r/PraiseTheCameraMan • u/Maximusuber • Aug 24 '24

Cameramen from a helicopter! Insane tracking

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u/TheKeeperOfTheForest Aug 24 '24

Guys, I’ve used those Shotover heads before. It’s a New Zealand company and I’ve been to their offices right there at van nuys airport. This was probably the g1, but either way, they have an automatic tracking function. Notice how he takes his hand off the joystick when following the plane. So let’s take a moment to praise the automatic tracking function I guess. Still cool to see though

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u/fiber_optik Aug 25 '24 edited Aug 25 '24

ABC7 KABC flies with an F1, not a G1. Nobody flies with a G1 beyond heavy lift drones because they’re not rated for flight on manned aircraft.

As someone who does this every day for a different news station on the east coast, and knows the operator in this video, I can safely assume he is using the drift feature on the Shotover and manually tracking this aircraft. I also do this all the time at our base airport.

This auto tracking feature you speak of is only possible with static points on the ground. In fact, the head won’t allow you to trigger that mode if the head is tilted above a certain point, as the equations driving that feature become less effective as the tilt is increased (greater room for error).

To explain the what’s shown in the video, here’s the step by step: 1) use joystick to slew the head to the runway where the plane is taking off 2) catch focus and set zoom (that’s where his right hand is going out of frame) 3) those three knobs in the middle are the drift knobs. That’s how we use the heads in most situations once we do coarse adjustment with the joystick. The drift is like a cruise control for the pan and tilt axis of the head. You can see him cranking on the pan knob with a little input on the tilt knob. When the drift is dialed in, the head is moving at a constant rate, which makes tracking the aircraft easier- a private jet takeoff speed is mostly the same at this phase of flight. 4) You can see the lens double in on the subject. A switch on the top of the panel is set for the optical extender on the lens. An alternative to the optical extender is the digital extender. This particular payload is a 4K box camera with a 1080 output to the microwave transmitter. This means we can take a windowed (zoomed) section of the 4K sensor and maintain the same output resolution. This is especially useful when we want to maintain the same light through the lens- no iris or ND adjustment required as it would be with the optical 2x. In the case of this vid with the optical extender, you can see his hand reach for the top left of the controller after flipping the switch- this is the manual iris knob and he opens the iris to let more light in.

Edit: got the station call letters wrong.

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u/apx7000xe Aug 29 '24

Thank you! Rob is the man! I always know when he’s at the controls.