HPX300 and Tyler Nose Mount

videomagician

videomagician

Well-known member
Has anyone tried a 300 on a Tyler Nose Mount (II) bolted on a Jet Ranger? I have a project coming up where I'm shooting forward POV from a helicopter and I just wonder if the skew/vibration would kill me. I'll be full wide the whole time with the helicopter making some low passes over different landmarks and buildings simulating a crop duster. I probably will be shooting regular speed since I won't be able to change settings in flight. I shot the same thing about 10 years ago with a VX1000 in a small gyro housing.

I'm debating renting a Varicam if the 300 won't handle it.

David
 
Heli03.jpg

Heli05.jpg

Heli10.jpg

 
Hey David, thanks for coming back and reporting your experience! The vimeo looks really highly compressed and a tad stuttery to me, so it's hard to judge. What did you think of the experience? Was the rolling shutter performance acceptable?
 
With a tyler nose mount you only have tilt to play with so unless you are slewing the ship sideways past some tall buildings at high speed ( which won't be that high) and close range on a long lens I think you are good to go.
 
There was a small amount of stutter (which looked more side to side to me) in the original files, which could have been vibration since it is basically a hard mount. Also, the image just didn't look as sharp as I know the camera is capable of, but I had zero focus control in the cockpit. I pretty much just set the focus to infinity (back focus was good) and left it. Either the wind or vibration moved the focus a couple times when we landed to clean the bugs off the lens. I figured just the little bit of vibration might have affected the sharpness too. We were also fighting fog and bad weather the whole time - we actually couldn't get to two of our locations. I really didn't notice much skew even on the shots where I thought the pilot was going to knock the camera off on the tops of trees! I did zoom in a couple times just to see what it looked like and it was totally unusable. On our second shoot day, we had more wind and the stuttering seemed a little worse as the helicopter moved around more. I shot AVC Intra 100 720 30PN VFR 60. I had the shutter set to 180 degree but I think I flipped the switch the wrong way and it wasn't actually on. I had the cover taped to keep bugs off it (and was handling 20 other things) so didn't check it. Oh well.

Overall, I think it turned out pretty good and looks a ton better than the video I did over ten years ago for the same display. We used an Eagle Vision II I think back then that had a Sony VX2000 in it. It never really looked that good to me but was ok. I used a modified vivid scene file, but will probably boost the chroma when I edit to get a more color saturated look.

I'm trying to get some more projects on the calendar so I can replace the 300 with a 3100 (and a nice wide lens) if I can ever get to play with one.

David
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top