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I was listening to Major Tom by Shiny Toy Guns in my car the other day. There’s a part in the song where she says,

“The count goes on

4, 3, 2, 1…”

When I heard those lyrics, I thought of the rocket launch I went to on January 14, 2012. Dmitriy and John, 2 other members of ML256, launched their rocket Safety Orange twice that day. I thought that it would be really cool to sync up the rocket taking off and the “4, 3, 2, 1” part of the song.

So I started playing around with some video editing software. After a few minutes of editing the video that was taken from that day, I realized that the video editor I had wasn’t going to work for this project. So I talked to crashcartpro and he suggested I use OpenShot.

And away I went with the video editing. With help from crashcartpro, ratmandu, ramgraden, and korc I had a 2 minute and 24 second video in 2 days.

The rocket launch happens about 53 seconds in and at about 1:50 is where the rocket can be seen again deploying its parachute. Make sure you watch till the end…Dmitriy does a happy dance!

I used Inkscape for the intro and credits clips. And of course, OpenShot for the video editing. The song in the background is, you guessed it, Major Tom by Shiny Toy Guns.

Here is a link to the video.

Here is some more info about Safety Orange.

I’m really excited to do some more video editing in the very near future! Let me know what you think of this video!

-Kix

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Dmitriy and his rocket, Safety Orange
Dmitriy and his rocket, Safety Orange

A few of us drove down to Talladega, AL on Saturday January 14, 2012 to put the Safety Orange rocket through some flight tests at the model rocket launch event.  Dmitriy’s flight computer altimeter worked great.  It was able to pop the parachute at the perfect altitude so that it almost landed directly on the launch pad it took off from.  It was very windy that day and even blew some of the tables over where people were preparing their rockets for flight.  You can hear by the videos we took just how much wind there was for the rockets to deal with.   There wasn’t a single cloud that day from what I remember so it made it easier to see as soon as the rockets would open their parachutes and watch it glide to the ground.  I recommend going to any of these rocket launch events to anyone especially if you already have a similar hobby like RC airplanes.

Video 1 (someone’s egg-nosed rocket): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLCeSg5HIjg

Video 2 (Dmitriy’s Safety Orange flight 1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpgSovuLzow

Pictures:  https://plus.google.com/photos/116575142518321294189/albums/5697765429049993249