Video walk around of the beast

March 2010 Two successive weekends of unfavourable flying weather left me with little else to do except record a video walk around of the beast inside the hangar.

Interestingly, although the negligible weight of the iPod Nano made it easy to film, the absence of mass meant there was no damping of the inherent unsteadiness of the handheld camera.

In contrast to digital still and video cameras, the Nano doesn't have an optical image stabilisation feature. If it did, the Nano would have cost me a bit more than it did!

The Nano's native resolution is 640 x 480 pixels. At this size on a PC screen, the image is reasonably sharp. But of course, the quality suffered much degradation once it was uploaded and converted into Flash format to a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels.

Experimenting with a simple video cam

February 2010 Work and life in general, kept me from updating this blog since my last post in April last year. Fortunately, things didn't keep me from flying the beast (and getting my relaxation therapy).

Even before I received DZY, I had thought of getting some sort of video camera to film my flights. There were a number of options including helmet-mounted bullet cameras feeding into very neat and compact mini digital video recorders. However, I haven't quite got around to buying such a system yet.

Recently, I began to experiment with using my little iPod Nano's built-in video camera as a cheap interim solution. The main challenge was working out how to mount such a small flat device on the top of the glare shield and isolating it from most of the engine vibration.

Eventually, I simply used a bit of velcro tape to strap the iPod to an old dishwashing sponge. Then I attached the jury rigged contraption to the top of the glare shield with a small velcro pad.

The contraption stayed mounted throughout the flight, but the following video shows the camera was still affected by vibration. So I'll have to work out better mounting arrangement.