tailwind5sw wrote:Action shots are cool. What mount are you using to change the camera angle?

It is a hard fixed mounted Contour cam facing rearward. Software panned the change to make it look like the cam was rotated on final.

Thanks. So was it panned down to see the shadows and not the tailwheel?

tailwind5sw wrote:Thanks. So was it panned down to see the shadows and not the tailwheel?

...and give away all my secrets!?!



The Contour is not as wide of an angle lens as say a GoPro or a Virb, but the trick with it works well enough for YouTube stuff:

I mount my camera so it is 90 degree off horizontal so you get a wider field of view vertically. If you look at the video that is being captured, it is "sideways".

When you pull it into your favorite editor, rotate the video 90 degrees (whichever way), then crop down so it fills whole whole frame. Most editors allow some sort of panning across a still (or live) image, so simply pan the cropped image across the video you are interested in. In my case, the cropped portion started at the bottom looking at the shadows and I had it pan up the video towards the tailwheel at the end.

You lose image quality when you essentially zoom in on a cropped area, but the effect of a moving camera is pretty cool for some things. I also am a fan of chasing shadows so I always have one of my cams facing backwards/down/etc. I think there was a recent write up about the same thing done by a Maule pilot where he panned from right to left in a video (software again; not actually moving the camera).

Very cool. I'm still stuck in the old ways. Never thought about cropped videos and what you could do with them post production. Thanks for showing me another way to spend my free time I don't have.

tailwind5sw wrote:Very cool. I'm still stuck in the old ways. Never thought about cropped videos and what you could do with them post production. Thanks for showing me another way to spend my free time I don't have.

I know exactly how you feel! I actually stumbled across this solution because I screwed up and left the camera lens rotated 90 degrees on my Contour (you can rotate the lens independent of the body of the cam). I ended up with lots of sideways footage and no idea what to do with it...

I will make you up an example so you can see the original video and the steps to make it look like it rotates the viewpoint.

First clip is raw footage, second clip is rotated 90 degrees and cropped to fill frame, third clip is a kern from bottom to top in the cropped frame.

https://youtu.be/DPiHlUCWm94

Thanks. Great stuff. Now to figure out editing software.

tailwind5sw wrote:Thanks. Great stuff. Now to figure out editing software.

If you are on Mac, iMovie can kern like that and is free. (in fact, I used it for the demo clip above)