Hi all,
I use MSFS mainly for creating ‘full flight’ videography for my Youtube channel, aiming for high realism. I just wanted to share my impressions after spending quite a few hours setting up MSFS 2024 for realistic airliner videography. Also keen to hear what others think.
(My system: RTX 4090, i7-12700, 32GB RAM, 100 Mbps internet)
Pros:
- FPS: Good FPS are key for videography. The performance boost in MSFS 2024 has been so significant that it was the decisive factor for me to swap to MSFS 2024. Where in MSFS 2020 at busy airports with traffic I would often get 40 FPS or less (4K) and many stutters, I have now gained at least 10 FPS and less stutters. Sometimes I gain 20 or 30 FPS.
- Scenery: The new lighting (sky, atmosphere, clouds) is awesome, especially at sunrise and sunset. The implementation of seasons is a big win.
- Airliners: Top class airliners are crucial for good videography. The inclusion of top quality third party airliners, particularly the inibuilds A330, was the right choice, and I hope cooperation with third party developers will continue and be expanded.
Room for improvement:
- Scenery: Realistic looking scenery is key, and there are unfortunately still quite a few issues. MSFS 2024 disappointed in some areas, e.g., where around KJFK, 3D bridges are now ‘filled’ again, and Manhattan in 3D looks gruesome. I found a huge tree in Vancouver CBD (is it still there?). Mountain shapes still look way too soft from the distance, like in MSFS 2020. Winter still shows a lot of green trees where there should be none. The snow line is a straight cut at a certain altitude - highly unrealistic. Road traffic, unfortunately, looks like in MSFS 2020.
- Streaming: Not being able to download airliners (or airports previously bought through the MSFS 2020 store) is a big problem as textures often load with significant delay despite good internet connection, which causes me having to re-record scenes. Here, I urgently request that a download function be added (which I hope will occur when the Store is available).
- Airliner compatibility: I do miss the PMDG 777 in the Sim, and should it not come, this would be a heavy loss for all airliner pilots in MSFS 2024. I hope Asobo provides PMDG with meaningful assistance here, and I feel sorry that PMDG have so much undeserved trouble.
- Liveries: I understand that Asobo have encrypted all aircraft, which prevents the creation of liveries (or makes it harder). This is very sad news for all those who wish to perform any flight with a particular airline, as it makes it much harder to get the right livery.
- AI traffic: AI traffic still behaves erratically and highly unrealistically, making realistic videography tricky. Aircraft move through each other, spawn on top of each other, spin endlessly, drive off the taxiway, don’t flare at landing, pushback is not modelled properly … It’s like in MSFS 2020 (and after fours years of these problems, it seems no one at Asobo seems to care). I have turned the in-built AI traffic completely off as I don’t want to see Airbus or Boeing house liveries in my videos, or DC-10 aircraft flying around, or cargo planes docked at passenger gates, etc. I am currently using FSLTL instead. I also hope Just Flight FS Traffic becomes available for MSFS 2024 soon.
- ATC: The in-built ATC still sounds robotic and therefore isn’t an option for realistic videography (better use Third Party ATC software or go live).
- Controls: Finely tuned controls are key for realistic videos. However, the calibration of controls, from keyboard to joystick, throttle and Headtracking (Tobii 5), was a nightmare. The controls menu is quite complicated and broken, and it cost me many hours to get it right for me.
- Drone camera: The drone camera is a key tool for videography, but it’s basically a copy from MSFS 2020 and highly complicated to use for all those that don’t know it well. Especially focusing the drone on the aircraft via Drone Lock mode remains challenging. Popular views such as ‘tower view’ are still not available.
- Custom cameras: For videography, it is important to be able to switch between numerous custom views quickly. We only have 10 custom views (plus a few instrument views which can’t be adjusted). It would be preferrable to have more custom views (20 would be a good number).
- Esc key: When pressing Esc, the camera moves out of the aircraft and hovers around it, which makes cockpit and runway textures blurry, causing them to re-load. Not great for videography.
- Menu bar: When moving the mouse, the menu bar appears at the top of the screen, which breaks immersion and is not what you want to see in a video. Thankfully there is now a free tool to fix this on Flightsim.to.
There are certainly other great things about MSFS 2024 or issues that need improvement from a videography perspective, and I’m keen to hear your thoughts.