All Purpose Salt & Pepper Blend

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Maria Langer

I discover that a rib rub actually makes an excellent everyday seasoning.

A few weeks ago, I watched a cooking video titled “Salt & Pepper Spare Ribs” by Allrecipes.com‘s Chef John. Although Chef John’s sing-songy narration drives me bonkers, he shares a lot of good recipes and this was definitely one of them. (You can find the recipe without listening to his voice here.) I made the ribs, using baby backs because St. Louis (which I prefer) weren’t available, and they were great.

I did find myself with some extra rub after preparing the ribs. (Baby backs are smaller than St. Louis.) I put it in a jar in my pantry. This morning, on a whim, I sprinkled some on my breakfast scramble. Today, that included bacon; onions, yellow squash, and potatoes from my garden; spinach; and tomatoes with an egg on top. The small amount of “rib rub” I put on my breakfast really made the flavor explode. I regret not putting more on. (Tomorrow is another day.)

The blend is easy. Just mix these five ingredients together:

Just five ingredients. Can’t get any easier than that!
4 teaspoons kosher salt. I actually used regular iodized salt, which is I had in my pantry and wanted to use up.
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper. Sadly my pepper mill doesn’t properly grind pepper — it cracks it. Not what I wanted in this recipe so I used pre-ground pepper. (Do not use flake pepper. Ever. If you have any, throw it away. It’s garbage.)
1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper. I wouldn’t even know where to buy white peppercorns in the rural area where I live. I consider myself lucky to find ground white pepper so that’s what I used.
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper. I’ll admit I used a little less than this because I don’t like super spicy food. The ribs were definitely spicy enough for me.
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder. Honestly, I think this is what made it so good on my breakfast.

Put it in a jar that you can seal tightly. I try to save spice jars with sprinkle tops just for this purpose. Then use it on anything you would normally sprinkle with salt and pepper. You won’t be disappointed.

That rib recipe won’t disappoint you, either. It’s especially good if you don’t have a smoker or just want something different. It can’t be any easier to make.

One Cherry Drying Flight, Two Different Videos

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Maria Langer

With three cameras running on board, I do a quick cherry drying flight and make two very different videos from it.

This week, I’m releasing two videos from the same flight.

Helicopter Cherry Drying Flight w/Tailcam Views

Hop on board for a standard cockpit POV view of a cherry drying flight, from start to finish. In this video, I take off from a landing zone in Malaga, WA, fly to an orchard up Squilchuck Canyon in Wenatchee, and settle down over the treetops to dry 3.3 acres of rainier cherry trees. Along the way, I talk on the intercom and radio to point out things of interest, explain what I’m doing, and give position calls. On some of the new tailcam views, you can see the trees shaking like crazy as I fly past. When I’m finished, I fly back to my landing zone in Malaga.

360° Helicopter Cherry Drying Flight

Hop on board — virtually — for a 360° view of a cherry drying flight, from start to finish. In this interactive video, I take off from a landing zone in Malaga, WA, fly to an orchard up Squilchuck Canyon in Wenatchee, and settle down over the treetops to dry 3.3 acres of rainier cherry trees. By using two cameras to record video, I was able to get an audio track of me talking on the intercom and radio to point out things of interest, explain what I’m doing, and give position calls. If you look out the back windows while I’m flying low over the trees, you should see them shake like crazy as I fly past. When I’m finished, I fly back to my landing zone in Malaga.

To experience the 360° features of this video, you need to watch it one of three ways:

On a computer in a Web browser, use your mouse to change the view by clicking and dragging. You may also be able to zoom in or out.
On a mobile device IN THE YOUTUBE APP (not a mobile browser), tilt or swipe your app to change the view.
On a smart TV viewing the YouTube channel, you should be able to use your remote’s arrow keys to change the view.

Behind the Scenes

How did I make these two videos? Here’s what went on behind the scenes.

Cameras

I started with three GoPro Cameras:

Cockpit Cam Instrument View (or just InstrumentCam) – a GoPro Hero7 mounted on a pole on the bar between my front seats. This provides a view out the front cockpit window, along with the helicopter’s instrument stack and cyclic. I show off this modified camera mount in “Behind the Scenes: Cockpit Cam Instrument View Setup” on YouTube; you can read more about it in the description for that video. This camera is also hooked up to my helicopter’s intercom, so it provides the cockpit audio.
TailCam – a GoPro Hero7 mounted at the very end of the helicopter’s stinger, in this case, pointing forward and down. This provides a view of the lower half of the back of the helicopter and the ground between it and the helicopter. It also records ambient audio: engine, rotor, and wind. (I did not use this audio track.)
360° Cam – a GoPro Fusion mounted inverted from the tiny window over the passenger seat. This camera records everything a front seat passenger might see in flight, even if he moved around to look out various windows, straight down (provided he was invisible), and straight up. This camera also records ambient audio: engine and rotor.

Audio

If you read this blog regularly, you might know that I’ve been struggling with one-channel audio being recorded through the NFlightCam audio cable I rely on for cockpit audio. There is nothing they can do to “fix” the cable so I have to “fix” the audio by combining the live left and nearly dead right channels into mono audio. Filmora Pro, which I switched to, does not include a feature to do this. I explained what I do in “The Video Editing Audio Workaround” on this blog.

The net result: for both of these videos, I used the post-processed (mono) audio track from the InstrumentCam.

Since most viewers like to hear the engine and rotors, I also used the audio track from the 360° Cam — although I could have used the audio from the TailCam. The difference between them? The TailCam includes wind noise, which I don’t think we needed.

But it’s important to keep in mind that for both videos the audio tracks were completely detached from the video tracks, thus adding the need to sync them with the video and keep them synced.

360° Video

I made this video first, using Filmora Pro. I obtained Filmora specifically to edit 360° video; I later discovered that other, possibly cheaper packages might also do the job. 🙄 I also discovered that Filmora doesn’t export the edited 360° video in a format that is recognizable as 360° on YouTube or in apps. Fortunately, I found an excellent YouTube video that explains all the steps I needed to edit and format for 360°: “How to edit 360 video in Filmora – Fail-proof method.” It required an additional software tool which, fortunately, was available for Macs and free.

To make the video, here’s what I did:

Import the video from the 360° Cam into Filmora Pro, allowing it to change the resolution as necessary.
Change the rotation of the camera view by 180° (it had been inverted).
Detach the audio track from the video track but keep the two tracks synced.
Dial down the audio track by 8db.
Import the Instrument Cam video.
Detach and discard the InstrumentCam audio track. (Remember, it’s left channel only.)
Import the processed audio from the InstrumentCam and line it up exactly with the video track so it’s synced.
Lock the two tracks together to keep them synced.
Resize the InstrumentCam video so I can see it and the 360° Cam video at the same time.
In the timeline, move the InstrumentCam audio/video tracks so they sync with a specific motion captured by both cams. If I’d been smart about this, I would have used my clapper, but I didn’t when I recorded the video, but I didn’t. 🙄 Instead, I had to rely on a specific movement — I think it was when I adjusted my headset. This, by the way, is the most time consuming and tedious part of making any of my videos — syncing two cameras — and it’s considerably easier when I just use the damn clapper.
Trim the beginning and end of all audio and video clips to cut out what’s not going to appear in the final video.
Hide the video track from the InstrumentCam. (I hid it rather than delete it so I could use the same video editing file for the other video, as you’ll learn below.)
Add beginning titles, Member Wall, etc.
Add to the render queue, adjust settings for 360° video, and render. The rendering process for this 15-minute video took just over one hour.
Run the resulting video through the Spatial Media Metadata Injector. (I’ll let you watch the video I linked to above for details if you want to know what the heck that is and why it’s important.)
Test the video with GoPro VR Player to make sure it looks and works OK.
Discover that the opening titles and Member Wall are completely FUBAR. Go back to the step where I inserted them, fix them, and repeat remaining steps.
Repeat previous step. (So yes, I rendered the video 3 times.)

You might say, Wait a minute, M. Doesn’t GoPro offer software for editing that video?

Yes, it does, but it’s extremely limited. My channel viewers want cockpit audio and the GoPro solution does not enable me to combine multiple audio tracks. So this is what I have to do.

Is it time-consuming? Hell yes. This video is about 15 minutes long and took a total of at least 3 hours of my time plus 3 hours of rendering time to produce. And that doesn’t include the hour of pre-editing stitching time or the bad stereo to good mono audio processing time or 30 minutes of YouTube upload time.

But I’m very pleased with the results. I just wish the final video started facing forward instead of backwards. (More experimentation is obviously needed to fix that in future videos.)

InstrumentCam Video w/TailCam Views

When the 360° video was done and uploaded for certain tiers of channel members, I took a day off and then got back to editing. My goal was to have both videos ready for Sunday public release.

This one was considerably easier because I already had some of the tracks prepared. Here’s what I did.

Duplicate the 360° Cam video’s editing file and rename it.
Delete the 360° video (but not audio) track. Its audio track is already synced with the InstrumentCam video.
Adjust the screen resolution to 2704 x 1520. (I shoot in 2.7k these days but will likely start working with 4K video soon.)
Unhide the InstrumentCam video track and resize it to fill the video screen.
Import the TailCam video.
Detach the audio track and delete it.
Following pretty much the same procedure I outlined in a step above, sync the TailCam video with the InstrumentCam video. I used the moment the helicopter lifted from the ground, although I might be off by a few frames.
Using a variety of cuts and transitions, place the TailCam video in a PIP inset where it makes sense to show it: takeoff, movement over trees, landing. Note that I masked parts of the video I didn’t need to show depending on where I showed it.
Fix titles for new video resolution.
Redo and add the Member Wall. (I had one new member since I made the previous video.)
Add to the render queue, adjust render settings, and render. Rendering still took about an hour.
Test the video in QuickTime player to make sure it looks good. Fortunately, I nailed it on the first try.

I uploaded this one on Friday for certain tiers of channel members.

Results

It’s a lot of work, but I think the results speak for themselves. I’m not a professional video editor. I’m a professional pilot. I’m fortunate that I have excellent computer skills from my previous career. But that doesn’t mean I have professional video editing skills. It just means that I can use software to produce decent (but not perfect) results.

I hope my viewers appreciate the time that goes into making these videos. They can show their appreciation by sharing my videos, subscribing to my channel, and considering membership.

The Video Editing Audio Workaround

Posted on June 14, 2020 by Maria Langer

The hoops I have to jump through to get the cockpit audio right on my YouTube videos.

I’m in the process of switching from ScreenFlow to Filmora Pro as my primary video editing software. I needed an editor that could edit 360° videos to add title screens, callouts, and additional audio. To my knowledge, ScreenFlow could not do this. That didn’t surprise me since ScreenFlow was designed primarily as a video screen capture and editing tool and the only reason I was using it was because it was cheap and it supported picture in picture.

I should mention here that in the past, I’ve used iMovie (limited) and Final Cut Pro (the old version was great; the X version is not). I knew that Adobe Premiere would do what I needed it to do, but I was not at all interested in paying Adobe a monthly fee to be able to access the files I created with its software. I believe software should be bought — not rented.

Filmora has a bunch of really good tutorials on YouTube and it was pretty easy to learn — not that I know everything about it yet. And the “lifetime” price did away with the nonsense of software rentals, letting me buy the software just once and get free upgrades and free customer support forever (however long that is). It was $180 after tax, which fit my budget.

But…

It wasn’t until I’d begun using Filmora Pro that I realized that it lacked a feature I really needed: the ability to turn stereo sound into mono sound.

Let me explain.

My videos usually have two sources of sound, each for a different type of sound:

One GoPro Hero7 Black records ambient sound — normally, that’s the sound of the engine and rotors as I start up, fly, and shut down. In the beginning, I left this sound out, but a lot of my fans claimed they liked it. So I made sure I had one camera running to capture that, even if I didn’t use the video that went with it.
Another GoPro Hero7 Black records the sound in my intercom system — normally that’s the sound of me talking to the camera or on the radio or phone. (When I’m on the phone, you can only hear my half of the conversation.) That’s captured through a connection between the camera and my intercom system via an NFlightCam Audio Cable. Channel fans apparently really love my narrations — who knew? — and the sound of radio chatter, so this is an important component of my video setup.

The problem is, the intercom audio is recorded on just one stereo channel: the left. (This is a shortcoming of the cable which, according to the folks at NFlightCam, is a problem with the one part of the cable they buy from GoPro for their products. In other words, according to NFlightCam, it’s GoPro’s fault.) If I use this audio in my videos as is and someone listens through stereo speakers or headphones, they notice that the voice is coming from just one side. And they complain.

When I used ScreenFlow, it had the ability to turn stereo channels into mono. That combined the left (with sound) and right (with no sound) into one channel that sounds like it’s coming from somewhere in the middle. That got the complaints to stop — when I remembered to take the extra conversion step.

But Filmora Pro doesn’t support the combining of two stereo channels into one mono channel. So there’s no solution in this software.

Of course, there’s a workaround — export the audio only, convert it stereo to mono, and import it back into Filmora Pro. Here’s how I do that with the software I already have:

I save old software and I’m very glad I saved this application. My iMac is running MacOS High Sierra; I don’t think this will run under Catalina on my laptop.
Open the video clip with the single channel stereo sound in QuickTime Player Pro 7. (Note that I didn’t say QuickTime Player, which is the current version of the software. No, I’m using the version from 2009: QuickTime Player 7.6.6, which requires a registration code. This was the good version of QuickTime, which allows editing and screen recording and includes all kinds of other neat features. I recovered and saved this version when it was overwritten by the limited feature version that came after it.)
Why can’t Filmora Pro have a Channels pop-up menu like this one?
Use the Export command under the File menu to save the Audio Only as Sound to AIFF. Before exporting, click the Options button and be sure that Mono is selected from the Channels pop-up menu. This is how I convert stereo to mono, but the resulting file is not compatible with Filmora Pro.
Double-click the resulting Audio file in iTunes to import and open it.
Use the Convert command under the File menu to Create an AAC Version.
Drag that version out of iTunes and into a Finder window to export it. I now have a version compatible with Filmora Pro.
Drag the audio file into Filmora Pro’s media window.
Drag the original video file into the Filmora Pro timeline.
Unlink the video file’s original audio track from the video track.
Delete the unlinked audio track from the timeline.
Drag the mono audio file into the Filmora Pro Timeline and line it up exactly with the video track that remains. That will synchronize the two tracks.
Link the two tracks together so they cannot be edited out of sync.
Repeat the above steps for every video clip with a cockpit audio track.

And then…

From that point, all I have to do is add the second audio/video track — assuming I want the ambient sound audio track to play behind the cockpit audio — synchronize it with the cockpit audio/video so the sounds are right, unlink the audio/video from in that second track, get rid of (or adjust the size of) the second video clip, and add subsequent clips, doing the same for each, for the length of the video. I also need to be sure there’s 20 seconds with nothing much going on at the end so I can add end cards. Then I add the title screen with “theme music” and animation and any annotation text, including a reminder that the video description has lots of information that might answer viewer questions.

In all, I think the video editing process takes about 10-20x the amount of time in the video clip. So, for example, a 10-minute video would take about 100-200 minutes to edit.

Rendering varies depending on the length of the video, but at least it doesn’t require any additional effort on my part. Uploading to YouTube also takes a while, but only a few minutes of actual work as I fill in the form with the video information.

So yes, it’s involved.

A lot of folks think flying a helicopter is hard. I think it’s a lot easier than editing a quality video.

How YouTube Ad Revenue Works for Monetized Channels

Posted on November 14, 2019 by Maria Langer

A behind-the scenes look at how YouTube creators can make money on advertising.

A while back, I blogged about an unexpected windfall from my YouTube videos and how that had motivated me to create new content and keep my channel growing as a real source of income. Since then, I’ve learned a few things.

The most important thing I learned was how YouTube advertising revenue works, and I thought I’d share it with the folks who think that they can become rich quick as YouTube content creators. As you’ll see, it isn’t that easy.

Yes, once your channel is monetized — a step that requires the channel to have at least 10,000 subscribers, which is a challenge in itself — you can get a small part of the revenue that YouTube collects on the ads that appear before, on, after, and sometimes during your video.

As a creator, you get some control over what kind of ads appear and when they appear. You can do this on a video-by-video basis or set default options that apply to all new videos you publish. Here’s what the Video Monetization screen looks like for one of my longer videos:

Here’s the Video Monetization settings for one of my upcoming videos.

Of course, all this is moot for a video if you turn monetization off. That doesn’t turn ads off — it just turns off your ability to collect ad revenue on the video. Why would you do that? Well, perhaps the video has a paid promotion in it; if so, YouTube requires you to turn off monetization. Failure to do so is a violation of the terms of service which is a serious no-no in YouTubeland.

If Monetization is turned on, you can select what kind of ads you’ll allow on the video and when they will appear. YouTube recommends that you turn all of them on and it’s pretty obvious that a lot of creators do. But because I hate seeing ads in the middle of a video, I keep the During Video option (at the bottom) turned off. (I wish everyone did.) Other than that, I keep them set as you see here, with most turned on. Skippable ads run for about 5 seconds before you can click to skip them and I think that’s a small price to pay for free content. (To my knowledge, skipping an ad does not reduce my revenue.) Non-skippable ads are a little more frustrating but they’re always short. Overlay ads and sponsored cards both appear over content and I have one turned on and the other turned off; I think my logic was that one is more obtrusive than the other.

Now you might think that turning these on results in ads appearing on every single view. That’s simply not the case. Surely you’ve seen YouTube videos without ads?

There’s actually a sitewide estimate of how often ads appear on YouTube content: 40% of the time. So if one of my videos is viewed 10,000 times, only 4,000 of those views were likely to include ads. This becomes an important number, as we’ll see in a moment.

I should mention here that you can actually calculate your current ad percentage manually by consulting two different analytics screens. The Channel Analytics Overview screen tells you the number of views for a specific period — 28 days by default. The Channel Analytics Revenue screen tells you the number of monetized playbacks. Divide monetized playbacks by total views to get the percentage:

For example, as of today, for the past 28 days my numbers are as follows:
Monetized Playbacks: 62.7 ÷ Total Views: 124.3K = Percent of Videos Monetized: 50.4%

So right now I’m having a higher percentage of monetized playbacks than average. That could be because one of my recent videos has become very popular and may be more attractive for advertisers so I’m getting more ad buys.

Here are the kinds of ads sold on my channel in the past 28 days.

Of course, I don’t see all the details of every single ad sale. All I see is a breakdown of the kinds of ads sold for videos on my channel and the all-important CPM. The breakdown is on the Channel Analytics Revenue screen and clicking a SEE MORE link brings up a full screen of detail.

The CPM, which also appears on that Revenue screen, is an average of what I’ll be paid per 1,000 monetized views. This number changes regularly — it’s $6.79 this morning, but was down to $4+ the other day. (Again, I suspect a popular video has made space on my channel more valuable.) I’ve seen it as high as $11+. I would not be surprised if I checked in this evening and it was different. (In a way, it’s kind of like a stock market per share valuation for my channel or a specific video. It rises and falls depending on the market for ads on my channel or specific video.) They say that $4 is an average CPM for YouTube creators, so I’ll stick to that for illustrative purposes.

But no, this doesn’t mean you get $4 per view or even $4 per monetized view. It means you get $4 per 1,000 monetized views.

So going back to my previous example, if a video got 10,000 views and 40% of them were monetized and you were getting $4 per monetized view, that’s

10,000 x 40% /1000 X 4 = $16.00

My channel is doing pretty well this month, mostly because of my 737 MAX video‘s popularity. I published it 8 days ago and it has almost 50,000 views as I type this. I can get analytics for just this video and the numbers are very nice: almost 50% monetized playbacks and an $8.38 CPM. That video has earned me $104.54 in ad revenue in just 8 days. Sounds great, right?

Well, let’s look at the video that came out right before it, the Autumn Cockpit POV flight. Although it has a higher percentage of monetized playbacks, it’s only been viewed 2,800 times in two weeks. Its CPM is just $5.91. In two weeks, it’s earned me a whopping $11.99. (That’s not per day, by the way. It’s for the entire two weeks. That’s less than $1 per day.)

And please do remember that a video will not earn the same amount per day/week/month/etc. throughout its whole life. Sometimes they start like duds and pick up steam, like the 737 MAX video — it wasn’t doing well at all for the first two days. And then sometimes they’re going like gangbusters and interest suddenly disappears. You never know what to expect and can only hope for a pleasant surprise.

Here are the view analytics for my most popular video ever. It had hardly any views for the first year it was published and then took off like a rocket, with periodic surges. The current live analytic for the past 48 hours shows 4,466 views — three years after it was released! This is a YouTube content creator’s dream; I wish I had a dozen like this.

When I started writing this, I didn’t mean to get into the complex details of revenue calculations for specific videos. I just wanted to explain how ad revenue works for monetized channels on YouTube. To take some of the mystery out of it.

The takeaway on all this is that in order to make YouTube a full-time business — as some creators have — you need a strategy that combines ad revenue from wildly popular videos and other sources. This is why so many content creators on YouTube also sell merchandise and offer memberships or Patreon patron benefits.

I’ll be frank here: creating content for my YouTube channel is crazy expensive. Not only do I have to fly an aircraft that costs hundreds of dollars an hour to fly, but I have to have the cameras, camera mounts, and video editing equipment to record and edit the resulting footage. And the time I spend doing all this is time I’m not spending doing something that could earn money elsewhere so there’s a definite value to my time. I could easily drop $300 to $600 to make a video that will never earn more than what it cost to make.

I’m not complaining here — I’m just telling it like it is. I love flying and having an excuse to fly. I enjoy making the videos. I like most of the very positive feedback I get. But a girl has to make a living so I hope folks don’t mind me pushing Flying M Air hats and T-shirts or asking for Patreon patrons. If my video creation efforts wind up costing me more than I take in over the long term, I simply won’t be able to continue making them.

And every once in a while, I publish one that actually makes the ad revenue work for me. My Home to Airport by Helicopter video, which has over 9.5 million views, is one of them.

Now if only I could come up with about a dozen more like that.

Helicopter Flight: Fog in the Cascade Mountains

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Maria Langer

A cockpit POV video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

Sit on the nose of my old helicopter as I fly over the Cascade Mountains and its fog-filled valleys. There’s some narration in the beginning; you can apply your own music.

This “Flashback Friday” video is an 11-minute clip from about 90 minutes of footage shot from takeoff in Wenatchee Heights (WA) to landing at Hillsboro (OR) Airport in July 2012. The flight was done on one of those very rare occasions when I could fly a direct, straight line route – normally, there are low clouds in the Cascades that force me to go around them to the south. You can find a montage of clips from the entire flight in a video I released back then, “Helicopter Flight from Wenatchee to Hillsboro” at https://youtu.be/hnIbY2y69Ug.

I remember this flight like it was yesterday. I had to take the helicopter to Hillsboro for a 100-hour inspection and needed to rush back to Wenatchee to finish cherry season. In this segment, I’m flying over the Cascade Mountains and the valleys below me are full of fog. I had taken off just after dawn and the mountain ridges cast long shadows ahead of me. It was absolutely gorgeous.

Back in July 2012, my divorce had just begun and it wasn’t in its crazy ugly stage yet. At this point in the flight, I recall thinking how much my future wasband would have enjoyed the flight and I was sad about that. (Now I can’t help thinking what an idiot he is and how much better off I am without him. Oh, well. Time does heal all wounds.)

I was also a little uneasy on this part of the flight. Flying VFR on top – which means flying in visual flight rules conditions over clouds – is not something I do very often. Helicopters normally fly quite low and I’m seldom above the clouds. I remember being surprised to see the fog and then nervous with the realization that if I had to make an emergency landing I wouldn’t be able to see my landing zone as I descended. But isn’t all that fog just wonderful to behold?

This was also memorable because it was Penny the Tiny Dog’s first helicopter flight. She was about 5 months old at the time and I had no idea how she would react. I put her in the front seat on a leash that would prevent her from getting into my controls. But after I started up, she just curled up in her bed on the seat and went to sleep. She slept until I began my descent at Hillsboro.

About Me and the Helicopter

I have been flying for about 20 years. My nearly 4,000 hours of flight time is in Robinson R44, Robinson R22, and Bell 206L (Long Ranger) helicopters.
The helicopter is a 2005 Robinson R44 Raven II — the same one that appears in the photo at the beginning of the video. This was my first R44, which was lost in a crash back in 2018. You can learn more about R44s here: https://robinsonheli.com/r44-specifications/ I owned this helicopter and now own another one very much like it, but blue. I’ve owned a helicopter since 2000.

About the Video

This video was recorded in 2012 with a GoPro Hero 3 camera mounted on the nose of the helicopter. Audio comes from the camera’s built-in speaker and has been incorporated into this video at 20% normal volume.
The video was stabilized prior to editing in iMovie software. Although I don’t like to edit in iMovie, it does have decent stabilization. If you compare this video to more recent nosecam video (for example, “Helicopter Nosecam Flight: Dawn on the East Side of the Cascades #2” at https://youtu.be/HXBznbtc54U), however, you’ll see that a GoPro Hero 7 Black shoots much more stable video than a Hero3.
Narration was done using a Røde Podcaster microphone (https://amzn.to/2IFnbNr) connected to a Macintosh. I recorded the brief narration while I was watching the video in the editing software.
The video was edited on a Macintosh using Screenflow software. Learn more about it here: https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm
The intro music is by Bob Levitus, famed “Dr. Mac.” You can find him here: http://www.boblevitus.com/

I try to drop cockpit POV videos every Sunday morning and “extras” with more info about owning and operating a helicopter midweek. (Some channel members get early access to some of these videos.) I also host occasional livestreams with Q&A chats. Subscribe so you don’t miss anything new! And tell your friends. The more subscribers I have, the more motivated I am to keep producing videos.

Any Amazon links on my channel are affiliate links (https://amzn.to/32PLHTD). If you click one of them and buy something, Amazon sends me a few pennies. Enough pennies make a dollar. Enough dollars buy new equipment. It doesn’t cost you anything so I hope you’ll shop with one of those links. Thanks.

Still reading? Thanks! Maybe you’ll consider buying something from my Etsy store to help support this channel? Start here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/FlyingMAir

Or better yet, to support this channel on an ongoing basis, consider becoming a member. This link will get you started: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLGD_GbGsS6YKK_Ekx0QMqQ/join

An Eclectic Mind

Web site and blog for Maria Langer, writer, video producer, jewelry artist, boat captain, and helicopter pilot. Blogging since 2003.

Tag Archives: videos