Friday, October 05, 2007

Why We Climb



Thursday lunchtime ride. Two cameras sync'ed up. Forward camera on my helmet; rearward camera on my bars.

Youtube crushed the quality after I uploaded it. The original is way better. Oh well, what do want for free???

BTW, if the embed doesn't play, you can go directly to youtube to see it.

[add/edit] So I recently learned about blip.tv which also hosts videos, and apparently doesn't compress them as much (or maybe not at all?) as youtube. It also gives you the option of allowing viewers to download the original video file by going to the site. This video is here.

The quality is better, don't you think?

13 comments:

Unknown said...

pretty bad ass Mark...
I think you've got a hidden talent.
I checked out some of your other videos btw... some funny stuff.
Too bad I didnt stick around. I had to split to get my prelab done for chemisty... What can ya do right?

Gianni said...

Looks like a sweet time!
Is that the weekly climb for you?

Tom Anhalt said...

AHA! Video proof that you guys all cheated by pedaling.

I won. phhhbbbbttttt!

Anonymous said...

Great Job Mark. It feels like some sort of a bike chase with the music you chose.

Did you watch the L'Alp d'Huez decent by anychance? Whoever it is and on whater ever that person is on, he's flyin...........

Marco Fanelli said...

Chester- It's a kick to see what comes out of the cameras. Unfortunately I'm such a spaz that most of the time I do something wrong, like point it at the sky or the ground. Or like today on the sunday ride, the batteries ran out. Oh well, with rechargeables and a memory card, it's free!

Gianni- Yep, climb that sucka at least once a week. And a lot more often during the year. As a kid, when I just started riding and racing, I would ride to Jackson and back by Lake Comanche just to get some hills. As you well know, Stockton is really, really flat. Now I love my Old San Marcos just three miles out my front door!

Tom- You missed the 15 minute protest period.

Michael- I just watched those Alpe d'Huez descent videos. Pretty cool! Makes me want to go balls out down Painted Cave and OSM with the cameras. Makes me think of EJ too...

Unknown said...

Marco have you seen the youtube video titled "bike messengers are on crack" watching bike msngrs in NYC haul ass through the city streets? In traffic?

Dave said...

Marco, I used Vimeo for those videos of Gary bunnyhopping stuff, the compression is much better than youtube. Give it a shot.

Dave said...

my bad, didn't realize you already posted it to blip.tv

Anonymous said...

Awesome vid. Very slick production. What cams are you using - you mention SD cards so I'm guessing ATC2Ks?

Got any pics of how you mounted them? Most ATC2K vids I see look much worse - more vibration and bounce. Your vid is pretty smooth.

What software did you use to combine the forward and rearward videos?

Marco Fanelli said...

Thanks Joe. Both cameras are the Oregon Scientific model previous to the current ATC2K. They're basically the same as the ATC2K except that they can only use a 1 Gig SD card instead of the current 2 Gig limit.

No pics of how they were mounted but the rearward one was on the side of the drop of my bars (left side) and the forward one was on the top of my helmet. Both were tied down with additional zip-ties and pieces of rubber innertubes. That helped dampen the vibration so it wasn't amplified beyond the shaking of the bars and my head. But the raw video is still pretty shaky so I also used a filtering shareware program (Deshaker) that plugs into a free program called VirtualDub. It's a bit tricky to play with but generally cleans up a lot of annoying vibrations.

Finally, I used Adobe Premier Elements to merge the two video tracks (and the music) and it's really simple to line them up.

Anonymous said...

Nice job - I think the prior model could only do 15fps, while the current can do 30fps. Yet you still managed to produce a much smoother vid than most of the youtubers using the newer model.

I guess the dampening materials and firm tie-down helped. Thanks for the tip on Deshaker.

Did the mount on the drops get in the way of using the drops?

Any other tips for someone using a cam for their first ride video? Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info. Here's my first video: http://blip.tv/file/596752

Marco Fanelli said...

You're very welcome Joe. Cool that you won the sprint on that ride, but you needed the rear-facing camera to see all your beaten competitors!