jamiepaul

I always thought the best idea was to have the camera packed with the canopy so that you wouldn't waste valuable time after deployment like you would with a pulley system. I would eat up 3K feet getting everything stowed. I would agree that the lines are the most stable and the smaller the canopy the more tension the lines would have and thus more stability for bracing for the camera. I used a 107 Stiletto. I was only using one of the cascades as a stabilizing point for the pulley system, this gave it some rigidity. Although if I were to snap a turn the camera would go a bit crazy until it caught up with the canopy. Thanks to editing you don't see that part ;). My next design would have been to use the two inner A lines for stability trapping the pulley system in both cascades, then I believe the camera would be much more stable. Trial and error cost a lot of jumps on this project. I sometimes had four lines running up the cameras depending on what format I was using. There were always two pulley lines. 16mm movie film required power plus on/off wire. All the extra lines were threaded through spectra so as to appear to be a suspension line, and had to be taunt for the illusion. Now that video technology has caught up I can imagine using those two inner most cascades and midway down on them use spectra to make a trapese for the camera to suspend from. Pack the camera with the canopy and go.

Jamie here ... Hope that you had some success in figuring it out. It's been about 14+ since I did this but remember it like yesterday. It was done with a pulley system that I attached to the A lines after deployment. I tried sewing a spy camera into the bottom skin like someone did on the link in this thread and got similar results. I put stills up there, 16mm movie and video. Too much detail to go into for a post, but the trick is to get the camera as stable as possible. I had a lot of ideas for this, including the pond swoop (which I didnt perform so well and lost a camera on that one ;) ). Lots of trial and error. I had pictorial in Parachutist years ago doing all sorts of stuff. Not sure if this helps, wish you luck. If you have a question let me know and i'll try to help.