jont

hi john it's 317443 ciao for niao jon t

Well, after a few switch failures, i've now completely given up with tongue and bite switches and moved to a suck/blow pressure switch. It's so much better. Your mouth never meets the switch, only a tube to suck/blow through. Means the switch electrics nevert get saliva anywhere near them, you can't bite through it, and the wiring never gets weakened or compromised by being moved about. I bought the switch online from RS Components in the uk, and it was a matter of moments to connect it to my camera. Comes complete with a metre of tubing to suck on! I noticed the other day that skydanceheadgear in the U.S. sell something pretty similar for $25 at http://www.skydanceheadgear.com/accessor.htm i have to say, i'll never go back to a bite or tongue after this - it's easier, more reliable, adjustable, can be used for both suck or blow - what more could a vidiot want? blues jon t

I believe it's Vegas 5 I have. have only given it a preliminary play with so far - got confused and shut it down! I might well take up your offer of help once i get into it. thanks again for advice jon t

Hey DSE, I can't tell you how great it is to have your input into this forum.

hi all hope the collective wisdom of this forum can help me. I have started filming occasional tandems. I am shooting in a sony pc120, and editing in Premiere Elements 2.0 on a pc (and don't start giving me Mac grief - can't afford another laptop!). One thing i usually do is snatch a dozen or so stills from key moments in the video, save them as jpgs, and use them as a little slideshow at the end of the film. It became clear really quickly that I would need to de-interlace these, or the results were either blurry or flickery. What has become a pain is that I seem to need to right click on each frame I have grabbed and set it's Field status to de-interlace. There doesn't seem to be a way to do the whole batch at once. If you select multiple clips, the Field menu becomes greyed out. I have tried setting each clip from my footage to deinterlace before I take the still frame, but that doesn't seem to work - I still need to deinterlace the individual frame grabs too. I have also tried setting "Deinterlace Video Footage" in the "Keyframe and Rendering export" menu, but still no joy. Can anyone tell me a quick and easy way to extract stills from my footage, and replace them at the end of the timeline with watchable results, without needing to deinterlace each one individually? Many thanks Jon T

Oranges, not apples. 400 of them in a big sack. Let the bag open, then try and catch one. It's wild! Some float, some dive, all spin. Someone told me that when he was tracking off from the dive, he was outtracked by an orange that overtook him! It's all done out to sea, so no danger below, except the confused fish wondering about the huge orange hailstones over Kenya. blues jon t

Yup, it's Will alright. There are some more of him, and of loads of other people at the Kenya Boogie 2005, in my webgallery. go to http://www.illogica.ltd.uk/gallery2/welcome/gallerywelcome.htm to see them. ciao for niao jon t

p.s. and i notice the original poster left no personal details

Just tried to play skydiver for Aid, and Norton popped up and told me it was blocking an intrusion called "Apple QuickTime and ITunes Overflow". Bit of net searching revealed this to be a known form of attack propogated from within a specially constructed .mov file, mostly attacking Macs. I'm not suggesting this is definite, just warning that Norton thinks it found it. Apologies if this is a false alarm. jon t

I'll just say this. Fit your bonehead cutaway kit. Then put on your helmet, sit down on the floor, and get a friend to grab the helmet and pull upwards, to simulate some loading on the system, such as you might get in the event of a line snarl. Now try and operate the cutaway. I tried this exercise. I promptly removed the bonehead cutaway kit, and replaced it with a 2K one, that incorporates a 2-ring. my 2p. Jon T

true but it also has far superior optics, hence the fact that it costs about 7 or 8 times as much as an 18-55 kit lens. It is noticeably heavier and longer, which is why some people don't like it for skydiving, but the image quality is qualatively better. just my 2p (UK) jon t

i haven't tried different wb settings while shooting in jpeg. what i have tried is shooting in raw, and then using the canon software to apply different wb to the shots on my computer, to see what they look like. suggest you do the same. cloudy can be nice, it pushes the colours more. others change the hue. have a play. jt

you bet. see here... http://www.skydivekenya.com/ and get yourslef there next year - it rocks! modesty forbids.... but thanks ciao for niao jt

true but i'm pretty sure it is also lost when the camera turns itself off. in other words, if you set up AEB on the ground, and then the camera goes to standby in the plane, the AEB setting is lost unless you have set up the custom function otherwise. plus you still have the problem of only getting three shots on one bite. jt

I'm jumping a 20D with a 17-85. I started off in sports mode, which sets it to 500th, auto apeture, auto WB, servo AF, auto drive. Worked mostly fine. Now i've started playing with it in manual focus (especially for tandems), Tv (shutter priority) set at somewhere between 320th and 500th depending on the light, but set to overexpose by 1 stop, which helps bring out faces and other details against light skies or cloud. I still always use power drive, so it takes multiple shots. Exposure bracketing is difficult. If you set it up, the the power drive only takes 3 (bracketed) shots, then stops. You have to release the switch and bite again to take more. Plus you have to set up a custom function for the camera to remember this setting, otherwise it does it once and then reverts. Too much hassle, so I don't bother. I shoot at 100 ISO unless it's getting dusky, and then I might push it to 200 or even 400. I leave the WB on Auto, and it always seems fine. hope that helps jon t

here's some I took at the kenya boogie last week jont

Goobersnuftda, what a succinct summary of what is going on. Time to go shopping, methinks! This forum is the most useful resource I know of. Thanks to all of you Jon T

Wow! And I thought I was confused before! So, I don't have Pro, and I don't have Elements. I have a weird thing called Standard, that clearly isn't very, but which periodically nags me to upgrade to Pro. It claims to be v7.0.1, but it turns out to be v1.0 (cos it came after v6.5) And the controls don't work like anyone else's. Curiouser and Curioser Thanks for the info, anyway

see attached

not true for me. the red button simply captures everything as one scene, until you hit stop. I could only make scene detect work by using the "Tape" button, which does the same thing, but enables scene capture. I did not use the In/Out button, but assume that it will trigger scene capture too. This is because when I looked at the user interface, I saw In/Out and Tape are grouped in a box with the scene capture control, but the red button isn't, which is what gave me the clue to try it. If it makes any difference, I'm using Premeier Standard 7.1 not Premiere Pro. Jon T

Thanks for the suggestions guys, much appreciated. I have now sorted it, by pure trial and much error, and with no thanks at all to the confusing "help" files. The problem was I was simply clicking the red "record" button to capture, which made sense to me. In fact to summon up Scene Detect you have to click the Tape button, or the In/Out button, which if you look really carefully is enclosed in the same outline box as the Scene Detect tick box. For the record, it's also a lot slower to capture than some other systems. Instead of capturing the whole lot but dividing it into files on the fly, it stops recording each time it comes to a time-code jump, then pre-rolls, and starts recording again until the next one. But it works, so hey. thanks again for your inputs jon t

Hi all Adobe Premiere Standard v7.1 came pre-installed on my Sony laptop, and I'm finally getting round to trying it out. I can capture footage just fine off my camera by firewire, but the Scene Detect function just doesn't seem to work - everthing stays together as one long clip. Anyone any ideas? ta Jon T

OK, Operation Swab it now completed! Pretty successful. I actually used three swabs in the end, because I was so scared I was too gentle the first 2 times and acheived nothing. But the instructions on the Swab box say "moderate pressure", so I tried again with a little more pressure, and the results are pretty good. No marks left to the naked eye. One small faint splotch left on blank images if I blow them up real big, but I think it won't show on real shots. Phew! Many thanks again to all who volunteered advice and support. blue skies jon t

i did mention the f-word, and much more else besides. what you heard was edited down from about 40 mins of me rambling on to about 3. I didn't hear the programme when it went out on friday, as I was flying out to texel. instead, i listened to the repeat on my way back home sunday night. it was kinda weird, and not very pleasant, hearing myself describe what "going in" meant, after what I had witnessed the day before. of course, i had know idea when i recorded it... jt

Thanks for the postings, guys. Following my own online research, and lot of good PM advice from CTSkydiver, I have just gone out and bought some Sensor Swabs and a bottle of Eclipse. Am very nervous about this, but it has to be done. Won't have time now til friday night, so I'll report back on how it goes. Re: where the dust comes from. Not only are the joints not airtight, but every time you go up to altitude the pressure drops and air will come out of the gap between lens and body. And in freefall the pressure will increase quickly, and air will be pumped back in. However, the marks I have are not dust. They are almost certainly water. We sat in a very cold plane for almost an hour flying from Old Buckenham to Texel before jumping in. On landing, my video camera went straight into condensation error mode. I don't think the stills camera reports such problems, but I have little doubt condensation must have formed in there too. So I'm guessing the marks on the sensor are where the droplets dried out. Anyway, I'll let you know if I manage not to poke the swab through the sensor! cheers jon t