allow you to grade the footage and make it look. How you want it to, rather than just accept in what.

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Mrs. DJI think it should look like for you, so that wraps it up for this video, above all, don’t forget to fly safely, get some amazing footage and wrap up warm. I hope that was useful. If you did like the video, you know what to do, give it a thumbs up. If you didn’t smash that thumbs down button twice, I mean, oh, you really really didn’t like it subscribe.

If you haven’t dropping thoughts, comments, questions down below I’ve, been Matt Williams, fly safe and blue skies.