Ground and Aerial Videos from the Ace Mini-Titan 450

I attached my ‘pack of bubblegum’ sized spy cam to my Thunder Tiger Mini-Titan e325 today and shot some great video of Ollie’s Align Trex 450 in flight and also shot some in-flight videos as well. Ollie shot some HD ground video of my Mini Titan e325 using my Sony HD Camcorder while the spy cam recorded the aerial flight in low resolution. I have incorporated the two videos together to make a nifty little Picture-in-Picture helicopter flight video that I hope you enjoy.

Ace Thunder Tiger Mini-Titan 450 with Spy Cam Attached

The ‘pack of gum’ spy camI have doesn’t lend itself well to forward facing video but does okay for the price and with the proper mounting you can make it work. It didn’t take too much ingenuity to get it facing forward and the extra drag on that side of the helicopter is negligible. Not an optimal solution, but it works OK.

The car remote type cameras do a better job at that as the forward looking camera is in the end of the product, rather than the side.

To make the mount for my stick of gum camera I took an old case from a servo and used the scroll saw to cut out a 90 degree angled piece of the polycarbonate.  I sanded both faces, washed them with rough grit sandpaper, then scrubbed them down with isopropyl alcohol to give the sticky backed Velcro a good surface to adhere too.  I heated the polycarb surfaces with a radiant heater sitting nearby to evaporate any remaining alcohol and warm the plastic for better adhesion to the Velcro (It is Fall so those sorts of things are more handy than in the summer!) I then scrubbed down the Mini-Titan canopy and added a patch of Velcro there as well, the camera already had Velcro on the back.

Ace Thunder Tiger Mini-Titan 450 Spy Camera Mounting

Ace Thunder Tiger Mini-Titan 450 Spy Camera Mounting

While it’s not the perfect setup, it worked pretty darn well!  The video is cocked a little bit to the side but your really don’t notice it too much in the videos once you get off the ground.  The video from these spy cameras is pretty low resolution at 640×480 and they’re heavily compressed. I am looking into getting a GoPro camera to do the same sort of thing in High Definition.  As a rampant video poster on YouTube I prefer to post everything in High-Def if possible and let people figure out what quality they prefer to watch in.

The first video I shot was just a flight video, nothing special other than RECORDING VIDEO FROM THE AIR! It was pretty cool, but Ollie wanted to kick it up a notch so I started the camera and recorded his heli flight the best I could from the air.  This is quite different from shooting video from the ground because you have to know where the other pilot is in relation to your helicopter and be able to fly in all upright orientations to get the camera lens pointed at the other helicopter. I did not know the results of our efforts until I came home and watched the video, and then of course I put it up on YouTube to share with anyone who cares, you can see this video below (but keep reading, there’s more!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF6ECa8bhU4

Once we had done that Ollie asked if I wanted him to record a flight of the Mini-Titan while I was recording it from the aerial view from the small video camera on board the helicopter. Of course I did, so this next video is of that. He wanted me to bring the helicopter up into a hover and move towards him helicopter then veer off and fly away from him. Although I didn’t get very close to him and the camera has a decent optical zoom it takes quite a bit of trust from your fellow heli pilot to have you fly towards him while he’s filming you, but it’s good to know he trusts my flying skills that much.  Please watch the next video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svamjjLxWzA

If you want to shoot much higher quality videos you should look at a camera like the GoPro Hero HD, there are various models that cost less such as the GoPro HD 960 but you want to try and go for the GoPro HD Hero version for the best quality videos.

If you have any ideas for future video, please let me know and I will try to get it shot.  Angles, approaches, camera setups or anything else, I love doing this stuff and would love some great production ideas.  Comment below! (Anonymous comments are welcomed, but I filter them for spam, your comment WILL appear, but it may take a few minutes).

Tags: ace, Aerial, camera, FPV, Helicopter, mini-titan, rc, Video