Looking at this rather good one
when you look closely, it is obviously from several cameras and then somebody who knew what they were doing did a lot of editing. So that’s one part of it – what you do on the ground afterwards.
But what about airborne organisation? They are flying mostly loose formations, which have their own dangers i.e. you can lose contact and then collide. What’s the procedure for managing that?
I have done such a thing only once; the result is pretty crap (not least due to the camera used)
but one particular thing I found is that the apparent convergence speed is very low for what seems like ages and then you fly past very quickly. IOW, the convergence speed is deceptively low at larger distances
[ there are TWO videos in this post – one Youtube and one Vimeo; if you cannot see them both then please post here ]
IMO the precondition to do high quality air-to-air filming is that all pilots have solid experience in formation flying. It does take practice..
- Editing and generous cutting is the key to good videos. I gave up when I discovered (with the help of someone who works with video professionally) that every minute of finished video requires at least one hour of editing… For a start, cutting away the boring bits would already help, but on most flying videos on YouTube, in order to see the twenty seconds of interesting stuff, you have to skip over eight minutes of boring straight and level flying and enldess views of some boring glass cockpit screens. Didn’t we have a guy on this forum who once posted a one hour IFR flight in full length, showing only his Garmin screen?
- Formation flying remains dangerous even with proper training and established procedures. As shows the recent incident in Germany where a Eurofighter collided with a Learjet that operated as their target plane. All on board were highly trained (ex) military pilots, any yet a brief moment of losing sight of each other was enough to kill two of them.
My Wife does our occasional flying / video editing. I dont do it because of what what next said about 1 minute of film = 1 hour of editing + 1 hour of frustration dealing with the software. Very happy to spend 8 hours photo editing a wedding or something, but not 8 hours for a short flying clip. We havent done any formation flying, nor sticking go-pros on wings, but do have a few cameras mounted internally.
I cant see the top clip as it is blocked by the company firewall so I cant comment on it, but what I generally dislike is a) music playing because the ‘music’ is the sound of the engine b) no enroute flying. I saw one short video portraying a trip all over Europe (not one of your’s Peter, I quite like your ones), and mostly it was just take-off’s and landing’s with hardly anything en route. I woud add that to point a), that the only time it is acceptable to have music is if you’re flying either electric / diesel powered aircraft.
I’ve cleaned up the thread because I think the viewing issues mentioned earlier appear to be a browser configured to silently block (rather than Ask) mixed (secure and unsecure) content, and it may be that Chrome is that way by default. It appears to be a common Vimeo issue. The solution is to change HTTPS to HTTP when posting a Vimeo video link, but anybody with a browser thus configured is going to have all kinds of hassle because a lot of websites do that.
Music is obviously a very personal thing – unless you go for something deliberately embarrassing like these
in which case people will just laugh, which is fine…
Back to formation videos… would those Lancair pilots be specially trained?
…but what I generally dislike is a) music playing because the ‘music’ is the sound of the engine
I second that! But of course it must be left to the video artist/author what soundtrack he choses. One of my colleagues occasionally takes his GoPro along and plugs it into our intercom. I told him that I would prefer some music score instead of hearing my own voice on YouTube, but this is an exception 
You need mutch time so review the data and found the interesting points. Editing is a peace of cake. I always enjoy good flying Videos. You will never fit every “gusto”. Most I try to make a “Information” Video to show mistakes and how something worked out. But by this I only tryed music an views, I like it:
@Cheshunt, I saw this video the other day on another forum in another language – and liked it a lot. This and Georg’s report makes we want to take up night flying this winter season. Thanks for posting.
As for videos generally: I enjoy watching flying videos a lot if they’re well made. I see two categories:
I haven’t done many, but I found editing a fun thing to do after a nice flying trip to relive the experience. I used to use desktop software for this, but currently I find iMovie on the iPad spectacularly easy to use and producing surprisingly good results (though obviously limited in terms of capabilities).
I haven’t done many, but I found editing a fun thing to do after a nice flying trip to relive the experience.
After the nice flying trip comes the next one… no time for video editing. I have hours and hours of (raw) video from the last years – even an Atlantic crossing in a Cessna 340 ca. 1998 – but I doubt very much that I will ever find the time to edit them into a five minute clip.
Formation flying for air to air photographing poses a high risk.
There was a sad incident two years ago where a Diamond DA40 and a General Avia F-22 collided during an air to air photo flight. It happened close to my hometown and I knew some of the involved pilots.
Both aircraft where owned by a well regarded flying school. The owner was one of the most experienced aerobatic pilots from The Netherlands with over 30K of logged flight hours. He was flying the F-22.
The DA40 was filming it’s own crash; and the investigation report (unfortunately only in Dutch) shows quite some footage.
Here’s the F-22 performing a barrel roll:
During this roll the F-22 hit the top of the DA40’s stabilizor. Here is the F-22 photographed flying with a ripped off engine:
Both aircraft crashed in a field. Two death, two severely injured.
I would not do it ;-)
