Kite Strings

Excellent stop frame of the 'landing'.

Thank you. Pulling stills from these videos is an UNGODLY amount of work for several reasons:
- I'm extremely anal (big surprise) about selecting the best frames.
- Frequently gotta crop out huge black borders and/or skinny but ugly black bleed edges.
- Gotta catalog, upload, organize, images and capture their addresses.

Often blind for several hours around the end of a big project.

But:

- It's real nice having the results available.

- One often discovers some stunningly relevant issues and details one would NEVER have caught just watching the video.

- The vast majority of the time it's a lot more interesting, educational, fun to look at stills than to click on and watch video. (Ken Burns' "The Civil War" was such a smash 'cause he ran all those Matthew Bradys and gave the audience lotsa time to REALLY look at them. (Beats the crap out of all those Attention Deficit Disorder streaming three second clips like the Arizona blowing up for the billionth time.) I've watched "Civil War" a million times and never get tired of it.)

Nothing really to learn on those stills from:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuMxK9PadzA


That one was just plain fun.

...what does one have to do with the other?

The point was supposed to be that we do all this dangerous landing practice on billiard table putting greens so we can safely land in dangerous terrain and then when we actually land in dangerous terrain we can't.

Turns out the guy on the stretcher was a PG:

http://www.flytandem.com/accident/index.htm

7-30-14 5:15PM Local intermediate PG pilot is flying downwind close to terrain downwind (NE of) the 750 and impacts terrain. No details yet as to why the pilot was continuing to fly this direction so low. Factors may include recency of flight experience as the pilot had not flown a PG in about a year. Impact was fairly hard with pilot complaining of back pain. Pilot airlifted by helicopter then transfered to ground ambulance in the LZ.

(thanks Steve and super reporting Richard Brooks) and probably not even trying to land but, what the hell, the point's still valid.

Sorry, don't recognize that one.

What programs are you using to accomplish the whole process?

Any video that's posted by anyone on Kite Strings gets downloaded/archived using Wondershare's AllMyTube.

To pull stills I use Final Cut Pro. That's a bit like using a forklift to stow a box of lightbulbs on a closet shelf but it was the only thing I found which would allow me to save frames at full lossless resolution. I use PNG. Had a very rough frustrating time learning how to do just that much but I can now work pretty efficiently.

Harvested frames get pulled up in Photoshop. At that stage I crop if necessary and rarely will brush out a cluster of corrupted pixels. Then I resave the image in PNG using max compression. Doing that reduces the megs requirement to a fraction of no compression yet retains every last pixel of resolution and color depth. Don't ask me how that's accomplished - I'm totally baffled - but it works.

Then I upload to Flickr which stores the original PNG and creates a wide range of lower resolution JPEGs.

Then I pull up the uploaded images and grab their full and 800 width addresses - 800 'cause that's the widest available I can use on Kite Strings and view on my 1280x800 display without chopping stuff off on the right.

I post using the following convention:

17-4117
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3682/14088396670_62d49cbf36_o.png


You're seeing the 800 width JPEG but the URL gives you access to the full resolution lossless original. (Open it in a new window or download it as you please.)

Again, it is impressive but a bit tedious to read and process.

Totally agree. You have no freakin' idea how tedious it is to get to the posting stage with this. But if you don't care to read and process stuff like this you do have the option of not doing so. And I can highly recommend several other more popular glider sites at which tedious reading and processing has never been nor ever will be...

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24846
Is this a joke ?

Jim Rooney - 2011/08/26 02:44:10 UTC

The "purpose" of a weaklink is to increase the safety of the towing operation. PERIOD.

...the least of issues.

The pic was to imply yuck!! to the everything including the kitchen sink layout.

See above.

I post these frames because *I* find them of some value and if one other individual sometime in the next decade or so feels similarly there's a chance that the effort and bandwidth will have been worth it.

The guy on that T2C or whatever it was probably lay there for a minute, got up and dusted himself off, and hauled his glider to the breakdown area. But that was a MAJOR pooch screw / loss of control. If a passenger jet pilot had done something comparable there'd have probably been a fireball. And there are a lot of hang glider jockeys who've ended their careers with much milder exchanges of energy than occurred on that one.

I think it's worth 23 frames of bandwidth to really look closely at what's going on and question the way things are being done - even if he didn't get paralyzed from the neck down that time. And if this guy - or even one of his clones - DOES get quaded at AJX later this or next season guess who's got another really great toldyaso ready to launch.