Mark Meredith's Aerobatics show at the Leesburg Virginia Airshow 2024.
Pardon the poor aircraft tracking as I was testing out some various filming equipment in a new configuration. For this event I decided to go with my Panasonic Lumix S5 Camera with a Panasonic 24 - 105mm lens with Tiffen Circular Polarizer. All video recording was in 4K30
Audio was recorded with a Tascam DR-701D field recorder at 24bit 48kHz mono-multichannel so that I had preserved tthe discrete channels for each microphone used. I used a microphone array for loud, soft, and directional recording but the mic that I used for the audio track in these videos was a Dayton Audio EMM-6 calibrated acoustical measurment microphone with the pre-amp set to high-gain in the recorder. I had two of tthese mics and the other was set to low-gain for overly loud sounds so that I had a "safety" track if the main mic was too distorted. In addition to these calibrated mics, I also had a "shotgun" directional microphone but opted for the Dayton Omni mic at high-gain as it sounded the best overall and offered a clean, full recording that captured both the full spectrum of the airplane engines faithfully but also captured the announcer's voice cleanly from the nearby speakers.
My tripod and cam / mic setup didn't allow for a full 90 degree straight up pointing of the camera and hampered my ability to fully track some of the aircraft as they sometimes went straight over the crowd and I couldn't tilt up enough to track them completely. I have learned from this that I should instead move the mics and recorder to a separate tripod and hand-hold the camera so that I can have more overall range of motion and track the subject more easily. I also found it annoying to have to jump around the legs of the tripod as I routinely needed to pan more than 180 degrees from side to side to capture the full path of the airplanes as they often would actually fly back behind the crowd and off the airport property.
