DSE

Nice work, Brian. Now you just need a belly, toe, and while you're at it, why not put a CX 100 in the nose of your canopy (airpressure will allow it to stay there, according to the PDFT guys). Why not get seven angles per jump?

The only downside I can see to the way you're using it is outside the waterproof box, the lens is extremely exposed, and it's not a coated lens. In other words, engine oils, scratch from something in the plane, etc could damage it, hence the reason GoPro recommends you leave it in the waterproof case. But...it's a cheap cam. The dark video is a bit odd. If anything, the several GoPro's I've worked with lean towards overexposure, and always has a black dot once IRE 235 is exceeded. For the dollar, they're a great value, IMO. Perfect for fun jumpers.

yes, very possible and relatively easy. In fact.....wish I could say more. Currently the workflow is to put the card in, it's read (can be named), and then opens Vegas with all the media in order on the timeline, effectively "pre-edited" with everything necessary to finish it out (put in student's name, tweak any fine points) and burn to DVD.

Nice vid. Greg and Elaine are incredible people, and they're super-talented flyers. Lotsa people in Oz starting to wingsuit because of them, met some really great birds in May.

I'm using Seagate Constellation drives. Spendy...but my data is worth it. They only recently started shipping.

Perhaps not. At the same time, you could maybe explain why red cars prove to have higher accident rates, and drivers of red cars receive more tickets. Insurance and car rental companies readily bear this out. Roger Nelson and Bob Hollar were both prudent skydivers. I imagine one could say Danny was prudent for at least X thousands of jumps. Or perhaps he wasn't prudent during those thousands of jumps but kept getting lucky? Oops, there's that damn concept of gambling again, so it couldn't be luck. Overall, it's an absurd argument. The longer you continue in the sport, the more random events can possibly occur of which you have no control. Additionally, while repetition generally generates competence, it also can generate complacency. Ergo, if you continue to jump, you continue and potentially increase the risk with ever increasing competence and confidence. If you quit jumping, the likelihood of those random events occurring during a skydive is exactly zero.

Word??

Mathematically, perhaps not. Conceptually, I'm quite satisfied with how it reads to me and (probably) the average person. I'm not a numbers guy, and not a philosopher. Debating the existence of randomness and directed existence aren't part of my repertiore. I don't believe that any one skydive influences the probability of incident (or not) but the fact remains, evidence proves that the more often you do something, the greater the possibility for error based on the human factor. Read the USPA or APF reports, all point out that incidents occur at higher, not lower jump numbers. If you read that different than "the more you jump, the greater the possiblity of an incident" then we have to agree to disagree.

This is entirely system dependent. USB bus is controlled by the CPU rather than having an independent bus. If the CPU is taxed, it'll slow down significantly. This was the sole argument in favor of 1394. We can make USB incredibly fast, but if there is an independent governor on it that prevents max speed, it's almost pointless. That being said, tape is dead. It's time folks realize that. Hard-store media is the present and future. Other than skydiving, our facility has been entirely tapeless for 7 years now, recording to HDD, BDPD, SXS, or CF. And for the past two years, MSPD for skydiving. I wish that there were a means on any computer, to insert a USB card that would provide an independent bus without addressing the CPU. It would make life a lot faster. For those reading this topic, one lesson to walk away with is ARCHIVE. Don't go buy the cheapest HDD you can and use it for storage. Get an enterprise-grade external and keep it spun up.

The more "independent exits" you enjoy, the more opportunities to have an incident. Stop exiting, stop the opportunity. Continue exiting, continue the opportunity. Pretty simple. So....apparently we read the data differently. The greatest number of incidents occur with those that have more than 300 jumps. I don't believe it's appropriate to merely extract a median number from the USPA statistics, because for example, the one person that was in the sport for one day with one jump tremendously offsets the guy that's been in the sport for 30 years and has 12,000 jumps. Either way, the data supports that the majority of the incidents occur with very experienced skydivers. It seems that we don't agree on how that data is interpreted. I feel it's related to combinations of complacency and complexity, with a small dose of opportunity tossed in.

In which is the same point I'm making. The more comfortable (complacent) one is with the repetitive task, the potential rises for greater challenge when a new action is factored in. Argue it all you want, the statistics show that the greatest number of jumpers with incidents are "reasonably" to "very" experienced. A student with 10 jumps is a generally more attentive, has gear that is looked atby others, gear that is more prone to safety, the skydives are simple. The potential for incident is no different than the potential for the guy with 10,000 skydives. But the guy with 10,000 skydives generally has a different attitude, different gear, and is performing more complex skydive.

Can you elaborate? I'm reading your statement as the skydiving version of the gambler's fallacy (e.g. if a fair roulette wheel comes up red nine times in a row, it is more likely to come up black next time). I readily acknowledge that I could be reading your statement differently than you intended. Nope...Not at all. The more you do anything (I can name a skydiver who's ugly as sin, but he approaches every single woman he meets. And ends up with some very beautiful women) done repetitively enough not only generates greater skill, but greater ability to use those skills, but at the same time, when something that isn't part of the "norm" when using those skills, it can result in a less then skilled reaction. Look at the jump number/incident ratios. They bear out what I've suggested. As we gain more experience in the sport, we also add additional responsibilities in many cases (smaller parachutes, cameras, wingsuits, faster speeds with lower margins for error, CRW, etc). I don't at all believe it's a gamble in the sense of odds. Some don't make it to their A before multiple cutaways, some go well into their thousandth, and a very few never have had a non-intentional cutaway into thousands of jumps. Yet the averages speak for themselves.

Each exit is an independent event. How about if I word it to say "The more independent exit events you experience, the greater the statistical risk of an incident or malfunction? One of the biggest issues is some become more complacent/comfortable as their experience and trust factor rises. Not everyone falls into this category.

Statistics bear out that the longer you're in the sport (more jumps), that risk increases. It's always a big risk. We just do the best we can to mitigate risk as much as possible. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do. Even though you did everything right.

Sony Vegas will extract a still that has been de-interlaced at XXX number of frames, seconds, minutes, or hours. Users define the value of time. No software (that I'm aware of) can auto-find a smile on a timeline and snap a still/screengrab from that.

We had a TI that would loudly scream "OH MY GOD, what was that?" or "HOLY SHIT, what was that?" while poking the student in the ribs. The student inevitably would say "What happened?" to which he'd reply "It was nothing." Scared every one on the loads for the first week he was jumping at our place. Some of the tandem jokes are funny, such as "If I do this one right, they'll let me start jumping by myself."

Yet an identical opinion from 5500 jumps and 15 years is valid?

As John explains, the pennies will float, and besides, the effect would be miniscule. Now....busting or opening a piggy bank in the air...no big deal. Compositing hundreds/thousands of falling pennies? VERY easy to do, and fairly cheaply too. Were I bidding this out, it would be one jump for talent and photographer, plus around 6 hours of compositing and assembly time, depending on how complex you wanted aspects of it to be.

That's an understatement if I've ever heard one Apple screwed Firewire (better than USB in that it owned its own bus) by keeping it proprietary and costly for too long.

It's an unused airstrip across from White Horse High School and Montezuma Creek Elementary. Bummer. Oh well...four loads, same pattern, slightly different landing areas? Got to admit, it would be fun as hell to set four state records in four loads, all landing in essentially the same place.

The runway in Montezuma Creek runs through both Utah and AZ.

I was permitted about an hour with it last month, and was not allowed to leave the building so I shot in very limited circumstances. I did have my own lenses however, and was pleased with what I saw both in the RAW and JPG images. The video is finally mostly ready for prime-time. It's 29.97 vs 30p fixed. If you're already a "Canon-ite" you'll be very familiar with the controls. Scary fast focus. I connected the 580 flash and was surprised at the options and speed. The "Spray n' Pray" photographer will love how fast it is. Dropping the sharpening resulted in a very film/silver-like image vs digital image, so I love that aspect. It's very smooth in how it manages grades. It was noisy at ISO3200 (as expected), but it saw details my eyes couldn't make out. I primarily focused on the video aspects of the camera, as that's the market we're doing a training DVD for. I'll have a 7D in a week or so for that shoot. Scotty Burns had a fair amount of time with the camera at the trade show yesterday, hopefully he'll chime in with his opinion. He was mostly interested in it as a still cam vs video. Canon is making a big deal out of the ergonomics of the camera, but the truth is (from my perspective), that it feels little different from the 5D or even 50D. For 1700.00 (body only) it's a beautiful piece for a mid-level camera.

Formatting is a huge issue, most guys just don't understand why....Lots of idx and other detritus stay on the card when you delete vs format. There are some repair software tools out there, but none of them have ever worked well for me. Are you copying the streams, or the entire folder content over? Do you have more than one NLE you can put the files into?

The 4 way team I video have Go Pro's on their helmets, Z1's I believe, they like them for checking levels. I got a little too close to the burble once and fell through the middle. We noticed after the jump that I had broken the plastic mount when I hit them. They didn't have cameras installed at the time, just the mount, and I broke the mount itself not the tape, that's some strong tape. I didn't have 200 jumps when I started, and I'm probably not as good as I would've been had I waited. Bear in mind that your body mass hitting a piece of plastic is significantly different than a snag point. You may be better at flying camera because you started early, but there also may be some basic principles missed. I had 500 belly camera jumps before I put on a wingsuit for real, but didn't put on a camera with my wingsuit til I had 200 wingsuit jumps (OK, not quite true, I put a camera on somewhere around 80 wingsuit jumps and got zilch). I learned a lot about flying a wingsuit before I put the cam on my head. EVERYTHING is a trade-off. You can't have one thing without it costing somewhere else.

Almost. It depends on the size of the sensor. As relates to this cam, you're correct, of course. The 7D is the cam body I've been waiting for for gen purpose everything. Real video, not animotion 30p, and 24p, so it's an amateur and even a low-end pro videographer's dream in addition to the still side. Beautiful images, does great in highspeed environments, built like a brick sh**house. Very nice cam overall.