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Cockpit video camera

I’ve got the Roadhawk.

It looks very good – but doesn’t work so is going back for a swap. They reckon either the camera is faulty or the 64GB SD card or the supplied USB SD card reader is faulty. The camera has no interface. It is configured by writing out a specific file structure onto the SD card, and then their PC software discovers the SD card in the PC, and offers to write parameters to a config file which resides on the card. It’s quite a good system for deploying a number of these cameras and then collecting data from them, but it’s unfortunate in that a number of things can go wrong and you can’t do anything with it or even find out where the problem is.

Windows cannot format the SD card with the right (128k) allocation size and one has to use the formatting program from here.

Their customer service is very good though. I will report again in due course.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I have been using car camera, but not necessarily complex your needs.
You can look at this website, maybe you need a dash cam

I spotted the Mobius Action Cam which is a 1080p camera and which can be set up to record as soon as the power comes on. They also mention “loop mode” which might mean that it records the last x minutes, which would be good for a kind of video CVR.

All that for less than £50 in some places.

Darley Moor, Gamston (UK)

I got the Roadhawk back and it works. Unfortunately I have not installed it yet because the angle is too wide. I need to find a way to reduce it, presumably with a lens of some sort. Does anyone know about optics? I don’t know if this can be done with a single lens.

Apart from that it does it all. The loop mode records 1 minute long files, and the software which comes with it will transparently combine them for saving as a single video file.

(If anyone knows about optics I have another job, not related to flying…)

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The mobius is available with a wide angle lens or a version with an 89 degree field of view.

Darley Moor, Gamston (UK)

There is more to making videos interesting that just the equipment. It is like reading a book. Some are dull and unimaginative and don’t grab your interest. Others capture your interest from the first chapter. The same with film/video. One of the most interesting and absorbing contributors whose videos are GA relevant is here.
All his stuff is done with GoPro.

https://www.youtube.com/user/jaunty17

Propman
Nuthampstead , United Kingdom

Here’s one for the discerning videographer. Blackmagic has just released the ultimate action camera. 4k Resolution, removable lens with Micro Four Thirds mount, remote control and a proper rolling shutter so no more strange prop effects.

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/8285014450/meet-the-blackmagic-micro-cinema-camera-a-super-16-action-camera-with-a-four-thirds-mount



EHLE

That looks really amazing. How much would that cost with a zoom lens, equivalent to say 18-80 on a 35mm? I have never seen this technology before.

It would also have to be waterproof, for outside-cockpit mounting.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Micro Four Thirds is an open standard, so all of these lenses would fit: http://www.four-thirds.org/en/microft/lense.html

This very compact zoom lense (28-84 equiv on 35mm) from Olympus would be a good fit. You can find it at around 300EUR.

That’s amazing stuff. I had actually seen this format before – the camera shops are full of it. You can get a DSLR which is much lighter and more compact than the traditional size, which seems to grow bigger and heavier with every edition (on the Losinj trip I got my son to carry the Pentax K3 and that one is far from being “big”)

But we are getting two requirements mixed up here, perhaps.

My original post was re a cockpit video recorder, not filming outside. This $1000+lens 4K camera would be way overkill for the former. One can do it well enough with a little 1080P one. The Roadhawk is fine, but as I say above needs a lens to do the correct angle of view; I haven’t yet spent time on this and am not really sure how to do it. I think it would need 2 lenses.

The 4K camera would do awesome outside shots, but as always you get the haze issue which limits the quality. I have just spent ~2 hours redoing about 200 DNGs from the Pentax, in Lightroom, mostly quickly hacking the haze with the Blacks function, and (for any with ISO > ~800) applying some noise removal in the luminance channel. I think all this stuff can be done with a movie, in e.g. Vegas. What I don’t know is if one can do a “vertically graduated Blacks” correction; this is needed for many shots.

What I am getting at is that flying with a really classy camera may be worth doing only on very clear post-frontal days.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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