Just for sake... Congrats on your gift. I've been a videographer for over 25 years now. Done weddings, corporate stuff, documentaries, TV show and more. I noticed, I want to keep all the good footage with the P3, but like in all video projects... good doesn't mean necessary and planning is a must in all videos. I've been using the P3 for 2.5 month now (almost everyday), the more I film now the more I'm choosy about what I want. So if your like me. Try to plan the shots ahead of time. My goal is to get the best of aerial shots the bird can offer. Mastering the flight control will bring you that. I practice more and more on just mastering the remote control. I want to be able to forget about the remote and just have the bird do whatever I feel. I make it a task. I just fly it without filming, with a nice camera flight pattern in mind and try to master it. I live on a private lake (20 acres of open space), so it's easy for me to just experiment. Now I can pan the bird around an object (front, sideways or backward), make figure 8 patterns, vertical loops, smooth panning, etc. The smaller you can fly those patterns, the nicer and smoother your shots will be. And more control you'll have. True though that the camera (down/up) panning is a bit out of reach for smoothness with the sticks. I'm still working on that. Mastering those controls can also save your bird. I have maybe done a dozen clips so far with the bird (some are on YouTube). And everytime I look back at them, I want to re-edit and take some scenes out. Have a nice sunday.
