I had to invent some stuff to make it happen- the most important thing being the outrigger cam
This is still just about the most amazing setup I've ever seen. WAY KEWL!
So, did you add a "tail boom" to the lifting body for the 'chase plane' view of the lifting body recovery into the grass, or was that a 'special effect' and not really a gliding flight?? Seriously good and interesting cinematography in your vids, doc, especially the 'white room' retract sequence...
I did sorta similar vids 20 years ago when I was in high school in my pre-BAR days... Only then I had to MANUALLY edit everything using only my old VHS camcorder (nearly the size of the TV station ones in those days!) that had a seperate sound/vid recording capability in the 'editing' suite under a little cover on the back of the camcorder, and a pretty primitive but highly cool ancient "digital" Toshiba VCR that could do cool tricks like freeze frame TV transmissions, and playback stuff in ultra-clear perfectly stepless multi-rate slow motion. I had a tape of a documentary they used to show on Nova on PBS and stuff back then called "Man's Greatest Adventure" that was narrarated by Orson Welles telling the story of the Apollo program culminating in Apollo 11. I used a lot of the soundtrack from that dubbed over the actual rocket launches I had videotaped out here on the farm. I also dubbed a lot of the flights into slow motion and then timed them, and went back and re-dubbed the "MGA" soundtrack over the soundless slo-mo sequences, timed to liftoff or motor ignition so my astrocam lifting off in slo-mo rises to the sounds of a Saturn V lifting off. Considering how primitive the equipment and my methods were, I was surprised some of them turned out really well, some others, meh... After I had done a BUNCH in the "MGA" soundtrack I switched to the soundtrack of a new TV series I was REALLY into at the time, so a bunch of the later rockets lift off to the sounds of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", so there are two stagers flying off in slo-mo sounding like photon torpedoes being launched, phasers firing, and Captain Picard issuing orders in the heat of battle. Those are pretty cheesy...
I recently redubbed all that stuff and all the old family movies over to DVD, since those tapes are getting pretty old.
One of these days, if I ever learn the dark art of making a computer actually do something worthwhile, I'd like to maybe post those vids to Youtube and learn how to use modern computer editing stuff to make some new vids. That would be really cool...
Just need to learn how to do this stuff!
Later! OL JR
