Saturday 15 June 2013

Bike video, part 2

Made another bike video using the same setup as the previous video, except this time I set the camera to 'HD' and put some sticky tape over the microphone to try and cut wind noise.


As you can see this one is a bit better, probably helped by it being sunnier. There was light cloud, so (hopefully) filming in bright sunshine should be even better. Let's hope I get plenty of that in France next month!
Again, this was filmed near my house - the first part was on narrow farm roads, I chose this as I knew that I could set up the alignment of the camera with little chance of passing traffic.
Between about 1:30 to 1:40 you can see a large boulder in the field to the left. This is the Clochoderick Stone, a glacial erratic which may or may not be the site of an ancient battle, the burial place of a king, a druidic meeting place, or a place for the dispensing of justice. Various stories about the Stone have been made up over the years, so feel free to add your own interpretation.
Just after that I join the main road and get the bike up to a reasonable speed. When I turn left at 3:55, I ride on the road that I shot the last video on, but travelling in the other direction. I come up behind some horses and had to slow before it was safe to pass them, so I ended the video there.
I'm a lot happier with this video and it shows the capabilities of the camera. It seems to be very fussy over changes in light levels (going under trees), but other than that its not too bad. Reading up on video cameras, you can reduce the 'shake' by using a higher quality SD card. Cards are marked with a 'class' which corresponds to its speed at reading and writing data: ie a 'Class 4' card can read and write at 4 Mbyte/second, whereas a 'Class 10' reads and writes at 10 Mbytes/second. The card I used was a Class 4 which is regarded as a bit 'slow', so I'll get a 'Class 10' before my holiday.
Also, just putting a bit of Sellotape over the microphone seems to have removed most of the wind noise - that's a good 'low cost' mod!
For a fairly cheap camera I think the results are reasonably good. If I was going to do a lot of filming, a better camera like a Go-Pro would probably be worth buying. I've also bought a very cheap (£10 including postage) MD80 camera (lots of them on Ebay). There are some videos on Youtube where people just Velcro them onto the chinbar of their helmet, I'll have a try with that later and post the results.

Update: If you click on 'Watch on YouTube' on the video, then set the 'Quality' to 'HD 1080' (the 'cogwheel' icon at the bottom), it looks a lot better.


3 comments:

  1. This wedsite has some good reviews of cheap video cameras etc. The guy's a biker so there are some on board videos.

    http://www.techmoan.com/

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  2. Much nicer without the wind roar. I certainly prefer your chest harness set-up to the helmet mounted videos I've seen. Just curious how long it took to upload a video of that length?

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    Replies
    1. The chest harness seems to be the best setup. GoPro make one that hold their cameras in the centre of your chest, but I wanted mine to be as high as possible and to one side to avoid seeing too much of the windscreen. My high quality wind filter (a small piece of Sellotape (Scotchtape)) seems to have worked and only cost about 0.1 pence! I'd actually filmed about another 4 minutes (riding back to my house), and as I passed the horses at about 5 mph, I spoke to one of the riders and you can hear my voice clearly.
      The file is 692 Mb, and took about 4 hours to upload to YouTube.

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