Help from above

As is well known by now, most Portuguese forests are in flames from north to south.

Right now there’s a huge fire in Figueira da Foz, near Coimbra and Melo has filmed some CanadAir planes who are up there fighting the fires, refilling their water tanks in the river right by his office.

So far there were no accidents despite their flying insanely close to the bridge, although Melo tells me that when they started coming in 5 at a time there were some acrobatics in order to avoid each other…

He put up the videos straight from his still digital camera and I took them and stitched them together in this little film for easier consumption.

By the way, if you ever need to edit MPEG1 Muxed footage filmed by a still digital you will have trouble getting the sound out of it.

The best way I found to do that was to use the fabulous MPEG streamclip software to export the clip to DV format and take it from there.