Hellis

That is the inside of the wideanglelens. If the lens would be shorter it would probably not be that much of a problem.

Have you tried clicking on the link in post #5?

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheHellis You are correct that some lenses will not work, but the 5050 will work. The Raynox 3030 will also work but you will have the same field of veiw as the 5050 but just more vingetting. The Liquid lens is one of those that does not work. But i have heard and seen other (sony) cameras having problems with that lens too.

The Raynox 5050 will work, only vingetting problem. I have not used it with xvusas mount but i belive it will be the same result as with the contour mount. I know it will suck, but i suggest you glue the lens to the lensmount.

I to like to see different ideas and have come with a few myself over the years. Just pointing out that the MLW on a base rig is not cluttered up with thing like reserve ripcord handles, cutaway handles (?) and articulating rings. This thing may cause a problem mounting the knife configured like it is. Sparky Very good point. However i hope i never have to use my knife when my handles are still in place, but it could happen. This is actually going to be my third knife on my rig. I have two knives at the legstraps already, but they are the ones with pushbuttons. And i dont think i have yet managed to pull one of them out without droping them (never in a real situation), and thats not a good sign. I need some kind of knife that i can attach higher on the rig because i will soon buy a tracksuit and the pants will block my legstrapmounted knives. I have also thought about geting a larger "standard" type of knife, but i have not yet found something that i feel confident it wont accidently fall out.

I appreciate your help Sparky, but i just dont agree that any other knife is like this knife. I have uploaded a few pictures, because of the filesize limit i uploaded them on my server. They are about 2 MB each. EDIT: It seems i cant make them clicky, the forum adds http:// and a space on all the links EDIT 2: Got it! Knife front side Knife back side Please note that the cheststrap is 180 degrees of heading, it should be going to the right. You see two keepers that hold it in place to the cheststrap. Only knife Here you see the wrap around part of the pocket. How you mount it Perhaps not a good picture, but you see the wrap-around part is first threaded on the cheststrap with the knife facing backwards. Then you wrap the pocket around the MLW and thread the cheststrap trough the other two keepers. Hope that made it clearer

Overpriced, yes perhaps. But i dont agree they are a copy. The knife is held in place with velco on the back and that makes them much easier to grab. The normal type of knives usually have a pushbutton that covers the handle, this means you have to first pull off the pushbutton and hope you dont lose the knife. Also most (the ones i have seen) other pockets are either legstrap type or the type that moves around if you place it on the cheststrap. The Apex type is wraped around the MLW and the chestrap.

Is there any knifes that works the same way as Apex knives? They wrap around the MLW and is very easy to grab http://www.apexbase.com/product.php?product_id=72 The only problem is my MLW/Chestring is too wide for this knife. Anyone seen one for skydiving gear? Or should i just modify one to fit my gear perhaps?

I also jump Guner but i always have earplugs if i have more than a few seconds of freefall. How can you hear other canopys? Your canopy will make as much noise as your friends canopy, but yours is much closer. I would think you hear your own but not so much others canopys. Move your head while under canopy and rely on your eyes, the eyes work on long distance. If you hear another canopy your eyes did not do their job and i think you are too late to do anything about it.

I also loosen the cheststrap after opening. But i would like to say that you should be carefull if you use a rig that does not have the stop on the cheststrap. I did not have the habbit of looking at how much left there was of the cheststrap. I was looking for a freebag, and looking down i noticed my lower body blocked my view, so i pulled back my legs and placed all my weight on the cheststrap. After flying like that for a minute i had a thought "man it would suck if the cheststrap got undone now", and thats when i rememberd i loosend the strap but never looked at how much was left of it. So two things happend that day, i found the freebag and i got a habbit of checking the cheststrap after i loosen it.

Could you do me a favor and post an update in lets say 100 jumps? How much the camera distracts you when you have made 100 more jumps with the camera. I have noticed just what has been said in this thread, "if i look more to the right", "with that background...", and so on. Ofcourse safety first, always make sure i can focus on the camera before i do. If im under canopy i always look around and make sure i count ALL canopys before geting a shot. When you start editing your videos you notice that you dont have anything good, and that makes you want better video. Be careful and notice when you are distracted

Are you serious??!!! No you are not a better canopypilot because you have made ~7 jumps per month. I can do 10 jumps in a day (yes i really can) and i would still not say im good at it. During those 46 jumps, how many times have you been flying in close proximity to another canopy and learning what the different steeringmethods really do? How much altitude do you lose when you make a 180 turn? A 360? And i mean exactly! What is the lowest altitude you can release the brakes from full brakes to full flight without making a dent in the ground? Dont try it, its dangerous. Your canopy does not have cellpressure and will not respond as normal, but you should know the answer. 7 jumps per month is not very much at all, even here where the weather sucks 75% of the summer 7 jumps per month is little. 7 jumps a weekend is ok, but not something anyone would brag about. Listen to the advices from the people here, they know what they are talking about.

And you can actually look at the pictures. Even if you get one of those drives with a screen, the image will be so tiny that you cant see more than blue sky and something in the center. If your camera by any reason might got knocked or something giving you out of focus pictures you are not going to see that on that tiny screen. A brand new laptop 10" at newegg costs $259, not a rocket machine but it will do the jobb. And as Phil says you can buy a used one. I can not recomend you to buy a memorycard reader as the one you linked to based on my experience. Sure, the technology might be much better today and they might be better than the one i bought. The ones with a screen, how much do they cost?

On the other side of the Atlantic swoop pond they cost $32 plus shipping. I have done about 100 jumps with mine now, so that makes about $0.32 per jump, but they are still as new. Sure foam ones are cheaper and you can use them for several uses, but they are in my opinion quite nasty

But you have a screen on the camera? My reasoning is that you verify the pictures in the camera, and delete the pictures that is bad. Then you copy them to the hard drive. And about the battery, that is the reason i say buy one that uses AA batterys. Either you charge a few high capacity batterys in the morning before you leave to the DZ (or wherever) or you buy a pack of disposable AA batterys. This way you are not dependent on the crappy battery built in the drive, you can use muliple batterys and are not dependent on a wall outlet.

Im sorry for just quoting a smal part of your post like this, but i just dont understand this. Are you saying that you dont do gearchecks at all? Because if you are making gearchecks this should not be a problem (i know there has been incidents, dont need to name them). To say that you are not using gear that can be misrouted does not make sense. What about your main bridle? It can be misrouted. Your cutaway cable can be misrouted. Your AAD could be improperly installed. Your rigger could have misrouted the lines on your reserve. I agree with you on the entanglement, but i dont agree with you to disconnect the RSL because it can be routed wrong

I had/have one that i bought about six years ago. It worked but there was two problems with it. Batterytime and speed. And if you are transfering lots of data the speed can make the battery a real problem. After using it a few months i could not copy my 1 GB CompactFlash card without it beeing connected to AC power. And reading about the one you linked to it has a speed of 5 MB/s, its probably 10x the speed of the one i own but its not that impressive when you compare it to what you are used to. A full 8 GB card is going to take about half an hour. A viewer? Nice feature, but do you need it? EDIT: I forgot. Based on my expirience i would try and find one with normal batterys. Something that you can replace, perhaps not needed today as batterys are better today than they where back then but i would still try and find one that i could replace the batterys on. Is a laptop an option? You get all the same features plus much more

What i started doing last year when i was teaching students packing is to have a photo of a open canopy from below. So every time the student or i grab a line or some fabric i show on the photo where the hand is and what we are doing. So when you grab the A-lines and make the fold between the A and B-lines i show it on the photo, and explain how we are making the fold to expose the center of the canopy. I have noticed that its much better, the students understand what im talking about rather than just saying yes. Before i used the photo i would have to repeat some parts a few times during the following packings, but now it seems as if they at least understand what needs to be done. And it also helps with what you are saying, when you have the canopy over the shoulder you just see a big mess of lines and fabric.

And always look for landingareas and how to land there in the current wind. If there will be any turublence, and if there is any rocks or obstacales in the landing area.

That works unless you have a newer version of quicktime. I dont know if the latest version of quicktime has solved the problem, but 7.6 (472) is a working version. Apple screwed up something with the codecs on the later versions. It could be solved with the latest version, but i have never tried it

So you think Vegas 10 would do the job better? Its 35% finnished now. But then i would have to do it again to speed it up a second time. Im not in a rush

Normally it does not take that long to render, but as i said, it created a file that was 8.34 GB, and that was just 36 seconds of video. I tried a few of the mov templates but they gave me some seriously bad video unless i used the uncompressed. But i think i have found a mov template that gives me a good quality to size realation. The computer i perhaps not the best, 2.26 dualcore (the old type) and 4 GB ram. But usually it renders about 2x the lenght of the video. So a 5 min video takes about 10-12 min to render. But i guess its because of the speeding up that it takes longer.

36 seconds of video 8.34 GB. 20 minutes of rendering. And completly useless. By some reason i could not open the file. Lets try it again. Yay

Its HD, 1080p video. Im right now rendering a few seconds of video to a mov "uncompressed", and i will see what i can do with that file. It took three hours to render the 9 min video yesterday, and now i have to do it again

Velocity envelope does not exist in the platinum version. Its a Pro feature only. So render it as Mov instead? Or what do you recomend? Could it be becasue of the Xvid that i cant speed it up more.