Day: March 16, 2015

I love taking pictures while I’m flying, especially when the vis is for miles and the air is lovely and smooth. It’s nice to be able to look back on them and remember the details of each flight, but they also provide the opportunity to share the pleasures of flying with others who may not have the opportunity to get airborne. And as well as taking still images, I also enjoy shooting videos, but the difference is that whereas you can hold a still camera in your hand when flying alone, a camcorder has to be secured on a mount of some kind.

For my early videos that I shot back in the UK in MYRO, I used the Canon camcorder that I then had attached to a bar mount on a tube above and behind my head inside the cabin. However, I wasn’t at all happy with the position because it showed too much of the inside of the cabin and not enough of the outside, so I then switched to a suction mount stuck on top of the panel. This worked pretty well but I was concerned that the vibration would shake the mount off during flight causing the camcorder to fall and get damaged, so I then switched to a new lighter-weight Canon model.

This worked fairly well and all of my more recent flying videos to date have been shot using that arrangement. It was far from ideal, however, because shooting through the windscreen plastic was always a compromise as inevitably it led to image degradation due to scratches on the screen, reflections and things like that. And although things improved in one way when I moved on to 56NE, my X-Air, because I was able to mount the camcorder outside thus eliminating the problems caused by shooting through the screen, I had no choice but to mount it on an extended bracket which caused vibration and camera-shake that I’ve never been able to eliminate.

But in the meantime, the market has moved on. People don’t use heavy camcorders any more for shooting these kinds of videos – they use specially designed, very light-weight sports cams. These can be mounted almost anywhere because they are so small – on a rider’s or skier’s helmet, on the bonnet or roof of a car, on the handle-bars of a bike or, as in the case of an ULM, even on the wing, nose or tail of an aircraft. And the best known of all of them is the GoPro Hero.

But I could never justify spending the several hundreds of pounds required to buy a GoPro, not even a used one as new models came out, because with each new model the new price went up and the old models still held their value. So I’d more or less given up going the sport cam route – until now that is. Many years ago, Japan had the reputation for being able to copy any product and sell its version at a considerably lower price, but that mantle has now been passed on to China.

So just a few weeks ago I was browsing Ebay, as you do, and came across a low-cost Chinese copy of the venerable basic GoPro sports camcorder. It was a fixed-lens, no zoom design with just a USB connection but it was advertised as being capable of shooting in 1080 full HD mode and came with a huge range of accessories allowing it to be mounted almost anywhere and on almost any surface. And the best part was that it only cost £29 including delivery to France! What the heck, at this price there was nothing really to lose, so I ordered one, and when it arrived a week or so ago, I was actually quite impressed by both its appearance and quality and by the range of accessories that it came with. Here’s a shot that shows what I’m talking about.

I couldn’t wait to try it out and grabbed the only spare Micro-SD card that I had once I’d charged up the battery. But I was to be disappointed, because right from the start, although the basic image quality was pretty good, the videos that I shot in and around my garden were peppered with errors. These mainly included coloured flashes across one or more frames and sound going out of sync and even worse, when I did a long recording of a drive over to Galinat, several seconds were cut off the ending of the video while in the meantime the sound kept playing.

But it was my own fault. The little leaflet that the unit came with stated quite clearly that a ‘speed 10’ card must be used, and I’d been using a ‘speed 4’. Luckily, I decided to persist and after ordering a new card from Ebay and being sent the wrong one, I eventually bit the bullet and bought a new 32 GB ‘speed 10’ card from Leclerc on Saturday, paying more than 2/3 of what I’d paid for the complete camcorder kit, including delivery from China, for the privilege. Initial results indicated that this had solved the problem but I needed to shoot a video of 30 minutes or more to be happy that it had actually done so, and a short drive yesterday provided the opportunity.

I’d shot my test videos in the car by mounting the little sport cam on a suction mount on top of the dash, as I’d done with my Canon camcorder for my off-road videos. It worked fine, but as the sport cam is so small and light, I thought that on this occasion, I’d stick the mount higher up, directly on the windscreen itself. Here’s a shot of the basic arrangement that I used.

It worked a treat and I’m very pleased with the results. Due to the lightness of the sports cam, 61gm including its battery and only 77gm including the plastic clip that it’s mounted inside in the above pic, vibration is zero and as a result the image quality was surprisingly high, even though I shot it in 720 HD mode rather than the full 1080. I’ve put the video that I shot up in the Videos section but it can be viewed directly by clicking on the following image, which itself was a screen grab taken from the original wmv.

So up to this point, I’m mightily impressed. I use Corel Videostudio Pro editing software and at the end create a wmv file which is of pretty high quality. However, I host my videos myself on the My Trike web site rather than using apps like Youtube and the WordPress plugin that I use requires that I convert the wmv file to a flv. This is much smaller and inevitably leads to a loss of image quality and although I minimise this by using a good converter and settings that over the years I know will give possibly the highest quality flv file possible, the difference is clearly visible. So far, I’m delighted with the results that my new cheap little sport cam is giving. There’s a bit of ‘fish-eye’ towards the edges of the screen, but I don’t think it’s enough to get too fussed over and I just can’t wait to try it out on a flight in 56NE 🙂