This has been a busy weekend of acquiring aviation footage, which saw me spending full days at an airport and at an Air Force base.

Friday, it was four vintage bomber planes (one was a pursuit plane, the P-51 Mustang) and Sunday was the Great New England Air Show at Westover ARB in Chicopee, MA.

 

The Air Show was better than anticipated. There was more than just planes. There was lots of noise, too.

Let's start at the beginning: This was a two-camera shoot, and a friend of mine and partner in a new startup that will offer high definition stock footage, attended this show. We used two PMW-EX1s and two tripods. It was interesting when we passed through the security inspection tents at the Air Force base; the gentleman inspecting our bags noticed the EX1 and said "That's a camera!" I smiled and he waved me on my way.

We treckked half a mile to the front line, just behind the barracade at the runway's edge and set up our gear about 9:20am. My day started at 5am. I drove an hour to my friend's house and we took his car and drove up to Chicopee, MA from there, about 76 more miles.

We arrived in time for the first events, and used up eight SxS cards, four of which were 16GB each, for the entire day's events, leaving the air field with only 1 minute of unused card capacity, which I consumed on a C-41 cargo jet on display on the way out. It was a satisfying shoot.

There were displays of various aircraft, showing their capabilities, stunt flyers, and a gal from Canada who stands on the top wing of a biplane as it does barrel rolls and other maneuvers, as well as the Blue Angels  Thunderbirds formation flight team. And then there was Kent Shockley and his Shockwave Peterbuilt truck powered by three rocket engines. We had the dubious distinction of witnessing, and documenting in high-def, the demise of the Shockwave, as it made its final run at 300mph down the runway and deployed its parachutes, suffering a malfunction that caused the truck to swerve and flip over several times. It was so badly destroyed that they could not tow it off the airfield and it remained there until the entire air show had finished, like a relic in a bone yard. It's all on XDCam footage now, and I'm reviewing the gorey details. Kent was uninjured, miraculously, due to the engineering of the truck to withstand this kind of crash, but the truck didn't fare nearly as well as he did.

My partner was using the XDCam for the first time, and I spent about 5 minutes at the start of the show, explaining features he'll need to be familiar with, especially focus peaking, location of essential controls and the fact that recording rolls over automatically from the full card to the second card. He got up to speed on it quickly and after the show, we stopped at the Boston Market across from the road leading to the Air Force base and discussed how the camera worked for him. He did note that the power switch was an awful design, but overall, he liked how the camera operated and was impressed with the quality of the images and control response.

I had a lot of practice at another air field on Friday, so I got up to speed fairly quickly at following planes overhead moving at high speeds and at full telephoto range, which became a sort of ritualistic trance-like existence between me and the tripod pan bar. I was focused on following the planes and by-gum I got some great footage.

 

Some of the footage was hand-held because the parachute jump team was directly over our heads, 12,000 feet up, and since the tripod heads didn't go to 90º vertical positions, we opted for doing these shots by hand. Everything else was tripod-based.

Overall, we came out of there with 6 hours of footage. I checked the sound on the events that were noisiest, and it was stunning (and startling) on playback. I used a -11dB attenuator setting with the Rode NT4, which gave us enough headroom to handle the loudest after-burner jets and the strafing runs and their explosions (yes, they blew up stuff on the other side of the runway and we could feel the heat from 1/4 mile away in the spectator area.)

The cameras performed extremely well, under these harsh conditions of sunlight and wind and noise. I was particularly impressed with how the EX1 captures details on the aircraft in flight, even when aiming directly at the sun for the high elevation shots.

Presently, I'm offloading clips and viewing them alternately and just enjoying the delicious detail in each of the shot sequences.

Tomorrow, I'll probably put a short clip online. The aviation stuff seems to be very popular.

Roger. Over and out.