I start the camera and (if doing cockpit comms too) the sound recorder at the same instant, obviously before getting into the plane. The respective storage capacities of the two are 10hrs and 50+hrs. The battery life of my custom built power back is 7hrs at -25C and 10hrs at +20C.
There is some primitive wifi remote control on the camera (from a smartphone) but, to cut a long story short, I don’t want wifi running on a flight on which I might need to fly an IAP in real wx.
The camera is temporarily mounted but it won’t come off easily.
BTW I did look at ways to do interrupted video, and then automatically sync sound (recorded continuously) to it, but it is more hassle than it is worth and since almost nobody (on any forum I know of) does it, it is hard to find out how it would work. The professionals use timecode… but I don’t need lip-sync accuracy. It is simply easier to stick a 128GB SD card into the camera and choose a recording quality which covers the longest possible flight. 1080P 50fps 25mbits/sec does 10hrs. There is a 50mbits/sec mode which runs for 5hrs (obviously) but there is no quality improvement once the tarmac is more than a few feet away 
Or one can do (unstabilised, and 170deg viewing angle i.e. a massive fisheye, like all the go-pros) 4k for about 2-3hrs.
Is I possible to rotate a video by a few degrees (not by 180 degrees), say if for example, the camera was not mounted aligned with the horizon?
Only by 180.
Anything else you have to do using e.g. Track Motion in Vegas.
And, yeah, this is one of the reasons one might want to shoot and edit at 4k, despite all the hassles involved, because if you are targetting 1080P then anything you do in terms of geometric corrections to a 1080P ex-camera material will mean pixel replication.
That said, I get pretty adequate results shooting at 1080P and doing loads of stuff on that, including something like a 10-15% crop to get rid of the corner stuff which results from any lens correction.
1080 is a lot better than one needs for most purposes, especially as very few PCs can play 1080P 50fps anyway, at any reasonable bitrate. I was in the Brighton Apple shop at the weekend and my son and I tried to play various of my Vimeo videos on various desktop machines there, and the lower end ones fell over totally on Vimeo which is only about 5mbits/sec!
I can assure you that any Mac released this decade can play Vimeo videos of any bitrate. I can watch any of your clips at 1080P on my 2007 machine which has a crappy Core 2 Duo CPU and 256MB ATI Radion 2600 graphics.
I suspect you were bumping up against a (probably intentional) throttling of the internet access.
Ah… Looks like it’s GPU dependent… Just tried on a much newer Mac Mini which only has the onboard Intel graphics and it freezes every few seconds. So I retract my above statement!
Not just that – none of the Macs in the shop could play any of the Vimeo videos without corruption at the top of the picture area, which progressively got worse.
Oddly enough my 2011 Ipad2 with IOS6 plays it all fine, even while downloading a 6GB Tomtom update.
I also tried the Download on the Ipad (to get the full size file) but it just hangs, with a play button in the middle of the screen with a line through it. There is no accessible file system on the Ipad so I have no idea where the downloaded file might be stored. I am doing this in Safari.
Weird – haven’t seen your first issue ever.
Back from Oban now and had an opportunity to look over the thread, although to understand its content is going to take more than looking it over.
Peter, I had seen your Oban video and thought at the time the quality was good watching directly from Vimeo on a Mac Book Pro, especially considering the conditions. I seem to recall thinking what a shame about the weather, if memory serves me well I visited Glenforsa the following day? (5th June) when the weather was fine.
If I’m right you were but 24hrs from a very different experience, you’ll just have to go back.
Thinking through the sense in sticking with something simple before using a ‘proper’ editor I concluded it would be worth looking at something more capable now. I had a look at Resolve, it does seem rather top notch, as far as I can see it’s approaching £800?
As for resolution, what does your camera put out? Normally you edit the project at the same parameters as that, to minimise quality loss. I would imagine most action cams doing 1080P 50fps would be putting out 25mbits/sec;
I have two cameras; a GOPro 2 which has been set at 720p and 50fps (it has options for 960 @ 25, 960 @ 50 and 1080 @ 25) and my new Garmin Virb, yet to be used, however my intention was to try it at 1080p and 50fps.
When asking the question about iMovie I was referring to the options available. Rather than output directly to YT I output to file, saving it to the desktop. When doing so I have the below options, I wondered if someone could advise what the quality options (and compression) equate to?
My first reaction, Misc, is that the imovie software is a toy intended for users somewhere between dumb and really dumb. What is “medium” v. “high” etc really? This stuff doesn’t mean anything. You need to be able to target some bitrate – because most movies get uploaded somewhere (so they can be viewed by others) and all those services have limits, so if you generated a movie which is 7GB and vimeo limits you to 5GB then you need to know how much to drop the bitrate.
If I was doing this I would buy Vegas 12 from Amazon for 60 quid or so and spend a few hours learning how it works. That is a proper tool which will last you years and you will probably never need to change it.
Resolve has a free version is seems basically very good, but the reviews I have read suggest it is rather quirky.
Regarding frames per second, my view is that 25 or 30 is fine for slow moving subject matter – like my Scottish flight video. I doubt 50 will make it look noticeably smoother. But it might – I don’t use 25/30 anymore. But if anything is moving even slightly quickly then 50/60fps is vastly smoother. Some people still work in 24/25 for an authentic movie effect, however.
Regarding 720 or 1080, obviously 1080 has more pixels but for a given bitrate, say 5 megabits/sec, both will contain the same information and if everything else is equal, both files will be the same size (I have tested that actually). And the bitrate is the main thing that will determine whether a given computer can play it without it breaking up. Very few computers can play 1080P 50fps at 25 megabits/sec, smoothly.
I am sure the Scottish video would have benefited from sunshine but OTOH if you have sunshine then you have a lot of bright spots which wash out in the video (they are just while, no texture) – because action cams are all basically crappy cameras and can’t handle the contrast range.
