The Drone Dish: TimeLab.Pro

Fresh from winning Drone Video of the Year in this year’s AirVuz Drone Video Awards, TimeLab.Pro chats with Tyler in this edition of the Drone Dish. With its vivid visuals, cinematic music arrangement, and breathtaking landmarks, it’s easy to see how “Moscow Aerial 5K” became an award-winner, and as TimeLab explains their methodology, it’s clear that none of those video qualities came by luck. In addition to “Moscow Aerial 5K”, TimeLab elaborates on how they became drone pilots, the video editing process they use, and how they work together as a team on-location to produce consistent, top-grade work, including their latest video, "Winter Saint Petersburg Russia 6K" (6K!). You can see TimeLab.Pro's work on AirVuz here. For more highlights from the world's best drone pilots, click HERE. And for more amazing aerial views, stay tuned to AirVuz.com. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Tyler Mason: All the way from Russia today we've got TimeLab.Pro: Andrew Efimov and Andrew Rodin, winners of the Drone Video of the Year in the AirVūz Drone Video Awards. Guys, thanks so much for joining us. Now, your "Moscow Aerial 5K" video took home the grand prize in the drone video awards. What was it like to shoot that film, and were you shooting it for anything in particular? Andrew Efimov: Thank you so much for the recognition! We were pleasantly surprised. You have a very cool site, thank you for your work. The video was a creative project, it was an idea that we came up with ourselves. We began to prepare for the video three months ago; we received a violation for the scenes over the Kremlin and in the center of the city, but the shooting process itself took two weeks. TM: How long have you been flying drones, and how did you get started? AE: I started flying drones four years ago, around the time that we met, and we were using homemade copters at first. Andrew Rodin: I have been interested in filming for a very long time, since my early childhood. Using drones gave us new opportunities to pursue using video cameras, and it was such a new and interesting thing for me to discover. Andrei brought me into this process, and since then, both of us have been engaged in shooting outdoors. In our work today, we use the Inspire 2, with the Zenmuse X7 camera. TM: Now, you guys fly the Inspire 2 as a dual operator team. What's the most important thing when you have a piot and a camera operator working together? AR: It’s really pretty simple, its not that two people are controlling the copter at the same time, but each person has his own tasks: one is a pilot, and the other is an operator, and the operator is only controlling the cameras, not the copter. There’s not much more to it than that. The main difficulty is understanding what the operator wants to do compared to what the pilot has the ability to do. AE: The operator should “see" the shot, and the main task is to give the correct instructions to the pilot and explain what he wants to see. In a way, the operator controls both the camera and the pilot. AR: But to get an interesting shot… AE: ...the operator has to explain to the pilot exactly how to steer: how fast, how high, and at what angle, and the pilot has to execute all of these instructions perfectly. TM: I'm curious, what are the drone laws like in Russia? AR: At this moment, there aren’t clear instructions that exist in Russia for flying drones. But, the government is working on the standards behind making drone flying legal. TM: You work with some very large file sizes; what's the editing process for your videos? AR: We shoot, Andrei watches the material, we install it to set the color characteristics that we need…..Andrei can explain it in more detail. AE: We remove the formatting, and after that we make special proxy files in Da Vinci. We make the montage from the specialized files so that the montage is replacing the original proxy files. We’ll then make color corrections and make the conclusion after that. TM: Do you have any projects you're currently working on? AE: Right now, we are finishing a new video about “Icy Saint Petersburg,” which we filmed back in June. We still need to arrange the music that will be underneath the video, but the video is done except for that part. TM: Well once again congratulations on an amazing film ad the Drone Video Awards Video of the Year winner, the first time I saw it I was blown away. TimeLab.Pro, thanks both Andrew and Andrew for joining us today.