Arial footage with 170?

Mwjace

Mwjace

Active member
This first week in June I am Hoping to go up in a small Ultra light Powerd Paraglider and shoot some footage with the hpx 170. Since this is my first time getting Arial footage I would more then apprciate any suggestions any might have.

the plan is to shoot 720 24p onto 4 16gig p2 cards, the camera with be connect to me via a old steadi cam rig we have. will be shooting Eastern Idaho specifily the college i work for.

Could there be any issues with altitude or temp?

Any and all comments would be more then appriciated
 
just a few thoughts

depending on how the glider is powered there might be some vibration involved. you said you were going to be using an old steady cam rig, but maybe also bump up the frame rate to give it a smoother look. but maybe you are trying to record the most footage you can on the cards you have.

any loose clothing, long hair, lense caps, whatever, tuck it in or secure it some how as to not get anything BUT what you want in the shot.



altitude and temp

ive run my 170 in -20 F weather after it was out all night with no big problems. the zoom and focus rings were stiff, thats it. shouldnt be any colder than that, right?

altitude shouldnt be a problem. just dont drop the thing. you will want to leash the camera to you some how. I use a thin sling girth hitched to the handle conected to me wearing a rock climbing harness.

be ready to clean your lense a couple times while in the air

sounds cool

have fun
B
 
I did a job some time ago in a two seater powered paraglider rig, a few points I found, when the op hits the throttle, you get to see lots of your feet, you have to have the cam high so your feet don't come into shot, also lose clothing is a big NO NO, don't get sucked into the prop, if you need to swap cards ask the op to throttle off and glide for that period.
Gaffer tape or remove anything on your cam that can be effected by the wind, eg lens hood / mic etc.
make sure the cam is tethered to you, a spare belt thru the camdle is a good one i use.
it's great fun so enjoy.. snot out of you nose is also a side issue..unless you wear a helmet.
Cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au
 
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It's "Aerial" Mike unless you are talking about the main character of Disney's "The Little Mermaid", then it is "Ariel" No such word as "Arial" at least in English ;-)

I am envious, this sounds like a really cool shoot and I bet you will get some breathtaking footage. I would shoot it all at 60 FPS (in 720 24pN) for the simple reason that you can smooth out a lot of the vibration and jostling around, you can still speed it up to get normal motion but you also have the necessary extra frames for smoother slow motion or even speed ramps. You cut down on your run time of course, but that is what I would do. I would also record about :30 at 24fps, just to get the sound. It will all sound the same but you do want the motor, prop and wind noise, you can always loop it if you need longer and I do think it will all sound the same.

Dan
 
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We did some ultralight stuff in a low-budget movie once; DP sat next to the pilot in a two-seater, using a DVX100. He tried going handheld.

Footage was pretty much unusable, super-super-super bouncy. I don't know if your glidecam is going to help; there's going to be a lot of wind and it'll probably blow the glidecam all over the place.

If you strapped the camera down onto a cinesaddle you'd probably get acceptable footage, vibration-wise and motion-wise, but it would seriously compromise your ability to aim the camera.

Consider the idea of shooting at a higher res and then using something like a software stabilizing application in post to remove some of the (likely) jerky-cam movements. We were shooting letterbox on the DVX, and that was a huge mistake; if we'd shot 4:3 we would have had some room to run a stabilizer and then still crop the bars out in post. In HD, that might mean shooting 1080 to get a 720 final frame after stabilization.
 
Thanks so much for the advice,

Dan, I'm a product of the internet genration and public schooling, so spelling... well... thats pretty much out the window :)

I do hope that we can get some good footage, i was a little worried about the virbration We'll be editing with FCP so do you think that the smooth cam filter will be up to the task?

Also what do you guys think of recording to a Firestore with p2 cards as back ups?
 
Mike,

We specialize in aerial video/photography from very large RC helicopters and so we use the smoothcam filter often. Even though our 3 axis camera mounts are gyro stabilized, we still find smoothcam quite handy to remove the inadvertent jerks and bumps from turbulence but not so much on semi-continuous mechanically induced vibration. If you try to filter too much, weird things start to happen to the images. Used sparingly it can be very effective. Long story short, anything you can do to isolate vibration from the camera is time well spent.

On a side note, we discovered in Google Adwords that many thousands out there think "aerial" is actually spelled "arial".

Good Luck!
 
I was reading a book on writing scripts for video by a writing professor this weekend. Keep in mind, this guy is a professor as in Ph.D. level? in his published book on script writing, he even wrote "loose" instead of "lose" once and his book was rife with typos and misspellings. It seems like a global English abuse pandemic is loose on the world. I even used the word "loose" correctly. Amazing.

Dan
 
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