Learning FPV Drone Freestyle (In One Week!)

this is an fpv drone and i've been learning how to fly these things for about a year now i've learned a lot gotten some cool cinematic shots and overall they've allowed me to explore the world around me from a completely new perspective but there's a whole other side of the fpv world that i haven't really explored freestyle while the type of cinematic flying that i'm usually doing consists of smooth swooping movements freestyle flying takes it to a whole other level with flips spins dives and a whole bunch of impressive tricks that require extreme precision to pull off now i've never really ventured into this world before because my main motivation for flying fpv was to film all the beautiful landscapes around my home but freestyle is something that i've always wanted to do more of it's fun it looks impressive and not to mention learning all the complex maneuvers required for freestyle are bound to make me a better cinematic pilot as well so this week i tried to learn fpv freestyle in seven days [Music] on the first day i packed up all my gear and drove to one of my favorite spots to fly i have eight batteries for my quad and each one gives me a bit over three minutes of flight time i don't really have a way to charge them outside so i decided that this was the amount of flying i would do during each session giving me about half an hour of actual practice time every day on day one when i started this is what my flying looked like [Music] now i'm not going to make you sit through the whole video but overall my freestyle consisted of a lot of swooping around trees trying to hit any gaps that i felt comfortable with and a couple spins and flips thrown in here and there to anyone who hasn't really seen fpv before this might look pretty cool but again when you compare it to an experienced fpv pilot like minchan kim here who's a professional drone racer and a completely underrated freestyle pilot it's all pretty rudimentary but my point is that i wasn't going into this as an absolute beginner and there were a few moves that i had already previously learned in fact anybody starting out in fpv is bound to try doing rolls flips and yaw spins pretty early on in their practice because these three moves represent the three fundamental movements you can make with your controller sticks let me show you on my controller to roll i move this stick to the left or the right to yaw i move this stick to the left or the right to flip i move this stick up or down when your drone is in the air these are the three basic axes that it can move in so any beginner learning how to fly is bound to experiment with these moves one other thing that i picked up early on was this move the split s it's a combination of both role and pitch and is probably the easiest combination move to learn now by the end of the first day of practice i already started to notice that i was feeling more comfortable and i was less afraid to fly closer to any obstacles overall i was starting to gain more control over the drone and it was easier to start flowing from one trick to another however there was a problem i wasn't learning any new tricks i was just getting more comfortable with the ones i already knew i realized i would need a better game plan this made me think of a video once posted by the fpv channel rhoda ryan where they tried to create a dictionary of every common fpv trick now i decided this would be a great starting point because i could just write down all the moves they named and make my way down the list as i learned each one so that's exactly what i did and this is the list now i wouldn't say it's exactly all the moves but there's a lot here and again at the top we start with the basics so the first thing i'm going to try to do today is to deliberately get better at the basics those are all the tricks that i was doing yesterday that i taught myself like the rolls the flips the loops the yaw spins all of those fundamental moves but today i'm going to try to do them as cleanly as possible that means when i complete the trick when i finish the rotation i want the horizon to be level and do that as consistently as i can i don't want to finish with the drone like this or tilt it like this i want to finish flat so i started practicing each trick over and over again i would just do flip after flip after flip trying to get the timing down so they would look as clean as possible then i practiced my roles and would do those over and over and over again then i tried yaspins which resulted in a few close calls but no crashes and i finally decided to practice power loops which are a 360 loop over and then back under an object there have been times where i've successfully pulled these off but very inconsistently on this day i struggled with these quite a bit but after numerous attempts i actually started to get the hang of it overall as i was practicing each move over and over again i realized that getting more consistent was surprisingly easy and that was because i started to pick up on an almost rhythmic timing what i mean by that is that depending on your controller's sensitivity each flip should take the same amount of time to complete so once you land a flip perfectly every consecutive attempt after that should become easier and easier the challenging part moving forward would be to ingrain that timing into my head so that i can nail a flip consistently without that first successful attempt as a point of reference next was day three this is when all the fun started all right today since i'm starting to feel a little bit more comfortable with the basics it's time to start putting them together and actually learning some new tricks the first trick i tried was the rubik's cube the rubik's cube is a half flip a 360 roll and another half flip the challenging part about the rubik's cube is that you have to execute the half flip and the roll perfectly or else you won't end with a level horizon at all the rubik's cube is also weird at first because the flip and the roll are all done on one stick while all the flying i've done in the past was always a combination of both at first this felt very unnatural but after a few attempts i was able to start picking it up the other trick i practiced was the inverted yaspin this trick is a half flip a 360 yaw spin and then another half flip this one was really tough because when i would do the upside down spin it really seemed to pull the drone down to the ground so to counteract that i really had to thrust or lift my drone into the sky so that when i flipped over and did the spin and got pulled down to the ground i would have enough room to recover still every time i tried this move it felt really really sketchy although i knew when i started that it was a stretch to see any improvement within a week it started to become more apparent than ever that seeing any progress with only eight batteries a day was not going to be easy the next day on day four i started to think that one of the things holding me back might be my controller sensitivity also known as rates so i'm thinking that one of the reasons why i might be struggling to perform my tricks close to the ground is that the quad is just not spinning fast enough to perform the tricks efficiently so i just increased the rates of this quad to give it a little bit more pep speed and yeah we'll see we'll see if that helps at first this made everything so much harder and i felt like i had significantly less control over the quad i was flopping around all over the place and things just weren't going so well if you've ever drastically changed the sensitivity of your computer's mouse or trackpad you'll know exactly how awkward this feels but as i kept practicing my brain and hands adjusted to the new rates and eventually i started feeling comfortable again with the added benefit of my flips being just a little bit faster the inverted yaspin however just kept pulling me towards the ground so i decided to give up on it for now and i moved on to something else the juicy flick the juicy flick is a half foot forward with a slow half roll out it seems simple but it just looks so cool and it was definitely my favorite trick to practice so far i learned that there are three main elements that make a juicy flick look good first you want the half flip to be quick while the roll out of it should be smooth and slow the trick should also be done as close to the ground or an object as possible if it's not it just doesn't look impressive whatsoever this made it significantly harder and i had trouble committing to the upside down flip when i was already so close to the ground finally this is more of a stylistic choice but the juicy flick looks great if you pause just for a second and let the drone float upside down before rolling out of it all right so that's another day done i don't feel like i made that much progress but hey i'm probably a little bit better than i was yesterday so that's it i'll have to watch that footage back see what i can improve and yeah come back again tomorrow on day five i was excited i had only practiced the juicy flake a little bit the day before and now i was ready to go out and master it i felt really confident going into it but pretty soon after i launched into the air i realized that something felt a bit off i can't exactly place the reason why but i felt like i was doing worse than the day before i tried doing a few warm-up flips they felt alright i went into the juicy flick and then bam i crashed and then i crashed again [Music] and again and again even when i didn't crash for some reason i kept finishing my tricks facing 90 degrees to the side and although i couldn't figure out what i was doing differently this kept happening again and again i felt like i was losing control as well as the progress i had made in the last few days i know i've said before that if you're not crashing you're not learning but day five felt pretty bad it was pretty much just a write-off but then there was day six which was fine actually it went really really well i guess the previous day was just a random slump because all of a sudden i felt like i had more control than ever i was nailing my juicy flicks and rubik's cubes closer and closer to the ground and it was the first time that i realized that i did actually make some progress in the past few days and i don't really have much more to say i had a lot of fun flying on this day which only leaves the final day of the challenge day seven now was time to see if i actually made any improvements my only goal on this day was to take everything i had learned that week and turn it into one consecutive freestyle line and i almost got it on my last try i realized i forgot the upside down yaspin and overall it wasn't perfect but again it was one week anyways i hope you guys enjoy this clip also if you enjoyed this video please make sure to hit that like button or subscribe if you want more content like this here is my final flight [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so you

Channel: Matt Pochwat

Views: 407,471

Keywords: fpv freestyle, fpv freestyle drone, fpv beginner, fpv drone, learning to fly fpv drone, johnny fpv, rotor riot, how to fly fpv, how to start fpv, how to fpv, cinematic fpv drone

Id: GlCgarOgtiY

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2020