Whether you’ve just bought a drone or are a long-standing drone pilot, one of the greatest joys of filming is sharing your content with the world. Pretty much everything looks better when filmed from above, and drones can give us perspectives on even everyday objects and landscapes that are impossible to achieve by any other means.
Rather than keeping your drone footage locked up on memory cards, below are some tips to get your content seen and start building an audience for your edits.
Always use professional editing software
Most modern drones capture video with accurate color grading. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t accentuate the impact of your footage using professional editing software. Moreover, you’ll almost always want to make interesting edits and transitions between clips, so make sure you use the best software available.
While editing packages used to be prohibitively expensive, prices have tumbled in recent years as more and more of us start making personal movies using everything from smartphones to action cams and, of course, drones.
The usual suspects like Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects are now much cheaper and offered on subscription packages, but you should also consider the excellent Davinci Resolve. A cut-down version of Resolve is available to download for free and, while it might not have the complete toolset of the pro premium package, it has more than enough features for most users.
Publish your content
Once you’ve color-corrected and edited your footage, it’s time to get sharing it with the world. In today’s super-connected world, you have many options available to start building an audience:
Build a website: Web development used to be a costly and complicated process. However modern advances in programming have massively simplified the work involved in publishing a site online. Whether you choose to go it alone with website builder systems like Wix, or choose to enlist the help of a professional website designer, setting up a site for your footage is one of the best ways to find new viewers via Google searches. Platforms like WordPress now have in-built coding that makes it very simple to embed videos into pages – either natively (i.e. hosted on your site) or using platforms like YouTube.
Set up a YouTube channel: On the subject of YouTube, you should set up a channel on the platform if you want exposure to the biggest audience. YouTube is the world’s second-most-popular website (and search engine), sitting narrowly behind sister company, Google (both owned by Alphabet). Remember to brand your channel effectively and always make your own descriptive thumbnails to maximize the chances of grabbing the attention of viewers.
Get social: While YouTube is the undisputed king of video streaming, don’t discount the power of cross-promotion on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Ideally, you should aim for common branding across all channels (i.e. use the same logo, brand message, banner image and handles on each) and also remember to add links to each on your website.
