on bike camera...any ideas???

kas750 · Post by **kas750** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:10 am

Hello Chaps.I am interested in an on bike camera and wondered if anybody on here has any experience with them???I fancy the type that fits on the fork leg but have no idea what i want and how to fit and then download and use the images

What gave me the idea was this video made by tim steele in the u.s.a with a camera fitted to his s2a.I am doing the banbury run next week on my scott and thought it would be pretty cool to do a video of that.The only problem being is that the scott doesnt have a power supply so any camera i have would need to have its own power supply

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8KaRU2ypvQ

sweet angel · Post by **sweet angel** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:37 am

Ade, don't bother with the one I have (ACT5000) as the sound is crap whe it's used on the bike.
I got it from http://www.dogcamsport.co.uk a couple of years ago. You can get the go pro hero from them that Tim has used, they they have some nice bits of kit, all depends on how much you want to pay.

kas750 · Post by **kas750** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:38 am

Yes Ali i was looking at the gopro,I will spend what i need to do a nice job

korky · Post by **korky** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 7:13 pm

hi everyone its my first post . with the regards to bike cam, i use a contour hd, brilliant picture and sound, and comes with a good selection of mounts

HIGGSPEED · Post by **HIGGSPEED** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 7:49 pm

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/GoPro-Helmet-Hero ... d3fe25878c

these are the mutts nuts Ady, you can mount them anywhere, battery operated so no leads and you just plug them in yo the usb on your pc and download. you can get a cheaper version that is not hd which i think is probably better as it takes less memory on your pc to download it. sound quality is awesome too.
google hero cam

oh yeah ,dont do this with it though

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3HadSvwy08

kas750 · Post by **kas750** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 8:23 pm

Tartan Triple · Post by **Tartan Triple** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 8:35 pm

mount a digi camera to your helmet!!!

korky · Post by **korky** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 9:41 pm

contour do two types a 1020 hd and a 720 hd as higgsport says the 720 is the best buy as the 1020 takes a lot of memory, and takes ages to download the 720 is a lot cheaper if you put a 16gb sd card in you get 11 hours of recording

Ståle · Post by **Ståle** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:51 pm

GoPro

simonh · Post by **simonh** » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:56 pm

i've no idea on cameras as this aint my area - but i would go against others advice here and record in the highest quality you can. you can reduce quality later. but i would settle for 720p 60 frames a second rather than 1080p and 30 fps

in video editing you CANNOT polish a turd. start with shit finish with shit

i would mount above the suspension, however tims vid was super clean - so either cams have improved or he got lucky

H2Nick · Post by **H2Nick** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 4:28 pm

I just tried the GoPro one at the TT.

I recorded a bit last Wednesday, on the way to Ramsey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkSp371hLcQ

The file was large (2.7GB) so I cut out the above clip & reformatted to mpg (the camera records in MP4) - this loses some detail & added some jerkiness I'll try something else next time, & maybe not mount on the handlebars, as the bike vibrates quite a bit...

Bike sounds nothing like an H2 - there is another door to the camera housing I haven't tried yet.

The camera's good - I took some clips walking round the garden & they came out OK

kas750 · Post by **kas750** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 4:42 pm

Nick.Was that the standard gopro or the hd version???

H2Nick · Post by **H2Nick** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 4:52 pm

HD one.

...but I selected something less when I saved the clip, or I'd be here till christmas uploading it.

It's got 5 record modes
r3 = 720p @60fps
r5 = 1080p @30 fps

I was using r5 mode

I'm using a 1920 x 1200 monitor & it looks pretty good on that.
The MP4 files didn't play correctly using windows media player or Divx, but were fine on a couple of players I downloaded (Miro & VLC )

kas750 · Post by **kas750** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 6:32 pm

So how would this one stack up

http://www.dogcamsport.co.uk/GoPro-Moto ... O-WIDE.htm

simonh · Post by **simonh** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 6:32 pm

post later bout file formats, i'm off out

g6mow · Post by **g6mow** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 7:14 pm

Adrian.. Why not give TonyD a ring. His vids are always spot on

kas750 · Post by **kas750** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 7:20 pm

Your right Simon.I was hoping he would comment.

simonh · Post by **simonh** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 8:44 pm

he may have changed it but he had a small cam plugged into a minidv cam.

i've been doing some video processing for work unpaid because i'm a spas

and 1080p mp4 works fine if you use the ps3 settings

when you get to this stage ade, theres a free program thats very good - not too slow on my two year old centrino laptop either

H2Nick · Post by **H2Nick** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 8:35 am

Tell us more Simonh !

I've got the camera Kas linked to - it takes MP4 - what did you mean by the PS3 setting ?

All instructions gratefully received !

kas750 · Post by **kas750** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 9:24 pm

Well because i'm a skin flint, today i codged together a bracket from some angle iron and an old light bracket for a pushbike light and attached my fuji digital camera to the front fork leg on my scott to film a little video.Sadly for all the reasons i suspected it didnt work well.
1, the vibration shook the camera so the picture was wobbly

2, the lens is only narrow so to get the front wheel in shot it misses some of the road.

3, The sound is crap because the microphone is on the front of the camera and all you can hear is wind noise.

4,Lastly,i recorded about 9 minutes of video and my computer "timed out" because it would of taken two hours to upload so i had to cut it down to about a minute and a half.Even that took ages.My worry is that if i get a gopro hero hd will i be able to upload vids quicky enough and if i then have to convert the file down would i not be as well with the none hd gopro???

anyway here it is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbBnskpkfd4

Post by **Triple Parts** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 10:06 pm

So how would this one stack up
http://www.dogcamsport.co.uk/GoPro-Moto ... O-WIDE.htm

512x384 video is pretty poor resolution Ade. All the helmet cam/action sport type cameras are very expensive for what you get.

For a decent budget solution, everyone seems to be going for these at the moment http://www.veho-uk.com/main/shop_detail.aspx?article=44

It is a Veho Muvi Micro DV Camcorder, absolutely tiny, but I'm very impressed with the results. 640x480 resolution, they call it HD which its not, but more than good enough for YouTube type vids. I used it for the Friday night ride-out video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3e2tX8vhLs), but bear in mind that the video you have seen is much compressed by YouTube, the original footage is much better quality. I was also filming thro' the visor so you can see some relections of my nose as the Higgmeister kindly pointed out! I fixed it with velcro to the cheek pad at the side of my face, its that small.

They are about £50, although you can get cheaper chinese copies on eBay for about £15 (type in MD80). The main difference is the Veho is aluminium body and the cheaper ones are plastic. My friend has a couple of the copies and they work OK but you can see the difference in build quality and slightly worse video quality, but you would not notice on YouTube and you can't lose for the money.

This one on Amazon is a good price....
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Veho-VCC-003-Mu ... 340&sr=8-1

They are so small and light you can fix them anywhere with a bit of velcro and rubber bands but you can also get various mounts including handlebar, but they are relatively expensive and you can fabricate something just as good.

You also need a decent quality micro SD card, I have heard some reports that the poorer quality cards that get shipped with them (especially chinese ones) give you "jerky" or poor quality video as the card cannot record at the required frame rate. I ordered a branded 8 GB Class 6 card for best results. If they don't state it, they will probably be Class 2 at best with a lower read/write speed and probably poorer quality.

Hope this helps.

simonh · Post by **simonh** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 11:43 pm

very good advice tony mate, esp bout cards but majority of cheap cards are unclassed (so unbelievably slow). class 4 would be fine for most applications but class 6 or ultra iii be best.

there are hundreds of codecs out there that compress and uncompress video, the codec dictates the frame rate and compression level, but also how well the codec is coded (?) will be evident when you view the video in flc or media player or watever. some codecs are gash - my toshiba camcorder uses a pathetic version of mp4, which mediaplayer plays really badly.

theres is a version of mp4 that is designed for playback on the playstation 3, and it works seamlessly in mediaplayer too

I cant understand why its taking so long to transfer video from your devices to pc. unless wrong software, slow cards, slow pc's?