DarkHorse1
Senior Heliman
Location: Gloucester UK
| Thanks, the camera is quite junk (runs on 2 good lithium cells from an old 3s pack ), see here what I sent in a email once before to a fellow flyer:
It's a near first generation JVC (DVL9200) DV tape hand cam and shoots PAL 25fps interlaced. It's really poor for anything other than RC video's and really would prefer something that could shoot clear 30fps 640x480. I originaly FireWire dump to some DV compatible format, edit the sequence in Pinnacle Studio9 then render to a low compression large 1gb DV 720x586 format. Then with TMPEGEnc 3.0 Express I double the frame rate from 25fps up to 50fps whilst simple unpacking the interlace lines into new frames (fakes every other line), plus some sharpening filter and boost the luminosity, try to bring out a bit of colour. Then compromise WMV compress for web quality and size, chopping down to 360x288 (only really throwing away 1/2 each line width given the fake lines that get dropped anyway). This makes the most from the noisy data source available.
Depending on sky brightness and the mood of the camera firmware, I often get a black model silhouette on sky backgrounds. To avoid this I try to fly lower and try to get the camera operator to keep the model in the top of the frame to maintain the exposure of a ground shot, plus keeping some speed reference with the ground, especially if it's a clear blue sky (I would prefer some clouds in the sky for speed reference)...
...so I had to fly for him to just point at, hence the close fly past head shots LOL . I have a feel for the type of 'money shots' I want to see and try to fly them twice for the camera and hope the operator gets lucky, some work out, some get cut. Trouble is, whilst thinking about all that too much tends to effect the quality of the flying  , particularly if your worrying about radio range and technical... |
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. I think I bought her within a week of it's release. Wow, time flies.
