Strand Hill Top Tube Cam 6.10.10
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Recently, 14erskiers acquired a new toy to play with and hopefully add to the quality of our trip reports:
A GoPro HD helmet camera.
Having seen footage from other users of this camera, we felt that the wide angle that this camera captures offers the best POV footage. I have another helmet cam, but more often than not I found that the battery was dead, or my video camera batteries were dead, or one of the many cables weren’t attached perfectly. In fact, the only really good footage I ever got with that camera was from Pyramid’s Landry line. One of my goals this summer is to edit up that footage and get it on the site, so stay tuned for that.
We found Microsoft’s Moviemaker to be incredibly awkward, so we ended up using a trial version of Cyberlink PowerDirector. It’s pretty good, and we may end up buying it for about $70. We would love to hear from our readers about other good, inexpensive editing software options. Our other question is what format people save their videos in, so the quality remains high but it doesn’t take hours to upload. We also noticed that our video lost considerable quality when uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube. We weren’t sure if this had to do with the compression format we used (wmv) or something else. So, any tips you could offer us regarding maintaining video quality while uploading to sites like this would be much appreciated.
Being just a small, stand-alone unit, the GoPro offers up a lot of unique mounting scenarios, and I decided to give a top-tube mount on my mountain bike a try. I’m not sure if it will be my go-to bike mount, but I thought it was kind of fun and different. We need to get a better SD card, so for now we just shot in regular, rather than HD, mode. The best version can be viewed here: Download Video
Otherwise, here’s the Vimeo version. Brittany gets the credit for the excellent editing job- I started freaking out after trying to use MovieMaker and had to take a time-out. 😉 “Easy”, by Lucy’s Fur Coat came up on my mp3 player when I rode Strand, and the size was right, so that’s the song we went with. Long-time MSP movie fans might recognize the song from the closing shots in their second movie, “The Hedonist”, one of my favorites. Oh, and it was only my second ride of the year…
Strand Hill June 10, 2010 from 14erskiers on Vimeo.
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