Category Archives: Multimedia

I get out to the movies and watch TV once in a while.

HeliNews

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A magazine for helicopter pilots and operators.

One of the things that has always bothered me about being a helicopter pilot — rather than an airplane pilot — is the dearth of good reading material about flying helicopters. The standard flying magazines here in the U.S. — Flying, Plane & Pilot, AOPA Pilot, Flight Training, etc. — rarely have an article written specifically about helicopters, for helicopter pilots, or by a helicopter pilot.

Sure, sometimes they throw us a bone, but it’s always with a catch. For example, in 2003 Flying magazine did a review of the Robinson R44 Raven II, but it had to share its pages with a review of a Porsche Cayenne. (You can read the article here.) It’s more common for them to put one of their airplane pilot/writers in a helicopter for a flight to write a “gee whiz, that’s cool” piece about helicopters, often fraught with technical errors. I remember one piece I read in a magazine where the author claimed that you must never let go of the collective, but you could let go of the cyclic. That author has obviously never flown a Robinson or Long Ranger — both of which I’ve flown extensively. I assume they’re representative of most helicopters: they have a pilot-friendly collective but a cyclic that’ll have the aircraft doing aerobatics if you let go of it.

What’s Out There

In the U.S., there are several helicopter-specific magazines. Rotor & Wing is the granddaddy, a monthly magazine with industry-specific content. Like most print publications, its page count has dwindled considerably in recent years. Content seems geared toward the heavy hitters of the industry, with articles about helicopter sales, new developments in helicopter technology and avionics, and reports from the North Seas and military operations. While I realize that it’s an important source of information for the industry’s heavy hitters, it can be pretty dry reading sometimes — especially for a small desert-based piston pilot like me.

Rotor, the magazine of the Helicopter Association International (HAI) is a quarterly publication. HAI is the helicopter industry’s big association. I was a member for about 2-1/2 years but soon realized that they really didn’t give a damn about operators with fewer than five helicopters. Everything they do is for the “big guys.” Their magazine isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if you’re interested in anything other than HAI’s internal operations and the big operators they service. And their Web site is ugly, difficult to navigate, has many non-functioning links and “features,” and contains little content of value to non-members. (One of these days, I’ll have to write more about my experiences with HAI.)

Vertical MagazineVertical magazine is a slick publication from Canada. Of all the aviation magazines that arrive on my mailbox regularly, it’s the one I prefer. It’s got more content geared toward helicopter operators and pilots. It regularly covers issues such as flight training and does profiles of specific helicopter operators and operations. The photography is outstanding. And while I feel that they still gear content toward the big operators, there’s enough in each issue to satisfy the reading needs of little owner/operators like me.

HeliNews

HeliNewsApparently, however, the best helicopter-specific magazine comes from down under. Australia-based HeliNews is a magazine any helicopter owner or pilot can really sink his or her teeth into. It combines photography that’s almost as good as what you’d find in Vertical with articles written by helicopter pilots for helicopter pilots.

I recently received two sample issues of the magazine. The May 2008 issue has articles covering the following topics:

  • Profile of a corporate CEO who does mustering (cattle herding) with an R44
  • A day in the life of a New Zealand contract pilot in Scotland
  • Australian Navy – U.S. Coast Guard pilot exchange program.
  • Australian Federal Police helicopter operations
  • Helicopters in the movies (just part one in this issue; I don’t have part two!)
  • Military helicopter air show team
  • Practicing autorotations to grass
  • How ADS-B works
  • Switching from Robinson R22 to turbine helicopters and back

All this in addition to the usual collection of columns, editorials, and news about the helicopter industry.

My question: Why can’t a North American publication give us more content like this? Rotor & Wing? Vertical? Are you listening?

Me? Writing for HeliNews?

You might be wondering why I have two copies of this magazine. After all, I don’t think it’s widely available — or perhaps available at all — in the United States.

Well, I’ve been asked to submit an article for the magazine and, if I don’t drop the ball by procrastinating and I submit something worthy of publication, I’ll be a HeliNews author. At least once.

There’s nothing more pleasing to me than to have some of my work published in a high quality magazine.

So if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to work.

Another Example of the Media Screwing Up the Facts

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A brief rant.

One of my Twiiter friends, @Vatsek, tweeted the following to me last night:

Have you seen this? Helicopter crashes at Texas A&M, killing one — CNN News web page

First of all, I do want to make it clear to folks that I don’t normally go out of my way to track down news stories about helicopter crashes — unless they’re local or there’s a chance I might know the pilot. But since @Vatsek tweeted it to me, I figured I’d better check it out to see why he’d flagged it. I found the article on CNN.com, “Helicopter crashes at Texas A&M, killing one.”

It was a brief piece with an overhead view of what looked like a helicopter that someone with a very large foot had stepped on. Included in the text were these sentences:

…The copter, which was heavily damaged, was attempting to take off when it crashed. A rudder apparently failed, the university statement said….

“All of the sudden, he dropped straight back down into the ground,” [a witness said]…

I have two problems with these statements:

  • A standard helicopter does not have a “rudder.” It has a tail rotor, which is controlled with anti-torque pedals. Those pedals resemble rudder pedals on an airplane, but they are not rudder pedals because a helicopter does not have a rudder.
  • If a helicopter’s tail rotor (anti-torque system) failed, the helicopter would not come “straight down.” It would be spinning like crazy. That’s because the tail rotor prevents it from spinning like crazy. If it failed, it would spin. And it’s pretty clear from the photo in the article that the helicopter was not spinning like crazy when it hit the ground.

This is yet another example of the media speculating, with absolutely no knowledge, about the cause of an accident, spreading misinformation among the public. What’s even worse about this is that if they asked any helicopter pilot — even a new student pilot — to fact check their story, they could have gotten it corrected with, at the very least, the proper terminology for the tail rotor/anti-torque system.

Cataloging Video

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Didn’t I pay someone to do this?

A few months back, you may have read various blog posts and tweets from me regarding a video project I’m working on. October was the big film shoot and I the guys I hired and an enormous amount of money to do the project shot about 10 hours of raw video footage all over Arizona.

At the conclusion of each day of the shoot, I was assured that they shot “awesome” footage and that the final product would be “mind boggling.” I assumed (silly me — when will I learn?) that these guys knew what they were doing, so I didn’t micromanage, as I sometimes do. I then sat back and waited for the promised hard disk full of footage (my copy) and the shot log.

When You Want Something Done Right…

I waited a long time. Weeks. What I finally got was three sheets of paper with print so tiny I couldn’t read it — even with my cheaters on. There was virtually no usable information and the list of scenes didn’t cross reference to any video clips by name or any other identifying information. In other words, the catalog was useless.

So it looked as if I’d have to do it myself.

After all, I needed a catalog so I knew what video I had to work with. I needed to know what video was good and whether anything needed to be reshot. I needed a reference I could consult to write my script and make sure I had footage to illustrate everything I wanted to talk about.

I also got the raw video on a 500GB Seagate drive. I assumed (dumb, dumb, dumb) that it was neatly organized and that all the clips would be in some kind of order. But when I plugged it in, I discovered that there was no rhyme or reason to the organization on the disk. Files and folders were randomly named and there were backups of some files on the same hard disk — resulting in duplicates. Video was in multiple formats, some of which simply could not be read on my Mac with the tools I had. I spent two days hunting down conversion software that would enable me to open video files in formats that included MTS, M2T, M2TS, DV, WMV, AVI, and MXF.

This is what I had to catalog.

And that’s what I’ve spent a total of 3 work days doing so far. I’m about 1/4 done.

The Nitty Gritty

Sample MOV FileTo give you an idea of what I’m working with and how I’m dealing with it, consider the screen shots here. The first shot shows a frame of a movie I’m reviewing. I converted its original high definition format to QuickTime for easy viewing. The movie was shot from my helicopter while flying over Lake Powell. It shows a particular stretch of shoreline. I need to know — at least approximately — where on the 135-mile long lake this shoreline is.

Enter Google Maps. I displayed Lake Powell in a big browser window and, based on my knowledge of the lake, zoom in to an area I think the footage might correspond to. This is made slightly easier by the fact that most clips are in named with numbers corresponding to the order in which they were shot. So if a specific piece of shoreline falls between two easily identified canyons, I can usually find the shoreline on Google Maps.

Sample on Google MapsHere’s the same place on Google Maps. And yes, I’m sure it’s the same place.

Then I whip out my handy Stan Jones map of Lake Powell, find Google Maps location on the map, and use a FileMaker Pro database to enter the corresponding lake mile marker as part of the clip’s description. I add some other info about the clip, including its time, a rating on a scale of 1 to 5, and a screenshot of a representative scene.

I only have to do this about 1,000 times.

There are several problems with this technique:

  • The water level determines the appearance of the shoreline. Google Maps has the highest water level and Stan Jones has the lowest. Our video is right in between.
  • Google Maps uses satelite images. Those images point straight down. In most cases, our video is shot at an angle to the scene, at various altitudes.
  • On Gootle Maps, north is always up. On our video clips, north can be any direction.
  • The direction we’re flying and the videographer who took the shot determines which shore I’m looking at. I have to think back to those October days to remember what we did and when, including what time of day.

So matching things up isn’t as easy as you might think. And if you think it’s easy, come on over and give it a try. You can buy the drinks when you give up.

And no, I really didn’t expect the videographers to catalog clip locations right down to the mile marker. What I expected was something like “Bullfrog Area” or “Near Escalante” or “Downlake from Rainbow Bridge.” That would have been a starting point, something for me to work with.

Anyway, I spent all day today doing this and will likely spend all day tomorrow and most of Wednesday. I need to get through all the Lake Powell aerial clips by then. I make good use of my two 24 monitors for this job, putting the QuickTime, FileMaker Pro, and Finder windows on one display and Google Maps in a big browser window on the other display. The thought of doing this on a 15 inch laptop pumps up my blood pressure. The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can move onto other things.

Captain Video Gets an Upgrade

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I’m going HD.

Captain Video is one of my “personal nicknames” — a name I apply to myself when I do something that’s silly or dumb or, in this case, an attempt to explore something new that’s currently beyond my skill set.

I’ve been interested in video for the past 10 or 15 years. I write for a living and I always thought it would be interesting to be involved with a video documentary project. Although one of my dreams has been to work on the research and composition of a documentary’s narrative, I really wanted to be part of the project throughout the video acquisition process, watching the cameramen and other professionals at work, seeing interviews conducted, listening to the director explain his goals for each shot.

I also toyed with the idea of doing my own video. We’ve owned various video cameras from the time the first shoulder mounted VHS machines hit the scenes. Cameras have been getting better, cheaper, and smaller. Over the past five or six years, I bought two different Canon video cameras. I used them a lot when I first bought them, then put them aside. Now their batteries never seem to be charged when I want to use them.

But earlier this year, I did make the big plunge into video production. I did it what I thought was the smart way: I hired a production team. Their job was to acquire the video that I could not shoot — mostly because I was flying a helicopter while the shots needed to be made. They would then take the video and put the best shots in the proper order using the proper transitions and adding the proper music and narration. The result: not one but three final broadcast-length/quality videos.

I won’t go into detail on how this is working out. It’s still to early in the process to say. In general, we have a lot of good footage — almost every bit of it in true high definition taken with professional video equipment. But there are gaps in the footage — scenes I need to tell my stories. And I simply can’t afford to get the video crew back up on location for a few days to get the shots I need.

HandyCam.jpgEnter the Sony HDR CX12 video camera. It’s small, lightweight, easy to operate, and shoots true high definition footage on Sony memory sticks. My production crew has one of these cameras and a lot of the footage shot with it was very usable. While not exactly cheap, it was affordable. I ordered it on Amazon.com yesterday, along with a spare battery and an 8 GB memory stick.

In December or January, Mike and I will head up to Page, AZ to pick up the video clips we need. We have some other business up there to attend to anyway, so we’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone. We’ll watch the weather and pick a weekend with calm winds and clear skies. We’ll fly the helicopter up with doors off on a Saturday, picking up needed clips along the way. Then we’ll do some late afternoon flying over the lake, spend the night in a motel, and follow it up with some early morning shots. Mike and I will take turns shooting, using the camera on the side of the aircraft with the best view of what we need to shoot. Then we’ll fly home, where I’ll put all the footage on a hard disk or series of DVDs and send them to my production crew for inclusion in the final videos.

At least that’s the plan.

Realize that I’m very worried that once this project is over, this camera will sit in a drawer with the others. The power will drain from its battery and I’ll be frustrated every time I take it out to use it. It’s going to take real effort on my part to keep using it. Probably a few small projects. None of those projects require HD, but it will be nice to save the footage in that format for future use.

I do need to mention here that I’ve been sitting on the fence about buying this camera since I first heard of it. My fears of not utilizing it and the price tag were the main things holding me back. But the need for HD video to complete my projects was a big motivator. It’s a lot cheaper to buy the camera and get the footage myself than to transport a video crew from San Diego to Page, AZ and back. To be honest, I’m also worried that they won’t get the footage I need on this second try, either. (You know what they say about wanting to get things done right.)

The thing that convinced me was the September 3, 2008 review on Amazon.com by Allen C. Huffman. It’s the first review that appears — probably because everyone who voted on it said it was helpful. He gave the camera 4 out of 5 stars and then provided some extremely helpful details and advice about using the camera with a Mac. He listed pros and cons about the camera, comparing it to another Sony model he owned and liked. This “real life” review by someone who is obviously not easily impressed helped convince me that this was the right camera for me.

Anyway, I’ve taken the plunge. Let’s see how much use I get out of this new piece of equipment.