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Cockpit video camera

My post was partly in jest. This camera is of course way overkill to just register whats going on in the cockpit. It’s great news however to note how great an image quality you can get for a suggested retail price of $995. I ’ve had a M43 camera for years and I like it a lot. There is a massive amount of lenses available for the format. I have the Samyang 7.5mm fisheye which should work well for filming in the cockpit.

I can’t edit my post anymore but the Blackmagic camera has both a global and a rolling shutter and the former is the one that does away with the strange prop effects.

EHLE

My post was partly in jest

Yes… I take written stuff literally

Actually there is another point which is that a 4K camera would be good enough to record both the avionics and the view through the front window. 1/60 takes care of both the display multiplexing and the prop. That’s assuming it can handle the contrast – any views on that?

I have seen youtube videos which show both but IMHO they were “doctored”. How, I don’t know. One way would be to fly on an overcast day. Another way would be a really good camera and compress the dynamic range in post-processing.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I’ve just bought a pair of Garmin Virb Elites which I’m going to leave mounted semi-permanently in my aircraft. They started out at £400 last year but the “Power Bundle” which includes a Bluetooth remote and second battery is only £196 on Amazon.co.uk at the moment.

Link

I like the slim form-factor, long battery life (3 hrs+), easy clip-on and low profile mounts, and that fact that the internal GPS records all that stuff and it can be overlaid on the final edited video. One BT remote can also control multiple Virbs. And you can also buy prop filters to remove the slow motion prop in the video.

I’ve also bought a small cheap Sony digital voice recorder which plugs into a headphone socket and records intercom and RT separately.

I’m editing some files from a flight yesterday and I’ll post it here when it’s complete.

Hope this helps!

Spending too long online
EGTF Fairoaks, EGLL Heathrow, United Kingdom

Just an update:

I got rid of the Roadhawk HD camera I bought for this experiment a year ago. The viewing angle was too wide and as a result it had no chance of recording the required instrument readings. I now think that to do this job (a video showing the whole instrument panel) properly one needs a double-res (4K) camera. Plus of course a means of ensuring the viewing angle is right; you don’t want to be filming the occupants and a wide angle just wastes the resolution.

4K cams are slowly turning up, but thus far I have not seen one which can simply record the last X hours. That cannot be done with a normal mp4 or similar format. The Roadhawk achieved it by recording 1 minute strips which their PC software would combined into a single video file. It did not have a battery, so the recording would stop when power went, but it had a capacitor to ensure that the 1 minute strip being recorded at the time of the power loss would get closed properly and not lost. Someone recently mentioned that Go-Pro has a 4K camera with a mode whereby it records the last 1GB (or similar) but it relies on the internal battery and will thus carry on recording until that runs out, and then it does close the last file properly. This should work, but the battery will always go flat after every flight, so it isn’t going to last very long.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Someone recently mentioned that Go-Pro has a 4K camera with a mode whereby it records the last 1GB (or similar) but it relies on the internal battery

My recent GoPro has 4K but I’ve never used that mode because my playback devices so far only support 1080p.

Is there no sensible way to charge the battery from the A/C using an appropriate 12V adapter?

Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

The battery will charge from the aircraft; that’s no problem. The problem is the requirement that the device is unattended, starts recording when aircraft power comes on, and stops recording (and properly closes the current video file) when the aircraft power goes off.

In fact just replacing the battery with a capacitor would probably work.

I would think editing 4K videos needs some decent PC hardware too but that isn’t a concern here.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The problem is the requirement that the device is unattended, starts recording when aircraft power comes on, and stops recording (and properly closes the current video file) when the aircraft power goes off.

I see. Yet in the abscense of a solution that can be entirely unattended, how much of a hassle are two uses of a button to turn the camera on (and automatically start filming, with an accordingly configured GoPro) and turning it off (properly closing the video file)? You could add that to your checklist.

I would think editing 4K videos needs some decent PC hardware too but that isn’t a concern here.

The software that I use now (Magix Movie Edit Pro 2015 Plus – and probably others, too?) use low-res proxy files even when editing 1080p content and only touch the original material again when rendering the final output file, which can easily run overnight and unattended.

Last Edited by Patrick at 07 Jul 07:53
Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

and turning it off (properly closing the video file)

May not happen if you crash

Obviously if the camera gets smashed or melted, the video will be lost (though smashing an SD card inside a camera is probably really hard) but what is needed for this application is a camera which properly closes the video file at or past the moment where the aircraft power failed. You don’t want it to run for 10 hours in the aircraft wreckage and overwriting the moments preceeding the crash.

Actually you want exactly the same in a car product – hence the Roadhawk which is a really good solution.

If one was happy with a manually controlled start-stop solution, there are plenty of ways to do this.

only touch the original material again when rendering the final output file, which can easily run overnight and unattended

That is how most editors (e.g. Sony Vegas) work; a fair point. But “overnight” might be optimistic in some cases. I ran one job for 100hrs and that was just a 16x speedup plus embedding a time counter, in a movie which was originally about 5hrs.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Fair points – I admit I didn’t go through the older posts of this thread from April again, so my idea was slightly out of context.

Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

I think one may need to do a different approach to this… maybe there simply isn’t a product which has the required function. It’s clearly possible, with a 4K camera of some sort and a suitably programmed controller, and a capacitor which enough power reserve to properly close the current video file when the aircraft power is lost.

There is no actual need to do what the Roadhawk does which is to write 1 minute video strips. The only benefit of that (compared with say writing 1GB files) is that you make full use of the available flash storage, but storage is cheap nowadays. And Roadhawk’s approach requires special PC software to combine the strips. If you wrote out 1GB .mp4 files, it would be easy to just drop a few dozen of them into a video editor and render the lot – if they are sequentially named.

The other approach, done in airliners, is to have avionics which generate the data and then you can record that. For example you would have an MP gauge which has an electronic output. But, as the point was very well made in the AF447 case, that won’t tell you for sure what the pilot(s) actually see / what the instruments are displaying.

The context for my interest in this stuff is here and here

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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