Right, good information, I can work with that.

First off, do you have image stabilization turned on on your camera, like 'steadyshot' on a Sony, because if you do, turn it off when using steady mounts. These work by repositioning the image. they zoom in slightly to give some room around the edges, then shift the image around as necessary to stablise it. If the image movement exceeds the degree the frame can be moved, it jumps suddenly to catch up, the net result being those dramatic hops in the picture every now and then. Steadyshot is good for absorbing hand shake, but not for big movements, where it actually makes things worse! But that's an aside.

It strikes me that for part of your shooting you don't need a steady mount at all, your problem on the internal shots of the instrument panel etc is arising because of the camera being decoupled from the aeroplane. What you actually need to do is to ridgidly mount the camera so that is moves with it.

So why am I so confident about that?

Well, I've been through a similar issue some years ago, and the good folk on the Home Built Stabilizer forum jumped through hoops with me to try and over come the problem, we looked at gyros, isolation, shock mounts et al, but the answer laid in direct coupling. To prove the point look at this (at the start I'm going over very rippled sand, so it shows another problem I'll come back to) The thing to watch here is not the horizon alone, but the kite buggy itself in relation to the camera too: Kite Buggy Camera

What you're seeing is the camera moving with the buggy, so the horizon jiggles about a bit, but the buggy doesn't so much, just the front end shifting as the buggy flexes. I proved this by fitting accellerometers to the buggy and the camera, and comparing the signals received, this showed the camera moved slightly in relation to the buggy, but not much at all really. So bracing your camera in the aeroplane will solve the internal shots issue. The only thing you need to be wary of, that I touch on above, is that cameras with mechanical recording systems, be it tapes, hard drive or DVD's. rely on rotating parts for them to work. In a regular MiniDV, or digital8 type camera for example there's a heavy rotating recording/playback head. It's heavy to make it's rotation smooth, but this weight resists rapid changes of direction, so with a direct coupled camera if the vibration is extreme, and I mean real jarring knocks, it will upset the recording head and a glitch appears, hence the initial wobbliness in that video above. The way to get around this problem is to simply use a solid state recording, but now we are talking fat wallets so we'll avoid that for now.

To fix the camera do not rely on the tripod mount alone, in this video the camera is mounted like that, and the result is appalling. The reason for this is that most tripod sockets are simply not man enough to hold the camera in these circumstances, bear in mind this beach was smoother than the first one! First Buggy cam trial

The tripod mounts in cameras like ours are fiddly little things which are usually fixed to a thin chassis in the camera, sometimes it's just the plastic case, and after that film it actually fractured the casing on that camera. So, the way around this is to clamp the cam completely. I can't show you know because of link limits, but basically I made up a huge 'C' type clamp which holds the cam bodily, that's what was used in the first vid shown, and still is to this day. On decent cameras the chassis is made from an aluminium casting, and that is very much better, but then it's still not perfect and the subject of the mount on to which the camera is fixed comes up and so on and so on.

So for your internal shots I'd find something that will allow the camera to be jammed up against the headlining of the cockpit. This can be done with some form of firm foam, not a sponge, more like camping-mat material, maybe sandwiched to make up the thickness. Use your tripod legs on the cockpit floor to sort that end, and wind up the centre column to jam the cam up against the foam on the headlining. If the headlining is 'false', i.e. it's suspended, use something to spread the load over a bigger area, a sheet of plastic or something.

For your window shots we are back to the steady cam mount. Without knowing what space you have you may or may not be able to use a similar rig. The reason I use another camera is that I'll always have that with me, so it simply saves carrying extra weights, it might as well be there serving to add to the inertia than sat in a camera case. I've subsequently rigged a remote switch so that I can take stills whilst shooting video, but that's another story.

The idea is not only to make the rig as heavy as is managable, but to spread the weight as much as possible. So why is that?

Let's take a ball of lead, say it weighs 10 lbs. It would be, what, maybe 3 1/2 - 4 inches in diameter, for the sake or discussion lets say 4 inches. hold the lead ball upright, like a shot putter as he mounts it to his chin, and rotate your wrist back and forwards. You'll be able to do this reasonably easily.

Now take a piece of wood, say 2 inches square in section, but long enough to be the same 10 lbs. Hold that in the air horizontally in the same way, and without having to actually do it you can imagine that there is no way you can do the same rotating action at the same speed as the lead ball.

The reason for this is that the same weight is spread out over a much much bigger distance, and so we have what's known as the 'flywheel' effect. Where the effort required to move the mass is much greater, conversley the effort required to stop movement is also much higher, like a flywheel. Our piece of wood will take more effort and longer to make it turn, and more effort and longer to get it to stop and change direction.

So this is what we want to build into our steady mount, and that's the simple reason why the legs are splayed on the tripod I use for my steady cam mount. It allows a fairly lightweight tripod to resist rotating in the vertical axis, which brings me back to why monopod style steady mounts are not so good. They often use a simple barbell weight on the bottom end, this provides the necessary horizontal axis stability, but does little for vertical axis. If you look at a steady cam mount such as a Glidecam, they put the weights on a 'T' Shaped bar on the bottom, this is entirely to spread the weight out, make that a three position one like a tripod and even better, you just have to ensure that the operator doesn't hit the legs whilst moving. If you extend the splayed legs you get a massive increase in stability, but of course the overall weight is just the same.

By adding as much weight as you can bear to the whole rig, like my added camera, and by ensuring that the position you hold the rig is in a place that puts the control in the centre of mass, your arm then acts as a decoupling device, and the mount looks after itself. Holding it in this place is important, if you hold it too high, then the weight will be greater under your hand, and that will resist movement more that the parts above the hand, so it will try and stay where it is when moved so the cam will tilt accordingly, if you hold it too low, then the opposite. I often get a low angle shot by simply inverting the whole thing, it's just as steady, but only a few inches off the ground.

So all being well I've given you some things to think about:

Couple the camera to the aeroplane as much as possible when the subject is within the plane itself, so that the camera moves with it, using 'steadyshot' is ok here.

Decouple the camera by using lots of weight spread as far as possible and by isolating that mass from the aeroplane to shoot objects which are outside of the plane, and turn steadyshot off.