Kitesurfing Aerial filming Gopro HD

UK Kitesurfing in waves September 2010.




I attached a 1080p HD waterproof extreme sports video camera (GOPRO) to a 16m North Rebel kite. This was my first experiment in using the GoPro.

Track is Goodbye Caroline: Aimee Mann.

For those interested in doing the same with a GOPRO video camera here are some tips you might find useful:

1) Use the specific anti-fog inserts, or the fast moving air will fog the lens in 10mins!! (upsettingly I had to throw away 40min of bigger wave footage when the tide came in)

2) Attach to the central kite strut (if your kite is designed this way.) I set to HD which gives a very wide angle with enough resolution for cropping. You can fit to other struts but getting the aiming right is difficult.

3) This was on a large 16meter kite which is of course very nice and stable. I have also had good results on a 6m in savage winds as well.

4) The main thing is that it's best to go out a bit overpowered so you don't have to continuously 'S' dive hard for power. Gentle swoops to the water and back keeping the kite perpendicular to the water look great though.

5) Mounting: I used the Gopro ' vented helmet strap ' and one of the angled Joints from the Go pro 'grab bag' to attach the camera to the kite. I then pumped strut up afterwards to 'lock it on tightly. I also added a cord in case it came off.
Check first that your kite is the type where the struts 'are not' continuously sewn to the canopy. North / Naish makes should be okay. Note: During flying, the kite struts are not perpendicular to your lines but angle back away from them slightly. They are only perpendicular when you pull in the bar to power up. Because of this I pointed the camera to look slightly forward of the kites strut by about 10-15 degrees.
There was a bit of shaking at the start. I am not sure what caused this, but it could be that the camera was swinging on what is a stalk / lever arm, caused by the long angled joint. I might try and get it sitting right on the strut from now on (but still angled forward)
Once the camera is attached to the strut, I found that the kite can still be stowed leading edge down on the beach without the sand/floor lens touching the lens.

6) Don't crash your kite into the water or salt could dry out on the lens.

7) Kitesurfing generally looks a lot slower and the waves look much, much, smaller from 25-30m up. This is why I had to use a mellow music track!! Some waves were actually above my head. You tend to loose the three- dimensionality. I am going to try swing the kite a lots lower now and then for a more horizontal and faster perspective.

8) I used IMovie (Mac) to edit this. However you do this in small sections!! It seems IMovie needs turn an MPEG back into Raw video fro editing. I loaded 1 hours worth of MPEG into IMovie It took 4 hours to covert, and unknowingly used up an incredible 220 Gigabytes of my hard disc!!
In IMovie you will need to rotate and possibly crop to zoom the video, as half of this was filmed upside down.

9) More useful aerial filming knowledge at www. camrig.com

(Board is an old all carbon fibre FOne wakesk8 . 139x 37 Amazing is choppy sea and waves, legs never seem to tire.)

Thanks for watching Stephen

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• Kitesurfing
• Gopro
• Kitecam
• aerial
• Kite
• camrig
• camera
• waves
• Wales
• Porthcawl
• Rest Bay
• Aimee Mann
• UK
• stephen courtney
• awesome
• beach

[missrachel84]

This is wikid....were looking into gettting a gopro camera, especially for this purpose....how did you do it? Great filming. Where was this.

Rach

[inventsc]

@missrachel84

Hi Rach . Just attatched a Gopro camera to my central kite strut. See my instruction attached to this.

The beach was Porthcawl in Wales - Rest Bay (tide out or there is no beach) glad you liked.

[inventsc]

Hi Karol

I have written an explanation if how to set this up if you wanna do it too. See my comments with this movie.

(The camera was attached to the centre strut of the kite) Thanks

[artekgorka]

Hi guys, had the same idea 2 years ago in Ras Sudr, next week will be in Egypt for 10 days and actually made something better, custom made holder for the main strap with the Velcro and rotary device, hopefully will work.

But nice video...

[rorider]

Thanks a lot for sharing Steven. I just got the camera and planning to mount it on my cabrinha switchblade.

[rvell7829]

Very well done. This technique is an inspiration. If in the future you find me trying something like this to film hydrofoils, please give yourself credit.

Thanks for your favorable comment on my video:

Hydrofoil --Save $20!! Don't Buy This Book

[karolschultz]

did you attach the camera with gopro line mount on the bridels ?

[andrewlynch40]

brilliant mate. Nicely done!

[ripcurl010]

nice vid dude