Recreational & Family - episode 2 father/son bike tour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0lV-Xn6uBw

Second installment of our bike tour. Kinda funny moments with two eccentric dads and our cool sons.

Cool vid!

I was trying to figure out which way you went off the Black Ball, but I figured it out just before the shots of Crescent Lake. You took some good pics of the moss in the rainforest. One of only 3 temperate rainforests in the world.

You obviously had a handlebar mount for the camera. Very smooth shots. Do you have front suspension? I would have expected more jitter, even with the motion smoothing that video cameras have. What camera did you use?

Looking forward to more installments.

Cool vid!

I was trying to figure out which way you went off the Black Ball, but I figured it out just before the shots of Crescent Lake. You took some good pics of the moss in the rainforest. One of only 3 temperate rainforests in the world.

You obviously had a handlebar mount for the camera. Very smooth shots. Do you have front suspension? I would have expected more jitter, even with the motion smoothing that video cameras have. What camera did you use?

Looking forward to more installments.

mntbikedude's son says: Actually, the raw footage isn't even watchable. It makes people sick to watch because it is so jittery. I have no front suspension, and the video camera has no image stabilization of its own. Adobe Premier Pro comes with a demo version of a product called steadymove which is a filter that fixes that exact problem. I lost a bit of resolution running it through the filter, but the results make the footage watchable. You can still HEAR how bumby and jittery it was, but you can't really see it.

The camera was a Sony Handicam (I don't remember the model number, but it has a 1/4" ccd. I got it specifically to mount on my bike, and it is the smallest, most decent camera I could find.) It doesn't have a large dynamic range, so it got washed out really easily, and the colors are not very rich, but there is no way that I would have wanted to try mounting my big ol' 3 x 1/3" CCD DVX100 on there.

The handlebar mount was made by taking the swivel head off of a cheap-o tripod. I removed the head at the scan/tilt joint, and that joint went right around my handlebars. I had to put some electric tape around the bar to keep the tripod head from sliding to the skinny part of the bars.

The bike is a 10 year old Trek 820 (I think.) It has no suspension of any kind. I was using front and rear paniers which provided some good lateral stability for the camera.

I did not know that about Adobe Premier. The Steadymove worked quite well. I can imagine it would lose some resolution.

The end product looks good enough for net video.

Thanks for the info.