7 Best Drones in 2021 to Shoot 4K Video

Drones come in all shapes and sizes and offer a wide range of specifications and unique features and buying a drone that suits your specific needs can require some research. A feature that many of the new drones in 2021 have in common as its popularity has increased over the past few years is 4K video. The video resolution standard is currently in a state of transition as 1080p fades into the past 4K, or 2160p, is proving itself as the new standard as it has become increasingly financially accessible for the average buyer.

Resolution size comparison graphic

So what 4K-capable drones in 2021 are the best and why? Just because the drone’s camera can shoot in 4K does not mean it shoots well in 4K. Based on documented specifications and usage research, discussed here are the five best 4K video-capable drones available to consumers with various budgets as of May 2021.

Holy Stone HS720E Drone

#7 For those on a tight budget the Holy Stone HS720E certainly packs a punch at its price point. The HS720E is equipped with Electronic Image Stabilization, a 1-axis gimbal, Sony sensor and is capable of recording video at 1080p (1920x1080p, HD) up to 60fps and up to 30fps at 4K (3840x2160, UHD). The drone also features automated flight modes for smooth route-specific shooting.

DJI Mini 2 Drone

#6 The ultra-budget-friendly DJI Mini 2 ascends into the number three spot. The Mini 2 is a small package perfect for shooting in tight spaces like flying indoors and yet capable of producing some massive results. This unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV includes a 1/2.3” CMOS sensor that handles silky smooth 4K video up to 30fps and 4x zoom capabilities.

DJI Mavic Air 2 Drone

#5 If $1,000 is the absolute maximum you’re willing to dish out for a drone, DJI’s Mavic Air 2 is the go-to. The Mavic Air 2 is a beginner/hobbyist-level drone featuring some impressive specs for its price tag. Included with the Mavic Air 2 is a half-inch CMOS sensor capable of producing 48mp photographs and yes, 4K video up to 60fps with an 84° field of view (FOV). It might also be beneficial to mention at 1080p this mini-drone can capture up to 240fps if 4K at 60fps just isn’t fast enough.

DJI Air 2S Drone

#4 Yet another DJI drone hits the list, the Mavic Air 2’s more handsome and ripped younger sibling, the Mavic Air 2S. The Air 2S fills in all the places where the Air 2 fell short. It boasts a 1-inch CMOS sensor to gather more information, 4K/60fps and 5.4K/30fps video, 10-bit Dlog-M (RAW) color as well as updated sensors that allow for obstacle sensing in four directions. Due to the high dynamic range, high resolution and accurate color reproduction, the results of night shooting are better than ever.

Autel Evo II Drone

#3 Autel’s EVO II takes the bronze. Designed for professional videography, the EVO II produces mouthwatering 4K video quality. It might also be worth mentioning the 8K video capabilities—yes, 8K video with a foldable drone under $1,500. 8K video certainly isn’t the current resolution standard and because it is the very first foldable 8k-capable drone it probably wouldn’t be too out of line to suggest the technology packed into its little spherical camera has some kinks that need to be worked out, but it’s still pretty damn cool.

DJI Mavic 2 Pro

#2 The Mavic 2 Pro is currently the all-around best drone available for under $1,600. Its sleek frame holds an f/2.8, 28mm Hasselblad camera with a 1-inch 20MP CMOS sensor. 4K video can be captured at up to 30fps and Full HD (1080p FHD) video up to 120fps. The 10-Bit Dlog-M and 10-bit HDR color profiles allow for over a billion colors to be captured and due to its image stabilization technology, all recordings will come out looking buttery smooth. Its 100-12,800 ISO range allows for surprisingly good low-light situations. Achieve the highest quality video available for under $1,600.

DJI Inspire 2 with Zenmuse X7

#1 The number one spot belongs to a drone that is aimed more toward those whose flight purposes go beyond recreational use. While there are a few drones available that provide cinema-level video quality only one has been tried and tested over and again by professional filmmakers. Putting aside bring your own camera (BYOC) UAVs like the Freefly Systems ALTA 8 and DJI’s Matrice 300 RTK which will run you around $14,000 to $18,000, the next best thing is the DJI Inspire 2 X7. This monster of a drone fly’s up to 58mph and shoots major motion picture-level quality footage. The Zenmuse X7 interchangeable camera system offers four carbon fiber enclosed prime lenses ranging from 16-50mm and resolutions up to 8K. but performance and beauty come at a price. The Inspire 2 with a Zenmuse X7 camera runs around $8,000.

Photo Credits: i.rtings.com; edrones.review.com; dji.com; guysgab.com; dji.com; dronenerds.com; photoshack.co.nz; mikeshouts.com

How beneficial are drones for professional real-estate photographers?

Interview with professional photographer, Andre Ramoska

Q As a professional real estate photographer, how have you implemented the use of drones in your work?

A We use drones to get a higher perspective, from 15-feet high to 300-feet high. The higher elevation gives a different feel to photos and also shows the space more.

Q When you were buying a drone to use for real estate photography, what specifications or features of the drone were absolutely essential?

A We use them for photos, so we look for higher megapixels and good sensors. We do not shoot video for clients yet, so we have not cared too much about video settings like 4K.

Q Out of every ten new assignments, how often does the drone get used?

A For us we use a drone 1 out of every 10 assignments, sometimes 1 out of 15. For us, we do more high-quality photos of interiors. We do more model homes/ apartments, if we photographed single home listings, I would say I would use it every time.

Q Is having or not having a drone a make-or-break deal for some clients?

A A drone definitely gives you an upper hand. I don’t think it would break a deal if we didn’t have it because our company is so sought after for our interior photography that they would probably just hire a separate drone person. But I cannot say for sure because we have had a drone for a long time. I would say for smaller companies/ people not having a drone would most likely break a deal.

Q Are you ever worried about property damage if an accident occurs, what happens if the drone decides to fly into freshly painted drywall?

A We are always worried about crashing and damaging. It is a flying object that potentially could cause serious damage to property and/ or other people if you do not fly safely.

Reuben Wu masterfully utilizes drones equipped with lights to produce art

Using drones as light sources, photographer Reuben Wu creates astonishing imagery with long exposure shots. Wu makes light exploration more beautiful than ever.

The Field of Infinity, Aeroglyphs, and his latest work Motion Pieces give a perspective of nature previously thought only to be found in computer-generated imagery, or perhaps at the site of an alien abduction.

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“By attaching a light to a drone, and tracing linear forms above remote landscapes at night, my work offers a new perspective, showing familiar places but under an unfamiliar light,” Wu says.

 It’s difficult to comprehend the amount of trial and error, the number of hours spent perfecting the scene’s timing. The landscapes are lit to produce accentuated curves and angles resulting in a dramatic and visually appealing image.

Photo Credit: Reuben Wu

Talking about DJI's Mavic 2 Pro

The Mavic 2 Pro, an entry/mid-level drone with professional-level features that gets put through the wringer in Drone Film Guide’s November 15, 2019 article authored by Stewart Carroll “Mavic 2 Pro Long Term Review.” The article’s aim is directed toward the consumer, someone who’s currently hunting for a new small unmanned aerial vehicle system.

 

“By the end of this review, you will understand both the benefits and downsides of the Mavic 2 Pro, helping you gauge whether it is the right drone for you.”Carroll dives deep into the system addressing each and every component. He provides the results of his extensive testing of its flight performance in various modes, 10-bit video picture quality, HDR performance and more. He discusses what he liked and what he didn’t like about the hardware and software, telling the story of a thing in such great detail you might think his life depended on it, but imagine he hasn’t received a lot of complaints.I for one definitely don’t have any complaints. It’s an article of instruction and guidance, the guidance I myself sought out and instruction I consulted when I was in the market for my very first drone back in 2019. 

Now that I’ve had a Mavic 2 Pro for about two years now I can confirm with confidence that the major majority of Carroll’s assessments ring true based on my own experience with the drone. The build quality is tough and it’s obvious a whole lot of time and money went into engineering this thing. However, there are a couple items that seem a little overembellished.

Mavic 2 Pro ascending

“As much as automated flight modes like Active Track and Point of Interest is fantastic tools, 90% of the time I fly in manual positioning mode and tripod mode. I need a drone that can be smoothly eased in and out of maneuvers and the Mavic 2 Pro does so like it’s on rails at times. This leaves more mental capacity to focus on the creative rather than the mechanical aspects of the shot in question.”

Fantastic when compared to what? While there are rare occasions when I’ll use these tools, more often than not I’ve found shooting manually produces a cleaner shot. I wish I could say these are fantastic tools, but that really hasn’t been my experience. Point of Interested would especially be useful if it were consistent in its function.

For me, Active Track sits bobbing uselessly in the same boat. I’ve tried a handful of times to allow Active Track to prove to me it doesn’t belong in this boat, but it continues to disappoint. If you’re following someone using Active Track they had better be moving continuously in one direction. No stopping or deviating from point A to B, god forbid you stop underneath the drone, otherwise, the drone loses you (its tracking point) and its memory of what it was doing just a moment ago. 

Mavic 2 Pro following cyclist with Active Track

Too often have I found myself saddened by the imported footage I was counting on being exceptional, like nearly everything else. The despair hits when watching the buttery smooth automatic flight path get interrupted by a violent repositioning. Maybe I’m expecting too much.

That’s it. Those are the only few complaints of the brutally in-depth work of Carroll. In the future when that new drone arrives with 8K video at 240fps, I’ll be looking for you Carroll. I want to know what you think about it. I want to know what you think about all of it, including what you think about its fantastic auto-flight modes.

Photo Credit: Thomas Husen

How to speed up a clip in Premiere Pro to give it a timelapse-like effect

There are several ways to make a visually stunning timelapse-like video with the Mavic 2 Pro and Adobe’s Premiere Pro editing software. One of the ways to create a timelapse-like video is through the “Hyperlapse” function available in-flight via the DJI Go 4 app. While this is arguably the simplest way to create a timelapse with the drone, sometimes the spark of creativity to make one or learning you need one doesn’t happen until later.

There are even built-in effects that can be added to a clip to give the video a little bit of glitching between frames to make the video appear more like a genuine timelapse shot using photos. This effect is called “Posturize Time,” but what is covered here is simply a video sped up.

Utilizing some pre-existing footage, creating a timelapse in Premiere Pro using a .mp4 or .mov file is easier than it sounds. Before anything is done in Premiere, it’s important to consider which clip will be used. A video clip with a duration under 30-seconds isn’t going to give as great of a result as a clip one to five minutes long.

There are a few reasons for this, but the main reason is that the longer the clip available with smooth, continuous video, the more room to make adjustments in Premiere. For example, if the clip imported is 40-seconds long and there are 5-seconds at the beginning where the shot wasn’t quite set up yet and a 5-seconds at the end of the recording where the drone’s camera jerked up a little bit, that leaves 30-seconds remaining of usable content.

Now, there’s a 30-second clip in the timeline of cars passing by on the freeway and what’s needed is a ten-second clip. Creating the timelapse effect from video footage means increasing the clip’s speed thereby shortening the clip’s duration.

A 500% increase in video speed looks pretty good, but the clip is only 6-seconds long. 300% nails the needed clip duration at 10-seconds, but the timelapse effect isn’t the best. Instead of hundreds of cars flying by it is almost possible to follow one car during the shot.

For the purposes of this article a clip with a duration of 60-seconds will be used. If the clip is longer than that, say 1:20s, even better. Import that clip into Premiere then drag it to the timeline.

Shortening video clip length in Premiere

Once in the timeline, pull in 10-seconds of each end of the clip to create the 60-second clip. The benefit of dragging the ends as opposed to trimming each side is, if the clip is getting dropped into another project, now there’s video available for smooth transitions.

Right-click on the clip in the timeline and select “Speed/Duration…” When a small window appears the current speed and duration of the unmodified clip is shown and should look like this:

Adjusting clip speed and duration in Premiere

Click on “100%” and change it to “600%,” and the duration will automatically adjust itself to “00:00:10:00.”

Render the footage by selecting the clip and pressing “CMND + R” or if using a PC “CTRL + R.” Once rendered the preview of the sped-up clip will begin playing. The only thing left to do now is “File > Export > Media…” then choose the preferred output settings.

That’s it. A 60-second clip has been squished into a 10-second clip making the video appear like time is sped up.

The end result. 100% vs 600%

Photo credits: Thomas Husen

Four settings adjustments to achieve a cinematic image with the Mavic 2 Pro

1. Always shoot in manual settings with “DLog-M.”

What will come to be a disappointing surprise initially when uploading your footage after shooting with the DLog-M profile will transform into awe after making a few easy color corrections using photo/video editing software such as Adobe's Premiere Pro or Apple's Final Cut Pro.

This shooting profile is what’s considered a RAW format. What is maybe most noticeable right from the get-go is how dull all the colors are–they’re neutral. If you didn’t know any better, you might think to yourself, “Wow. I had no idea the world was so gray,” or maybe and probably more likely you’d think something was wrong with the camera.

If it’s time that you have none of and couldn’t possibly spare five to twenty minutes of making adjustments post-shoot then make the time or maybe it is best not to shoot raw.

That being said, if top-shelf quality is of the utmost importance then D-Log is the go-to. The D-Log profile offers the most room for color correction due to the 10-bit color capabilities. There are heaps of resources online to get a more in-depth understanding of color science but two of the most common graphics storage methods (8-bit and 10-bit) are discussed here briefly.

8-bit color is the system utilized to store an image’s information and each pixel represents one byte or 8-bits. It offers 256 red shade values, 256 green shade values and 256 blue shade values which offer a combined 16,777,216 available colors. If this is new information then this range of color possibilities likely sounds staggering and surely it was in the early 90s.

10-bit color on the other hand, like featured in the Mavic 2 Pro’s optional D-Log setting allows for 1,024 possible shades of each primary color respectively generating 1,073,741,824 (1,0243) possible colors. The increase in available red, green and blue shades for the camera to store will create a better, more accurate life-like image.

2. Exposure: Adjust the aperture between f/2.8 and f/5.6, strive for the lowest ISO and set the shutter speed to twice that of your frame rate.

Setting the aperture around f/4 will give the best results by achieving a balance between image sharpness and an even depth-of-field. Opening up the aperture from f/5.6 to f/2.8 allows the camera's sensor to gather more information about whatever or whoever is being captured which means more light is entering through the camera's iris.

Increasing f-numbers decreases amount of light

Understanding f-stop ratios can get a little complicated the deeper it's read into but in a few words, increasing the f-numbers means decreasing the size of the opening for light to enter and vice versa.

The more information gathered the better but without making some additional adjustments to the shutter speed or swapping out the standard UV filter with an ND filter the subject will likely be heavily overexposed or blown out.

So what's the workaround? Increasing the shutter speed is one option. The shutter speed is measured by the amount of time the shutter is opened per second. As the shutter increases the more light is required. As the shutter decreases less light is required and the subject will appear to blur when in motion.

Achieving the right amount of blur between frames as a subject is moving is much of what gives a video that cinematic aesthetic that also relies on the chosen frame rate. Frame rate and shutter speed go hand-in-hand when aiming for a cinematic image, specifically a frame rate of 24 frames per second or more precisely 23.976fps; the standard frame rate used in the majority of major motion pictures.

With the frame rate set to 23.976, the aperture set around f/4 and the ISO set to 100 the question of the shutter speed's adjustment is all that remains and can actually be answered simply by following a rule of thumb.

The 180° rule of shutter is a standardization developed by the motion film industry that says whatever frame rate is being used, in this case 23.976, the shutter speed should be doubled. An exact figure would mean setting the shutter speed to 1/47.952 second but most camera systems won't offer this frame rate, so choose the next closest (1/50 second). Because 23.976 is the industry standard, 1/50 second is the appropriate shutter speed, but the 180° rule can also be applied to other frame rates: 25fps and 1/50s, 30fps and 1/60s, 60fps and 1/120s and so on.

Manual settings configuration

The settings are dialed in but how does the image preview look, is it completely blown out? Whether or not the preview is bright white will depend on what the current lighting situation is. For the sake of this post being about dialing in drone settings and drones generally shooting while the sun is out, we'll say, yes, the picture is in fact overexposed.

So what is the solution? An ND filter. This little piece of tinted glass will cut the amount of light that reaches your camera’s sensor, in a way it’s a bit like tricking the camera into thinking there’s less light than there actually is, granting access to the above settings while attaining a properly exposed image with cinematic motion blur. Now it's time to get out there and create some visually appealing cinematic footage–or don't, you do you.

For more information about ND filters refer to the previous post here.

Photo credits: Thomas Husen; KoeppiK, CC BY-SA 4.0; Thomas Husen

Why ND filters?

ND filters, neutral density filters, are a necessary tool in the world of photography. They are the answer to your blown-out, over-exposed videos and photos. The filters help with the amount of light entering your lens which thereby reduces the amount of light reaching the sensor. They allow for the capture of shallow depth-of-field objects without your image getting over-exposed.

It’s a bright, beautiful sunny day on a rural and picturesque landscape with very few clouds in the sky, a perfect time to capture some aerial shots with an OTB drone, right?

Reduction of light to sensor at ideal settings

Wrong. Unless of course you’re prepared to sacrifice video image quality by boosting your ISO several thousand stops to capture that regal-looking cow atop a grassy hill, which isn’t recommended, the right way would be to apply an ND filter. Think of ND filters as a tint for the camera’s lens or sunglasses.

ND filters are relatively easy to acquire, simple to install and probably won’t break the bank, depending on who the manufacturer is and how many are added to the gear bag.

Polar Pro offers a wide selection of ND filters that are available for various manufacturers and models but tend to be on the pricey side. For the more budget-conscious buyer finding some decent quality filters through Amazon is entirely acceptable, just take a few minutes to read some of the product’s reviews instead of purchasing the first set found.

Just like how sunglasses for humans can be bought with polarization, sunglasses can be bought for UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. Polarization produces richer colored landscapes and allows for depth when shooting water, thanks to a reduction of glare.

 

The effects of polarization

A polarizing filter isn’t always necessary, but if the plan is to get some footage of dolphins playing in the ocean or to fly through the city on a sunny day surrounded by mirror-windowed skyscrapers, shooting through a polarized lens will make a world of difference.

On top of nearly eliminating reflections, when polarization is combined with the appropriate level of tint by selecting the right strength of ND filter for any given weather condition. The right amount of motion blur can be achieved between video frames when dialing in the shutter speed and aperture, which is something that can’t be achieved cleanly without a filter.

The takeaway from this article is hopefully one that inspires shooting better video and bold-colored photos by utilizing the right tools available.

Photo credits: Thomas Husen; Reddit user: Reacher_Said_Nothing