DJI Mavic
Also known as: Mavic, Mavic 3, Mavic 4 Pro
DJI's folding camera drone line, the default platform for cinematic aerials with a stabilised gimbal, long flight time and obstacle sensing.
Updated
What it means
A Mavic is what most people mean by a drone. It folds into a bag, holds position on its own, and puts a stabilised camera where a tripod cannot go, which covers the majority of aerial work.
The camera is the reason to choose it over smaller aircraft. Larger sensors, a real Aperture on recent bodies, and a Log profile that leaves room for grading rather than baking a look in.
Automated moves are built in. Orbits, reveals and a Drone panorama run from the app, which turns a solo pilot into something closer to a crew with a second operator on the camera.
How it works in practice
Flight planning is half the shoot. Battery packs are swapped in rotation, each flight covers one or two planned moves, and the pilot lands before the aircraft insists on coming back by itself.
Settings stay manual once the light is known. Fixed white balance and a locked shutter give clips that match across flights, which saves Color correction later and keeps motion blur consistent.
Everything recorded sits in a flat profile until grading, so the raw material looks dull on the card. That is expected, and a LUT applied in review is enough to judge a take.
What to watch out for
Obstacle sensors refuse moves rather than warning about them. A planned pass that ends near a cliff face will simply stop, and the interrupted clip is useless even though nothing crashed.
Automated moves also drift. An orbit flown by the aircraft keeps the subject centred but varies its speed, and that variation shows up when the clip is cut against music with a steady Beat grid.
The long flight time encourages overshooting. An hour of hovering produces many near-identical frames, and Duplicate shot detection has more to do than it would after a disciplined session.
How RawClip handles it
Stabilised aerials are reliable openers and establishing material during analysis, so they tend to land at the start of a sequence rather than its middle. Flat-profile clips are graded alongside mounted camera footage so the two do not read as separate films.