If you follow this site much, one of the things you’ll have noticed that I like to do is film and edit/publish flying videos of our travels. I particularly like some of the first-person point of view stuff with cockpit audio. I think it’s really cool, and captures a lot of those ‘moments’ that others would enjoy, but since we’ll be working on more ratings soon, it can also be a nice training aid. That’s particularly true with the new camera that I picked up at Airventure.

It’s an improved version of Contour lipstick camera that I’ve been using, with the same excellent automatic lighting controls, but this one has on-board audio so I can eliminate my separate device for that, and it includes GPS tracking. It features 1080p video at 60 frames-per-second, and wider viewing lens, the audio input, as well as bluetooth connectivity. With the bluetooth you can use an Andriod or iOS device as the viewfinder to see what the camera sees, which is really nice to make sure it’s pointed where you want, or that the rotate-able lens is right-side-up.

The only downer is the suction cup mount covers the audio plug (on the bottom), but with the interior in I can’t really use the suction cup mount anyway. You may also notice with my latest video that the carbon-fiber-black panel seems to not reflect so much light, letting the camera catch the gauges as well as the scene out the window. Very nice.

That’s really nice, as with this and a piece of software called Dashware, I can overlay our airspeed, heading, altitude, and a miniature map onto the video. That might help folks enjoy our trips, but will be a very nice post-flight tool for checking pattern work and the like. It’ll be a little less helpful for IFR work since the parameters are all GPS-based, so the airspeed and altitude will not be “right”.

Posted By: Brett Ferrell
Sunday August 7th, 2011 at 12:16 AM

Categories: A/V Recording
Tags: A/V Recording Building Camera Contour HD Dashware