Propeller wash
Also known as: prop wash, jello
The turbulent air thrown by a drone's own propellers, which disturbs the airframe and shows up as wobbling or rippling in the footage.
Updated
What it means
Air pushed down by the propellers does not simply disappear. During a fast descent or a hard stop the aircraft flies back into its own disturbed air and shakes. Dropping straight down is the classic way to find it.
On an FPV quad the result is the rippling distortion pilots call jello, worst during a sharp Acro mode move and visible as waves travelling through the frame.
Camera drones feel it less because a Drone gimbal absorbs much of it, though a quick vertical drop still leaves a faint shimmer in the picture, usually at the moment the aircraft settles.
How it works in practice
Flying around it is the main defence. Descending while moving forward keeps the aircraft out of its own wake, which is why pilots drop on a diagonal rather than vertically. The shot survives the compromise.
Mechanical tuning helps on an FPV build. Balanced propellers, soft camera mounting and attention to Motor vibration remove much of what reaches the sensor. It is a build problem before it is a flying one.
Shutter discipline matters too, since a Rolling shutter sensor turns vibration into skewed lines rather than simple blur. A slower shutter hides less of it than people expect.
What to watch out for
Repairing it afterwards is unreliable. Stabilisation treats a rippling frame as motion and tries to correct the whole picture, which Gyroflow handles better than most tools and still not perfectly. The frame was never stable, so there is nothing clean to lock onto.
It also hides inside otherwise good takes. A pass is fine until the pilot stops hard at the end, and the closing moment is where the wobble lives. Trimming before the stop is usually the fix.
Audio suffers in parallel. The same turbulence is loud, so the onboard track gains a surge of noise exactly where Wind noise reduction has least to work with.
How RawClip handles it
Clips with visible rippling are analysed normally, and steadier coverage of the same moment tends to be chosen ahead of them. Where a wobble sits at the end of an otherwise strong pass, the shot is cut before it rather than discarded whole.