Airplane Ride, Anyone?
 

My dad got me hooked on flying RC planes at a very young age, and so it's been another of my passions for going on 40 years now. I always wanted to strap on a camera, and so I bought this cheap Jazz camera at Walmart. Finally gave it a whirl around the patch Sunday afternoon. I'm not sure whats up with the jumpy frame rate, it's suppose to be 30 frames per second, but it seems like there's a lot of dropouts. Whole new learning curve for me.

Kevin,

This is very good for a first attempt.

If you want to see a skill level to work towards, take a look at Crazy Horst.

http://vimeo.com/user6527917


In one of his best lately, Horst Fenchel is flying his model in and along the river Main in Frankfurt, Germany:

http://vimeo.com/51229811

Most of his videos are in German, but a few are in English, but these planes speak a universal language.

Thanks. Yep, there is some pretty cool stuff going on with RC video, although there's an awful lot of editing and special effects in some of those. I've been reading that a lot of guys are recording at 60 fps and playing back at 30 for a general smoothing effect.

I was impressed...

Nice work to start. You could not pick a better place to demonstrate the effect of flying for the spectator.
There is a local guy who added a camera to his RC helicopter and is now doing real estate feature work.

Thanks guys. There's actually been a big stink going on over the FAA attempting to make it illegal to do any commercial photography work using RC aircraft, unless one has a actual full scale pilots license. No idea how they would enforce such a rule, other than by making an example of a few unfortunate individuals. They're coming at it from a safety standpoint, although more likely there's big money behind it.

Thats REAL cool Kevin. I used to attempt to do this the "hard way" by actually trying to get video TRANSMITTED from an RC helicopter. I found out QUICKLY that my ability to build and configure this setup and get it to work.....was well beyond my ability to actually FLY it though.

This "Crazy Horst"....WOW!! I have been watching and downloading these ALL morning! Small cameras have come SO far now, and the memory capacity lets him just "shoot it all" and then MASTERFULLY edit and mix all the footage later....and the apparent range he has to fly the aircraft have enabled some REALLY stunning shots. I used to consider myself lucky to get a couple hundred feet in WIDE open space. I do still have one helicopter I outfitted with a small pinhole cam, UHF transmitter....and a "holster" reciever which I could watch with little virtual reality glasses.

As I mentioned before. I could BUILD the thing, but I just couldn't master FLYING it....and sorta gave it up after going through countless rotor blades and taping crap back together. My transmitter would never stand up to a PLANE because it would go out of range for the transmitted video just about the time it reached takeoff distance. The short time I had the helicopter up and running...I would fly it from the video glasses, which is just about the most asinine roundabout way of doing this. The range was terrible (about 200 feet at best). The color and resolution AWFUL (NTSC), and I had no way of recording it unless I felt like strapping a Sony "Watchman" type 8mm thing to the receiver's output. I gave up on it before it got that crazy :-P

I got the idea from playing with software for Sony AIBO robots that allowed remote control via WiFi. You could walk the robot (ERS7) around with full telemetry, but of course this was NOWHERE near as open to trouble as an RC aircraft. A small robotic dog ambling VERY slowly can only get in trouble....VERY slowly :-P

The guy I referenced says he is allowed up to 300 feet but rarely goes over 200 feet altitude even to do a 100 acre spread feature.

I've been talking with a relative who is a home inspector and he has looked into this for checking out roofs and such. The FAA has really thrown a wrench into the idea. Sure seems like it would be hard to make a solid case against someone flying a tiny helicopter over a house.

So what keeps him from doing it "for fun"....or what proof could someone turn over that a couple passes over the property with the current owners permission was in some way "commercial"

Stupid idea on the FAA's part IMO....especially if you are just talking well under a couple hundred feet. How does it make it different than recreational RC?

The difference is you'd be doing it with the intent of getting paid :) There's a lot of demand for aerial photography. Technology advances within the RC industry along with better smaller cameras are now giving the big boys a run for their money. The biggest concern of the FAA is cross country RC by hobbyists. Very doable with today's technology.

I know this is an old thread....but I've been following Crazy Horst's Vimeo account...and he still quite regularly posts some really beautiful FPV videos.

Also...some stuff in the news that FAA is considering ALL video on RC aircraft to be a "drone"....and wants to make ALL of it illegal. Even talk of making ALL RC flying illegal. This all just sounds like CRAZY talk....and just as RC video is getting good with range, resolution, clarity, memory and antimotion, etc.

I hope this hobby and the hobbyists are powerful enough to fight this....or don't start abusing the freedom of the new technology.

This is fairly recent from the horses mouth.

http://amablog.modelaircraft.org/ama...ama-expo-2013/

The media tends to get many things confused.