Basejumper.com - archive

Going through a lot of footage consumes a lot of time. Sometimes you just want to quickly refresh the visuals of the jumps from previous seasons before making them again. Or compare your jumps with each other, or to somebody else's jumps from the same exit. All without tedious skipping through all the extraneous footage and aligning the timelines.

I came up with a simple system that compresses each jump into a 30-second clip which makes it easier to review and compare flights. I thought I'd share it and if many people will adopt this format, we’ll all benefit from these concise, easy-to-compare overviews.

This “3x10” format consists of three 10-second parts: 1) 10 seconds at 1x speed from the moment your feet leave the object; 2) 10 seconds of compressed wingsuit flight from the first part till the opening*; and 3) 10 seconds of compressed canopy flight from opening till your feet touch the ground. Labels indicate the time scale for wingsuit and canopy portions of the flight.

You can do this in pretty much any video editor. (I do it in iMovie for now, which is a very basic editor.) Trim your raw footage to the moment your feet leave the object and touch the ground again. Split at 10-second mark and leave this piece at 1x speed. Add 1s... 2s... ... 10s labels to this piece so it's easy to evaluate how fast you start flying. Split the remaining piece at the opening shock frame. Compress both parts to 10 seconds each, while noting their original duration, and add the duration labels, like "75.0s wingsuit", "68.1s canopy". That's it!

I put all these overviews in one folder and name them in format "YYYY-MM-DD Exit name, Wingsuit, any extra keywords.mp4", e.g. "2013-08-16 Sputnik, Wingsuit, L/D Magic Vane.mp4", which makes it a piece of cake to find any jump.

Now not only you spend maximum 30s watching each jump, but can quickly produce a comparison video by dropping two 3x10 videos in the editor. First 10 seconds of the flights, openings, and landings will align automagically.

Here's a couple of examples:

https://vimeo.com/108326052

https://vimeo.com/108326309

and a comparison of two jumps from the same exit a year apart:

https://vimeo.com/108326635

Yuri


* opening is defined as the first moment of the opening shock, usually the first vertically smudged frame in the footage

Can i just send mine to you to take care of?

3x10 format can also be used for tracking footage, provided the track was longer than 10 seconds. Here, it's exactly 20s, so the second 10s part of the clip just happens to be precisely at 1x speed.

https://vimeo.com/108443781

If people see you on exit and ask what that thing is, you can also say that it's your navigation system! It looks like a great way for me too lose my phone though...

p.s. If this was my format I'd play everything at 1/3 speed so I can ogle my shitty wingsuit flights.

Interesting idea about 1/3 speed, Jon. I noticed when I watch video in 3x10 format, my heart rate increases like 3x. It makes the jump look more intense than it actually is. And vice versa - slowing down a jump to full featured movie length had kinda hypnotizing effect. I almost fell asleep and faceplanted the keyboard. So...

1) Pick up a chick. Watch a footage of your jump stretched to 1-2 hours with her on a couch.
2) She falls asleep on your shoulder.
3) ???
4) PROFIT

Brick vs. Bird :)

Easy to compare starts, distances flown, and opening altitudes (10ft/s is a good ballpark of average descent rate under canopy loaded at ~0.75lbs/sq.ft, so with some proration for different wingloadings it's ~250-300ft difference here).