Firstly Happy New Years to those of you who have visited my blog before. We are in the middle of summer down here in New Zealand and its BBQ ‘s and swimming time of the year. Its also school holidays which doesn’t do my productivity any favours with 3 kids at home.
I recently did a job shooting some bare land for sale which I always find the most challenging to do when shooting real estate video. This is mostly because you don’t have a central point of interest ie. a house to focus the viewers attention on.
The Client Brief
The Realtors brief to me was “Basically its just a strip of mown bare land between two neighbouring properties”
So my next question as always was “What are we selling”?
Answer – The views, the vineyards in the valley, ie. the location of the land for sale.
The video was for the Sothebys group who don’t like any graphics except for the end graphic with the agents contact details.
The Gear used
It was shot on my DJI Inspire 2 with the 12mm lens and my Panasonic GH5 with 12-35 and 35-100 lenses. I also had a slider on my tripod.
The Challenge
When editing the video I found it tricky to try and balance the colour between the drone and the GH5 shots. I find the DJI Drones white balances are a little too warm and slightly green whereas the GH5 has good white balance but a slight blue cast.
What I’d do differently
Again as mentioned in previous blogs I’d would have liked to have motion tracked some property boundary lines into the video so as the viewer knew exactly what area of land they were looking at. However the video will be presented on the Realtors site along with stills photos and details so not essential.
The Realtor was also happy with the first cut of the video and it was job done.
As always I found it a lovely piece of video just to sit back and enjoy, and isn’t that a large part of what keeps browsers looking? And I can see your problem. Even if there had been a white fence, hedge, stone wall or something to define what the property to define what is being sold is as opposed to what belongs to the neighbors it would have been helpful. But I got the sense from your video especially with the shots when you descend to what looks like land that was plowed, that it was the plowed bit that was the property for sale. And not a nice square or rectangular piece of property either but sort of a squished triangle. Tough to get that across. But it sure seems like you got every marketing point across beautifully from the views to the habitat to the vineyards. But as you say, if the video is not just a stand alone but will be coupled with some descriptions that let viewers know what is actually being sold and what are “the added values”, that would make up for the lack of those property lines I know you would like to add. I really loved the video and relished the views.
Question One: have you modified the gimbal speeds for your drones? The up and down pans seemed perfectly slow and steady, under perfect control.
Question Two: Am I right in thinking you actually have a video tutorial that demonstrates how you create a graphic over lay of property lines that moves with your clip? I have another large property coming up and I think that would be a good technique to use to separate the property being sold with the others around it. All are agricultural and wild landscape so boundary lines are only bits of rusted barbed wire and are highly irregular to say the least.
Hey Peter – yes I always go into my DJI Go App for my drones and adjust the gimbal pitch speed. Go into the Gimbal menu – advanced – Gimbal Pitch speed. I have set mine to about 6-9 which allows you a nice slow smooth tilt and even allows for a smooth start and stop to the tilt movement.
With regards to tracking a graphic overlay to the property boundaries, I touch on it in Chapter 20 of my Editing Real Estate video with FCPX and I did a Youtube video a while back here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmM2MKKfm6g&t=39s
You have given me a kick along thou and I will put up another Youtube video going into more detail as it is a pretty easy to use plugin. It sometimes may have trouble tracking correctly but can usually be sorted with a little trial and error. Cheers
Hey this is nice Lovely Drone shots. They will soon be banning drones here. Barbados
Yes the we have a lot of restrictions here too but hopefully common sense will prevail and they won’t get banned completely. Cheers