Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Oh the places we flew...

Finally getting around to posting the HD video from the post Sandy flights of the shoreline and realized I needed to pull up the GPS trackline data to be able to match up my annotations of the video locations to where it was taken on each flight.  Some day someone will have a nifty interface or add on to the GoPros to have embedded GPS but in the mean time here was my work flow.
1) Attach GoPro to outside window of Cessna...stare at camera (all GoPro videos seem to start with a variety of unflattering face shots usually aimed up the nasal cavity).
2) Give an audible note of the local time and for visual cue hold up watch or phone to the camera lens (see below).  Setting the date and time on the GoPros I find to be tedious and prone to error so unless I have a student there to help me I simply don't bother and just note the time whenever the camera comes on.

3) Turn on the camera and hop in the plane.
4) Fire up my phone to record the GPS track.  In my case I used the iOS applications GPX Master.  
I like the ease of use and a specially nice feature is that it will sync to a Dropbox account so I had a preserved copy waiting for me on my laptop when I got home.
I used GPX because that is what Andy Coburn at the Program for the Study of Developed Shoreline http://www.wcu.edu/1037.asp
uses to match up the still camera photos that we take with the GPS positions which are then shared up on Picasa
5) Convert the GPX files to kml.  In order to give myself something to work with in Google Earth I used this nifty online converter to upload my gpx files and spit out kml.  There are probably a myriad of other ways to do this but this one worked well for me.
6) Fly...fly...fly

Below is a screen capture showing the tracklines of the two flights we conducted on 10/31 just after the storm.  We covered from Brigantine NJ to Cape May and along the DE Bay,the NJ side.  Then on the second flight we covered the DE bay shoreline and down along the MD and VA shoreline as far as Parramore Island.

7) process and upload the videos to YouTube.  I used Quicktime to open and trim the videos to 15 minute segments and upload to YouTube.  

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