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Tilt-shift effect in amazing Mavic Mini video creates miniature world

You know how some video simply catch your eye? Well, this one did it for us. Post-production transformed cars and buildings into miniatures, using a tilt-shift effect.

Tilt-shift lenses are amazing. When attached to a DSLR or mirrorless camera, they allow you to define a narrow band that remains in focus, while the rest of the image gets blurred. The resulting effect gives you the impression that those objects in focus are miniature. If you ramp up the speed in a video so that, say, cars are moving quicker than normal, it looks for all the world like they are toys. There aren’t too many people flying tilt-shift lenses on their drones unless they have a heavy-lift rig with a conventional camera. But it can be done in post-processing. And the video we’re about to see involves a creator who did this well.

Very, very well.

Facebook

This first caught our attention on Facebook, in one of the drone groups. We reached out to Pavel Petrov, a drone pilot who lives in the city of Sofia in Bulgaria (which we’ve also heard happens to be gorgeous). Once we got in touch, Pavel revealed that he had a longer version than what was posted on Facebook.

Here it is, and it’s even more spectacular than what we saw initially:

Wow. Check out this tilt-shift effect!

Our Tilt-Shift questions, answered

We asked Pavel a few questions via Messenger and got some great answers.

Q: What were you flying?

A: Mavic Mini (gen 1)

Q: How did you produce the Tilt-Shift effect?

A: I have used Adobe Premiere Pro for post processing with some compound blur (for the narrow depth of field) and some oversaturation and speed up to 300%.

Q: How long have you been flying?

A: I’ve been flying for around 10 months

Q: Did you know in advance you were planning a tilt-shift? How did that influence choosing your location?

A: Actually, I didn’t know that I’ll use this effect in post-processing when I shot the video, it just fit. Now, if I intentionally shoot a tilt-shift video I’ll shoot parts of it in differnt way. It is very important to have the right angles of the shooting objects in order to look like miniautres. The location is near my home. 🙂

Very nicely done, Pavel!

We think the final product here is fantastic. We, unfortunately, don’t have the Adobe Suite, so it’s unlikely we’ll be trying these effects soon. (But hey – if you happen to know someone at Adobe….!)

Superb job, Pavel. And truly a pleasure to share this calibre of work.

While you’re here, why not subscribe to Pavel’s YouTube channel? When you’re done doing that, you can subscribe to ours.

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