At the California Capital Airshow- WOW! « Videomaker Community Forums

KBVP
Member

Did anybody else go to the Airshow in Sacramento last weekend? Besides a great show, the weather and sky conditions were great for video and stills. I actually went with a mission,(besides shooting anything that moves!) and that was an in depth shoot with the F-22 Raptor. A few weeks ago I started the process of getting the F-22 pilot to grant an interview that was more than a standard media head shot. All went as planned, so now I have a fun edit coming up.
For those that didn't make it, here's one of the stills I shot. More are on the web site. http://www.kbvp.com

Posted 4 years ago #
cfulton
Member

Very cool! I haven't been to an airshow in maybe 20 years... that was at Beale. I don't know if that one is still around anymore or not. Thankfully, it was just a walk around part of the grounds that we were interested in--not the displays set to the tune of "Rock You Like a Hurricane". (Any Simpsons fans lurking around?)

Actually, I think there might an airshow still in Redding, but it's been quite a long time since I've seen any local advertising for it. I'm going to have to do a little Googling... lately the only air-related thing in my world is flying for work-related stuff. Civil aviation is fine and all, but there are certainly more interesting aspects to it all to learn about.

Posted 4 years ago #
KBVP
Member

The Redding show is now every other year. (?) I was at the Beale show last year- still great.

One of the things I did at this Sac show was experiment with audio. Airshow speaker systems are usually fairly good, but I like to have a track without the speaker system blasting over the aircraft's sound. I placed an Azden 51XT on the end of a handheld mic(XLR) to transmit audio from the speakers. I used a small mic stand and placed it about 10 feet from a speaker. This was about 2 feet in front of the crowd barricade and aimed toward the runway. The mic gain had to be set mid level to keep distortion from the speakers "bass" response under control. The end result was actually very good with the aircraft sounds in a good balance with the db output from the speakers. This also picked up some great crowd reactions. I was far enough away from the speakers to have the camera's(JVC GY-DV5000U) other audio track 90% aircraft sound. Airshows are very challenging for both video and audio, but lousy audio ruins all the efforts put into great video! Allow plenty of time to "tweak" your audio setups. I moved the mic five times to get the balance I wanted. If in doubt, set your audio input levels a bit low to minimize unexpectedly high audio peaks.
When it comes to the edit, there is now an audio track of mostly aircraft- no speakers, to have a professional narration track added. This audio method will apply to many types of events. Of course you can try the line out of the event's mixer board but this is not easily done with people you don't know. (read: don't mess with my system!) Also, I find the line out feed to sound too "sterile" for events like this. Kinda like a NASCAR race without car/track audio.

Posted 4 years ago #