Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Sony FDR-X1000 / X3000 - good for flying movies

After a few more tests I have concluded that the best way to use the X3000 is in 1080P, 60fps (what is traditionally called “NTSC”; “PAL” gives you 50fps which looks the same but writes 20% less data to the card), Medium viewing angle (the middle option), and with Standard (software only) stabilisation. The result is a fairly minimal optical distortion

which most of the time is not objectionable IMHO

Also the lens distortion can’t be corrected (accurately) with anything I have come across, apart from Magix Video Pro X8 (which is currently 70% off on Steam; much more from Magix).

4K is just a waste of time. The quality is not visibly better in any real-world scenario short of you just playing your own videos from your hard drive

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Here we go… a 1080P 50fps 50mbps video. I’ve decided to forget 4K when 1080P can be as good as this, and doesn’t IMHO need lens correction:


Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

A snapshot from a recent movie

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Well, can you now describe the final solution?
Not only camera but external power solution as well.
I am back on the start again as my new plane is low wing Bristell instead of previous shoulder wing. Nice for traveling, speedy enough (in this category), but … how to mount external camera is a question. How to use external power there is again the same question.
I have one Sony, one GoPro Session and one Garmin VIRB XE. All of them were useful for some previous work, but on the shoulder wing plane… slow enough for such activity.

Slovakia
LZSL, LZOC, LZLU

Btw. I had application on tablet working with GPS position and recording all communication recorded directly via cable splitter/distributor. Excellent due to precise timestamping with actual position.
Could be useful for voice/radio recording I think.

Slovakia
LZSL, LZOC, LZLU

External power was done simply by mounting a lithium battery in line behind the camera. It lasts longer than the longest possible flight.

I never found any clever/elegant solutions to sound recording (various threads here on that) so I just start the camera and start the sound recorder at the same time, and then completely forget about both of them for the entire flight. I am not shooting in the cockpit, and especially not shooting anyone’s face, so there is no need for an accurate lip sync (which in any case would likely need jam sync, after some hours with the camera’s crystal at -25C and the sound recorder’s crystal at +25C ).

These cameras can manage 2hrs on their own (1080P 50fp) which is good enough for a lot of people especially if you are willing to use the X3000’s bluetooth power on/off function (and have a way of dealing with the resulting loss of sound sync).

I record the GPS track on the win8 tablet, in Oziexplorer. Ozi comes in windows and android versions so my T705 android tablet can do the same job. My plan is to get rid of the win8 tablet once I am using the ADL150, anyway. One could indeed record the sound and the GPS on the tablet; no need for a sound recorder. It is just a lot easier to start the camera and the sound recorder at the same time.

I like the X3000 because it shoots 1080 with optical distortion low enough to not need lens correction in software. However, on a ski trip last month I must have banged it against some ski lift metalwork because subsequent video was out of focus. So I opened it up and found that pressing on the back of the sensor PCB brought it back into focus (more or less) so I clamped it down on the bench with a G-clamp and put a load of epoxy around the sensor PCB, and managed to salvage the £500 camera For aviation video you don’t want this kind of cheap optical stabilisation anyway; you just get jello.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

The obvious solution is to hack the volume S/N of the new card to match the old one. But there doesn’t seem to be a utility for doing this for EXFAT cards.

https://github.com/relan/exfat/tree/master/mkfs

ELLX

Many thanks Lionel, but I can’t see a windoze executable there, which could be used to format an SD card with a user-specified volume S/N.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Yes, that for Unix-like systems (and is included in most GNU/Linux distributions). For a Microsoft Windows machine, my reflex (short of a dual-boot setup…) is to use a POSIX layer for the Microsoft Windows OS. It seems Microsoft’s WSL is a no-go (no access to disk devices: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/689 ), but that bug log (and the Cygwin documentation https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html ; search for “/dev/sda” in there) suggests that Cygwin is a possibility. Now, indeed, if you are not more than a tiny bit familiar with Unix (and more specifically Linux) command line and /dev filesystem setup, that “solution” is quite poor for you, and … you are a one-character typo away from formatting your hard disk instead of the SD card. Which makes for a poor user experience. And probably quite a big install and learning curve, if it is for just that one use.

ELLX

Some stills from the x3000, in 1920×1080 50mbps mode, are here. You can see the lack of geometric distortion.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top