Barry, I have played it off the PC into a large TV and also a projector at another venue. Both times it looked pretty good. The only really distracting thing in this footage was the fish-eye lens interacting with the motion of the balloon - it acquired something of a vertical wobble in the high winds and it causes what I have nicknamed the "flapping wings" effect on the sides of the screen.

I have some other footage we captured at 1080/30p that is a bit jumpy - but I put that to the downconvert from 30->25p (see vimeo.com/15985847). Overall, the GoPro seems quite a capable camera for it's size.

I think for fast action, stick with the higher frame rate.

Currently we are planning another balloon launch soon with three cameras on board, one running at 720/60p with the aim of improved slowmo performance for trying to capture the moment of balloon burst - looking up at the balloon. Shall be interesting to see how we fair.

We have radio tracking beacons attached to the balloon as well as fairly sophisticated flight path prediction software. The radio beacons allow us to direction find the balloon as well as using the GPS telemetry stream from the balloon to allow us to track height and position. (We use special GPS that are unlocked for flight above 60000 feet). We also download the telemetry into the prediction system in real time, and also have a distributed telemetry listener network collecting the stream and feeding it back to the chase cars via 3G Internet connections to help in landing site prediction.

A typical flight can cover a little as 10-20km up to 250-300km depending on what the jet stream above us is doing on any given day - so there is a fair bit of tactical work in this as well - with some days seeing us station people 100km out in front of the balloon path before launch so we can catch it's decent and get the last telemetry positions as accurately as possible (as the beacons are quite low powered we have to be within ~5-10km of the landing zone to ensure recovery).

After 14 launches we havent lost one yet! (although this flight came close (vimeo.com/16241165) because the balloon didnt burst when predicted).