Flying KLZU to Vegas via the Grand Canyon with 7 cameras

[dmloftus]

I've accumulated hardware over time. This time I was flying with five action cameras, my iPhone, and a Sony RX10-IV superzoom mirrorless camera. For the action cameras, inside the cockpit I have a Sony Actioncam FDR X3000 suction-mounted to the canopy or clip-mounted to the dash pointed at me, a GoPro 10 suction-mounted to the right side canopy pointed out the right window, and a Garmin Virb Ultra 30 adhesively mounted to the ceiling pointed at the dash. You can see each of these in angles from the other cameras in the video. On the tail, I have a Gopro 10 on one side, and a Gopro Max 360-degree camera on the other side, mounted with Nflightcam Exterior Ball-Head Mounts. These mounts are really cool, they are secured with a single exterior screw on the surface of the aircraft, in my case a screw that holds the composite winglet to the horizontal stabilizer. I occasionally use a MyPilotPro Swivel Mount to secure one to the tie-down eyelet under the wing, but did not use it this time. Each of the action cameras has an app to control remotely, but I have had problems with each of them losing BLE communication occasionally. The Gopro 10's are the most reliable, but I lost communication to the Gopro Max several times. Very frustrating when you can't reach out and reset the camera while flying. Battery life is only about an hour, so you need to be able to turn them off and on remotely from the cockpit. Even when they work remotely, they produce A LOT of video (probably 250GB this trip) that needs to be edited down.


https://youtu.be/3ora1OaDOUQ

[dant]

Cool video! Definitely on my bucket list.

The Gopros definitely don't put a lot of CPU power in to good encoding of the videos. If you want some space back for interim storing you can re-encode them with Handbrake to h.265 (HEVC) at a super high rate factor e.g. 20. For my 2k 60hz videos from the Gopro Hero 5, this results in some 6x improvement (e.g. 3.72gb -> 611mb). These encode at maybe 30fps on my Ryzen 9 3900X, so roughly half realtime.

edit: this is with the x265 encoder.

[dmloftus]

Thanks for the suggestion. Not a real issue with the size of files, more an issue of wading through hours of video and hundreds of stills. I use Handbrake to convert iPhone video from variable to fixed frame rate.