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Fleein' High over the hills ay scotland


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Here's a video of a flight I made in Lanarkshire last week in scotland.

I'm taking off from a little village called Kilncadzow where my parents live and I grew up. You then see me

flying over New Lanark (a world heritage model town built in 1785), before flying over Lee Castle, then doing

a fly over of the village for the locals - look closely was some waving people.

Taking off was a bit tricky, involving running with my knees up to get my feet clear of 14" of snow with

every step. It was interesting after landing to look at my footsteps getting further and further apart as I

accelerated for take off.

[youtubevideo]

[/youtubevideo]

It was shot on my goPro HD at setting r3 (1280x960) 4:3 for the vertical FoV, and then squished to 16:9 as I

think it works well with the very wide fov and fish eye.

I did try a semi-unfished version, but the effect of pushing mid distance objects further away detracts from

the effect I think, so I have stuck with this version. The audio levels were a bit better on that one though,

but I'd uploaded it by then, so tough. I will take some stills from both version later and post them, so you

can see more clearly what de-fishing does - basically thing of projecting a picture on the back of a spoon

(fish eye), projecting on front of spoon (defish).

This was the first video I've taken with the goPro, so a bit of an experiment as much as anything.

I also wanted to find the best settings for the gopro, but also for youtube, and also find youtube's

limitations regarding mac codec.

GoPro wise - a variable bit rate H264 encode, 2 pass, average 4MB, peak 10MB seems to maintain the full

quality of the 16MB goPro native video.

You can see this 'master' edit (i.e. same as on youtube but proper higher quality as you get out of the

gopro) here (direct download - no mucking with entering codes, etc) :

http://premium.fileden.com/premium/2010 ... now720.mp4

You'll notice differences with YouTube in areas where colour variation is small - youtube will introduce

banding and blocking across areas like the sky. And also where there is massive amounts of detail, such as

taking of and landing with all the details in the snow - this becomes blocky and blurry on youtube, but

maintains its definition on my upload. YouTube footage still looks decent, but basically YouTube re-encodes

to Constant Bit rate 2.5MB - so resultant file on youtube ends up being half the size of mine.

Finally, if you want to see some defished footage it is only in master edit here:

http://premium.fileden.com/premium/2010 ... ow720b.mp4

- there is a bug in the edit with a bit duplicated, but I have left it uploaded for folk to look at the

defish. You will see I've only partially defished - more than that and I'd start to lose significant details

from the sides and top, AND the centre of the frame would be reduced even more, losing too much detail. I

think the defish does make it a bit less goldfish bowl like, but in the end I stuck with the original one I

updated to YouTube.

I don't want to put the other one on youtube, there ain't much point.

comments (and ratings!) welcome!

stu

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Here's a video of a flight I made in Lanarkshire last week in scotland.

...comments (and ratings!) welcome!

stu

Cracking video Stu !

Very impressive picture quality even with Youtube codec.

Particularly surprised with the auto white balance performance, as snow sky and bright conditions can often confuse small video cameras.

Love your production company name as well :D - some of the locals must have thought that when they saw you flying overhead in such cold conditions...

Anyway thanks for sharing, and please post any further experiments you make with your new goPro HD. Happy flying !

Cheers,

Andy

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Here's a video of a flight I made in Lanarkshire last week in scotland.

Love your production company name as well :D - some of the locals must have thought that when they saw you flying overhead in such cold conditions...

Cheers,

Andy

Funny enough the bloke down the road is ex-military, now police firearms. He had 2 mates up visiting - both ex-SAS. Apparently they both professed that they thought I was 'f*cking mental"

which I take as a compliment :-)

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Funny enough the bloke down the road is ex-military, now police firearms. He had 2 mates up visiting - both ex-SAS. Apparently they both professed that they thought I was 'f*cking mental"

which I take as a compliment :-)

Do so! lol

Great vid, I am loving the quality of the go Pro HD!!

For sale, non HD Go Pro 'offers' :-)

SW :D

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