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[White Raven]

Here is my newest FPV video. Shots taken from a dozen flights during January in my local mountains provide some spectacularly colorful views of sunset-lit peaks covered in fresh snow, a few bald eagles, and some of my usual crazy cliff surfing.

I decided to do an original music score for this one. I've never done this before and it was quite an adventure learning the process, but given my lack of experience I am fairly happy with the results. I always get at least a few comments on people not liking my music choices, and I'm sure I'll get more than usual on this one. But a lot of creative effort and time went into it, so I hope most people enjoy it.

I'll be doing original compositions from now on, partly because it's fun to do, and partly because it allows for ads on my videos that help drum up a few extra dollars for props and shafts, which I break on a regular basis.   

EPIC FPV! - Majestic Rocky Mountains from Birds Eye View - DragonLink & GoPro Hero2

The gear used in the recording is listed in the YouTube write-up. Reaper XL with DragonLink & GoPro. Lawmate 2.4, DOSD, etc.

[dogzilla]

Wow the scenery is simply stunning.

Great video mate, top quality.

Out of interest how much flight time do you think went into this? And what sort of setup do you run?

[White Raven]

Thanks dozilla!

I pulled those shots from about a dozen flights, each one lasting approximately 15 minutes, so maybe 3 hours or so of video.  So much of the video is bouncy from wind that I can only pull bits here and there when the plane is fairly stable or hits a calm pocket.  Even if it's calm where I'm standing at the base of a mountain, there always seems to be air when I get up to the cliffs and peaks.  And a lot of the video is time spent just climbing up the mountain, switch-backing back and forth until I can get up to where the terrain gets interesting, and then of course the flight back, which is usually boring.  So I've only got maybe 5 minutes of interesting stuff in each run.

I get bored watching most FPV videos, so I cut these pretty tight to keep the interest peaked throughout the whole video.

[TeeJay]

Great video that, thanks

[Ratty]

Nice video as always. Love the scenery.

At 4:48 ish it looks like there is a big Y on the floor, whats that?

[6lennn]

Stunning as usual Todd, another vid bookmarked, thankyou

[Badlands]

At 4:48 ish it looks like there is a big Y on the floor, whats that?

lol - i googled 'Y in Utah' & it found it! - > http://www.byhigh.org/History/Ymountain/Yletter.html

:-)

[g.collins]

another stunning video mate, I'm so envious, it must be such a buzz, to be there live.
signed up to your channel, great stuff
  G

[Coyote]

Great video as always

[Steve W]

Beautiful vid - kinda makes a mockery of my flat fields

[White Raven]

Haha, yeah, that's a giant white Y painted on the mountain side above Brigham Young University.  The Y is for Young.  Every mountain in the state that's near a high school, college, or University has a silly giant letter painted on it.  Sure makes an otherwise beautiful mountain look dumb.

I'm glad everybody likes the vid.  More good stuff to come!

[bignose13]

Nice Todd, however you are a jammy git living by those mountains, makes our Welsh ones look like a steep hill

[Ratty]

Thanks Badlands, know i know Y. 

[bogbeagle]

Remarkably smooth flying.

[White Raven]

bogbeagle,

It looks smooth, but it really isn't.  While I do try to keep the turns and approaches smooth, I constantly battle windy conditions in the mountains.  Even if the air is fairly calm in the valley where I'm flying or even calm at the base of the mountain, there is almost always turbulence up high.  Some people comment that they wish the shots weren't so short, but in fact I have to carefully select shots that are relatively smooth and isolate them because there's too much bump in most of the video.  There are smooth pockets of air, and when you hit one, you get good video.  Otherwise it's BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE.

Once I've selected dramatic shots that are relatively smooth, I do an image stabilization on every one of them, which takes days to do.   Once that's done, I can drop them in an edit.  I look for the most dramatic shot to start the video with, and drop in a bunch more shots to work out the timing and try to figure out a good tempo so that I can compose an original score.  Once I have a tempo and know what the shot pacing is, I can start composing music and trimming the stabilized segments to work with the tempo.  Sadly, some of the best and most interesting flight segments are just too rough to enjoy watching over and over again, so they never get seen.  I have hundreds of segments as rough as that opening shot, but I don't use them.  It was worth putting that one shot in because I dang near smacked a stack of rock and it was really dramatic.

It's a fairly big pain in the hind quarters to do all this, but the results are worth it to me.  I enjoy watching and reliving them almost as much as I do flying.   

Cheers,

Todd