parachutist

No. It's like pissing in your food bowl. Tandems bring new people to skydiving. Tandems bring money to the DZs. That allows us to get on fancy planes, get affordable lift tickets, and have plenty of dropzones available wherever we go. Tandems are the food bowl. Why add more complications and risk for those who don't know any better (the tandem students)? Why add the likelihood of more negative press toward tandems? You know that someone is going to screw up and hit a tandem if this practice is condoned. Go play with knowledgeable jumpers and buzz their canopies if they're in agreement.

Hmmm....so it does. Well, I'll tell you what. The 126 Optimum fits in there nicely. Good firm fit all the way around. I can't see how it would be causing the softness in the packed main at all. Maybe I'll make a little video and post it. Having more bulk in the reserve tray would cause the reserve to push a bit into the main tray, causing a slightly tighter main fit. No way to tell how much without tying it. This effect can be recreated a little if your rigger makes an effort to leave very little fabric in the ears of the reserve, and a lot of fabric in the S-folds. You've seen my Javelin TJN which is tight with a VX109... it's opposite of your situation... it's tight with the canopies I have installed. In order to fit my main into the main tray, I have to put lots of reserve fabric in the ears and as little as possible in the S-folds. Chris

Lance, I'm glad you liked the video! I would suggest - one mid-size internal drive for OS and raw footage/photos - one mid-size internal drive for rendered videos - one external drive for permanent storage (I move the raw footage/photos/.veg files over to this external drive at the end of every day). This external drive is easy and cheap to replace when it gets full. You could swap the purposes of the two internal drives without noticing much if any change in performance... as long as the raw footage is on a different drive from the rendered video.

Some changes would need to be made to that Hot Rod style to make it really efficient for editing. 2D video is all that matters for Vegas editing, so onboard video is just as good as the pricey video cards. I'd get a motherboard that has 2x video outputs and an onboard RAID controller. The Hotrod only shows 1 hard drive. That's going to be a choke point for editing... a good idea would be take the money you saved on the vid card and invest in multiple hard drives. Set those up in RAID 0 or 10 using onboard RAID controller. Production Assistant is what you'd need for pushing tandem vids through fast, because it provides a scripting feature that lets you drop video clips directly into a pre-made template. Ultimate S has some nice features as you noticed, such as quick creation of photo/video montages that work great for wedding videos, but US doesn't have the scripting feature mentioned above. Ultimate S is good to have in addition to PA if you're venturing further into video production than cookie-cutter tandem template vids. That bundle price you found looks like a deal. I haven't seen better. Chris

37 mm threads are nice because they'll also work with your next video camera, whatever model you buy. Howver if you buy a lens now with threads to fit your current camera, and say they're 30mm... you may or may not be able to use that same lens on your next camcorder. When you take that 30mm thread and use an adapter ring to put it on a camcorder that has 37mm threads (like my CX-7). Then you'll probably have a big black ring around all your videos. Best option is to think ahead and plan to use adapter rings... start with a lens that can go to any camcorder (37mm) instead of limiting yourself from the start by getting a 30mm. This one comes with adapter rings and is affordable. Customer rating is 5 stars, and it's low profile. The single element design helps eliminate fog issues when you're in humid areas. The one thing you lose is zoom-through ability, but I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice. I've been using it for 2 years for SD and HD with no complaints: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/229934-REG/Century_Precision_Optics_0DS_55WA_37_DS_55WA_37_0_55x_Wide_Angle.html

Keep us posted, okay? Spot, if you get a chance to read this, we're all thinking of you and wanting you to heal fast. You'll make it back.

Sounds a lot like this post I put up a few months ago: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3346001;search_string=vision;#3346001 My Aerodyne Vision 117 was fine with Spectra lines, then I got a new line set from Aerodyne & it was HMA, and then my risers started melting. Sounds like what you're dealing with. I ended up putting the Vision in a bag & it's gathering dust in my closet now.

Latest update: Douglas got out of surgery a few hours ago. His pelvis is back in one piece now (yay!). Just to clarify a mistake in the original news story.. there was no femur break. The pelvis was in 2 pieces and it allowed 1 leg to be slightly higher than the other, which is why initially the paramedics thought he may have had a broken femur. Doctors want him to be up & mobile soon. We'll see how that goes... I think Douglas will likely be online posting for himself within a week. The posts of good wishes are appreciated by me, Douglas' family, and of course Doug himself. They've been read to him in the hosiptal so keep 'em coming =] Chris

This is the part I'm not understanding. I'm thinking we teach them a box body position for stability from the beginning. It seems the arms in box position when student extends legs allow him/her to maintain stability and direction while moving forward. Does the T add more stability and direction control than the box?

I prefer having risers short enough that I can reach the outer B lines without mods, then just pull the line itself. Outside lines are my preference because you can steer easily with them, and you can swing the whole canopy right/left/right/left while diving if needed, causing a faster dive. I've used this with Lightnings, loaded from 1.2 - 1.9. Thanks to Henny for introducing me to the B line option several years ago.

I was discussing this technique with an instructor last week... it's a new idea to me. My first impression of the T: We'd be teaching people something that they'll be unlearning in the near future, and that seems inefficient to me. The other instructor was completely sold on the idea, though. I'm accustomed to teaching this method: - maintain a box position with the arms while turning away from a formation - extend legs to begin the track, leaving arms in box position - after forward movement begins, pull elbows down so that hands are at shoulder level ----------end of class for AFF students---------------- - after graduating AFF, teaching to extend hands down to hip level and then to full track while cupping shoulders

With my CX7 I've been using the VMC-K100 that Trunk mentioned. Mine has about 600 jumps on it & it's still working great

Interesting gripe. I've no desire to leave with hand on the hacky (or frog, or barbie head, or whatever in CRW). Then again I've never seen an issue caused by those who do it regularly. I've watched it happen out of Twin Otters and Casas plenty of times without a hitch, so it never really bugged me... just seemed different. Chris

Today a rigger at our DZ in Erda, UT found a reserve closing loop that looks exactly like the one in your photo. It may have been from the same rigger that made the one you found. This rig was last repacked in Ogden area. The local DPRE was on site today & he looked it over, so I figured he'd take it from there & make any calls if necessary.

heh... the bite marks only take a day or so to go away. People who've been watching this forum have heard the question about HDD cams so many times. I got bit similarly my first time in here when asking about MPEG encoders a couple years ago. People pulled up several old threads & wondered why I hadn't searched. All my answers were there already =p

Red usually picks up the phone when you call during normal business hours, unless he's out for some reason.

You're looking for gaffers tape. Put that into a search engine and you'll find lots of results. Mail order is probably best option for a decent price

There is another option: Burn the photos to a data folder on the video DVD. Using Sony Vegas it's an option in the DVD Architect application... both video and data get burned to one disc at the same time. One caveat to doing this: You basically need to hand people an instruction card. I print one and put it into the DVD sleeve. The card tells them the photos are in a "photos" folder on their DVD. People are so accustomed to getting separate DVD and CD, and they may not be aware of how to navigate to the folder on their computer.

The camera's on your head, so you know what you're recording. I'm sure after doing as many video jumps as you have, you've got a pretty good idea what the customer's going to see from your camera. If you were editing another jumper's video, however, you don't need to watch the video at 1x speed to know what's on the screen. You can 'scrub' through and see what's on screen through the entire video in about 15-30 secs. You don't need to listen to the entire audio sequence. I use visual audio levels that I see on the timeline, then verify by selecting important areas and listening to those briefly (Like 4 seconds going from music to in-plane interview at altitude). It takes very little time. Then I can jump to the next spot by clicking further down the timeline (Where we go from music to just-landed interview). Once the video's been burned I encourage the jumper to take their new DVD and watch it on our TV. That works great for QC. I can listen to the DVD and watch their responses while I'm editing other videos.

Your times are what mine were looking like 18 months ago. Then I started working with DSE to find out how to cut that down. First priority was to use a flash-based camcorder. That one change cut my editing times almost in half. Second was to create a few templates with music already selected and titles ready to go (I'd been spending too much time thinking about what music to use for each video.). That saved me a couple minutes. Third was to automate the copying and importing of clips to the computer. That one saved time, but even more importantly allowed me to relax, sit back, and quit clicking so much. With these changes, when editing only 1 video, I can hand a disc to the student 8 minutes after the flash card comes out of the camera, or 10 minutes if I drag lazily through the sequence & make finer adjustments to cut points. So for 1 video I'm about same speed as analog editing system, but my finished DVD now has a custom menu with extras included (like a teaser video that shows what else the student can do beyond tandems). That's for 1 video at a time For multiple videos (if I'm editing for all videographers today), I'm now much faster than analog boards, because steps can overlap. The rendering & burning steps of video 1 can happen at same time as copying/importing/editing of video 2 and 3. So now in 15-18 minutes I have 3 videos finished, which breaks down to 5 or 6 minutes each... and they come out with all the extras on the DVD This will only get faster and easier. I spent time honing this sequence of events last year, and while the really slow portions have now been eliminated, more streamlining can occur and more automation can be created.

That's what I was told when I first started rigging, but in my experience it seems that's only the case if I do a loose pack job, or if bulk wasn't managed properly. If the job is tight from the start and all corners of the packing tray are filled from the beginning, they don't seem to loosen up. I learned the difference early on by trying a Mirage G3 pack job just using the original manual (my pack jobs would shift), then packing the same rigs using Mike G's Mirage tutorial. Now they were tight and nothing had room to shift over the next XXX days. Photo 1 makes it look like more fabric should be moved to the middle ear portion (next to center of PC) Also it appears there wasn't a 'hole' left between right and left sides at bottom of the pack tray. That empty space should create a depression for the PC fabric to sink into. I've had occasional rigs that come back to me for tightening or reseating, but I try to learn from those & keep it from happening next time on similar rigs.

scottysfartsburn.com would be a good resource for these and other aeronautical solutions

Awesome! I'll get to jump with you guys & girls then :)

It takes about 10 minutes from time the card comes out of camera til DVD ejects from the system. My tandem videos usually end up being about 6 minutes long... some people spend more time on the interviews, etc... I'm guessing for a 10 min video it would probably add a couple more minutes render time, so you're probably looking at 12 mins. When I first started editing tandem videos with an NLE system, I was frustrated by all the mouse clicking needed to create folders, copy files, pull files into the program, etc, etc. So I started using automation programs. We demonstrate how these programs can speed things up. To me, automation is the main reason editing with a PC is now fast & easy. You will have a few minutes to leave the PC while it's rendering the video (typically 3-6 minutes, depending on speed of your system and length of your video) We go into why we chose Sony Vegas in the DVD. One of the big reasons is that you can run multiple copies at once, which means you can edit 1 video while another is rendering and a third is burning. It helps speed things up. PC vs Apple... I haven't used a macbook for editing, so I'll need to let DSE answer this one Chris

We used Sony Vegas Pro when filming the video, but the workflows and a majority of procedures that we demonstrate can be easily adapted to other NLE software as well. It's like instruction on how to drive fast: After watching Joe in a Mustang on video, you can go drive a Camaro and it'll behave a little different, but the principles are the same and you can apply them to either car. There are a few bonuses we supply in the Extras folder of the DVD that are specific to Vegas: - pre-made tandem video templates (with intro, music, and outro) - pre-made tandem DVD menu (with links to credits and a Norman Kent compilation of videos) It's convenient to be using Vegas because you can start using these templates immediately, however we provide all the raw materials to make your own similar templates: - royalty-free music folder (contains same music used in the pre-made templates) - Video compilation file (same as listed above in the DVD menu template) Also there's a chapter about templates and how to make your own custom versions. You can use this guide for making tandem templates in other NLE apps. Chris