Copter videos of MC race in Council Bluffs yesterday

[Jay Hannah]

Anybody know who/how they shot this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmowWzRX-bs

j
http://rvtr.org

[Jay Hannah]

On Nov 5, 2012, at 5:05 PM, Jay Hannah <j...@jays.net> wrote:
> Anybody know who/how they shot this?
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmowWzRX-bs

Oh... There it is:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=368398423245814&set=a.368396956579294.86663.108076652611327&type=3&theater

j

[James Harr]

Note for anyone watching that video -- the flood from 2012 washed in all that sand. In some spots it's a consistent 8ft of sand. In others it seems like it's 12-18ft of dunes.

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^[:wq^M

[David Knaack]

Neat rig. As I was watching the video I was thinking that a really sweet setup for that kind of work would be a two-man POV system where one person is the pilot with a stereoscopic view and the flight controls, and the other is a camera operator, with his remote linked to an HD camera on a PTZ platform. That way the pilot could concentrate on flying the course and staying out of the trees while the camera operator could focus on getting good footage.

[patrick]

This has been the plan for mine all along. Unless I can get a pan tilt head mounted FPV motion rig working...

[Eric J. Kaplan]

That's how the pros do it, like the SkyCam in pro and college football or during the Olympics. One person drives the camera rig, and the other controls the camera. 

Sent from Eric's iPhone

[Dan Linder]

I am not a quad-copter expert (IANAQCE?), but does a quad-copter really need a separate gimbal for the camera?  I would assume that the camera could be affixed to the QC frame rigidly (possibly a little up-down movement), and the swivel left-right would be added into the flight control that the pilot is sending...

And depending on the range of motion, the up-down might also be just a command to fly the QC at a bit out of level (though using additional power).

Very cool footage and platform.

Dan

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[Ben Hutcheson]

You can't tilt the whole quad without causing it to slip sideways.  The left to right could be left to the pilot, but by keeping it separated you allow the pilot to focus on not crashing without worrying about the framing.

[David Knaack]

In the linked video you can see that the copter is flying over trees. If there were separate video feeds, so the pilot could look where he was going while the cameraman operated the camera, possibly pointing sideways, backwards, etc relative to the flight path, then the whole rig would be much less likely to crash into a tree.

It would probably also make sense to use the gyros to decouple the camera platform rotation from the rest of the craft, so that as the pilot made turns, the cameraman would not have to compensate as much for the orientation changes.

[patrick]

The reason for not having the camera couple directly to the frame for me is independent control of the camera to the orientation of the QC as well as camera stabilization. If the camera is fixed to the frame the picture quality will go down drastically requiring stabilization processing after the fact leading to a lower res video. If the camera is decoupled and has auto stabilization with a second controller board the footage will look a lot smoother and will require minimal stabilization after the fact leading to a higher res smoother video.