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TBM camera ship - behind the scenes

A behind the scenes video of a TBM specially adapted to film an AF B787. Stunning!



always learning
LO__, Austria

Wow, what a great video!

Peter, can you rig one of those cameras up to your TB20? :-)

EGBJ and Firs Farm, United Kingdom

It is an interesting video. Obviously this stuff has been done before countless times and a lot of people in the industry know how to do it well. We even have a thread here somewhere. Often a bizjet is used as the camera platform. The cameras are usually stabilised; this one was too.

This may be a rare case of a relatively high speed platform with an external camera. Normally the really high-end cameras are inside the aircraft, behind an optical-grade glass window. I imagine flutter was one issue they had to solve because the mounting is not exactly rigid, being a single point with the huge lump hanging off it. I hope they screwed it to the spar and not to the skin Actually looking at the mounting plate (which appears to have four bolts of about M10 size) they have probably replaced the whole underside skin section with a thick piece of metal.

The most credible guy in the video is the photographer. He makes some great points about the preparation e.g. the position of the sun (crucial). The rest of the team just made me cringe, wearing their epaullettes in the office

I wonder what spec the camera was? It is a RED. Mega optical zoom. It looks like an off the shelf package, including the whole gimbal system and the stabiliser inside that, so perhaps the new thing was mounting it on a fast plane rather than on a helicopter.

I would need a brain transplant to master the advanced terminology



(don’t mention AF447 )

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

First item during the TEM threat and error management briefing departing CDG: ATC! – nobody has a clue what’s going on because it’s all in french. Don’t blame them for wearing their uniforms, it’s mandatory, as is the french on the radios (or so I heard).

always learning
LO__, Austria

Visually it is stunning, but based only on what can be seen in the video, I would have loved to have seen greater thought given to the background scenery. I think there are many places where the background scenery would have transformed the visuals into something utterly sublime.

Yes, true. For example mountains?

One previous thread is here and another here.

@172driver might recognise the camera.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

@ Peter the camera is an 8k Red inside a gyrostabilised mount. The Red has been around for nearly 20 years now but I think the Stopover F1 mount is relatively new to the gyro mount scene. Looked to me like a standard 100 to 1 Leitz zoom lens but its difficult to see properly on my somewhat old Samsung tablet, it doesn’t do 8k justice.
In the past you are right that the camera would often be inside the cameraship for this type of shoot, remember it was probably a 35mm film camera and would have had to be reloaded several times, but the lens would be outside the aircraft on a periscope device pressurised if necessary so that one had more flexibility of angle.
A great deal of planning has to go into every detail of such a shoot, it is very easy for everything to go wrong and you end up having spent a fortune and not coming back with the shots the director and the client wants. Or a shot is spoilt when the camera zooms in and the pilots are seen not to be wearing the correct uniform.As for TEM I had not heard the phrase used until I came across it as part of human factors in IRtraining. It would have been an asset in my day as many directors only thought about getting the shot and no thought to safety of the aircraft or even the camera and operator on occasions. Focussing the mind on things that might go wrong and how to manage it could possibly have stopped some very hairy moments.

France
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