I borrowed a GoPro camera recently and decided to try to attach it to an airplane to see how that would turn out. Because flights tend to be fairly long and the GoPro camera has a wide angle lens which makes everything at a distance look like it's going by really slowly I made the videos into time-laps movies. This was done by setting the camera to take a photo every two seconds, and then combining the photos on my computer into a video. One problem with this method is that the photos are 2560 x 1920, which means that a 8 Gb memory card fills up within an hour or so. Processing large files into a video on an older computer is also problematic, so I had to down-sample all the photos to a much smaller size using 'mogrify' before doing anything else. The video was created using mencoder, and then compressed using ffmpeg.
Anyway, here are the results:
Youtube Link
The first flight was intended to scope out some local lakes to check their sailing potential. As you can see, most of them were still iced over in early April.
The second flight was with my father at the controls when he came down for a visit. We attempted to fly out to Cypress Hills, but low clouds kept us from reaching it.
Hope you enjoy these.
