Mountain Bike Bill, The Dirt on the Dirt

Category: Video

Mt Saint Helens Video

Riding at Mt Saint Helens on the Ape Canyon Trail and Plains of Abraham is a pretty incredible experience. From old growth forest to riding across the destruction from its eruption there is something here that should move you as a human. I went out to Windy Gap onto the top of the Smith Creek trail before heading back. This video on the back portion of the ride. The views here absolutely amazing. Here is my blog post from that outing.

What an amazing place

This video sit around for over a year as the audio was horrible. The Hero 5 did not have particularly good audio in the first place but my gimbal was having issues as well as it was starting to get noisy enough that the mics of the GoPro focused on that noise and it also managed to start picking up my heartbeat. The whole setup was aggravating. I thought about just covering it all up with music but I was able to get it mostly wrangled in with some filters in post. The video does not do this place justice. If you are ever in the area I highly recommend this place.

I had been out here the year before and the weather was not cooperating. I did shoot video on that trip and looked at incorporating some of it into this video but none of it made the cut. Here is my blog post from my 2018 visit to this area.

Downieville 2007 – Remastered

I finally got around to remastering this video from playtime in Downieville.

Downieville 2007 – What an awesome trip!

Got through this footage, I am very thankful for the modern era of tiny GoPro cameras and gimbals. I did some stabilization work on some of the clips, but it is a balancing act between cropping and smoothing out the video. Crop too much and the field of view gets to narrow and quality goes down. Clearly I need to get back up to Downieville and get some modern footage!

Futzing at La Costa

I recently upgraded by GoPro cameras and replaced a gimbal I retired. I finally broke them out at to tinker around with the setups. La Costa is pretty much a local trail for me so that was where the tinkerfest was held.

While I managed to goon up some of the footage with the gimbal in wrong mode or the mounting positions not best for all conditions I did get some usable stuff. I put most some of that together here.

I moved from Hero 5s to Hero 8s and I am quite happy with the audio in in Protune mode vs what I had to deal with on the 5s. I have added wind mufflers over the mics in addition to setting changes.

The hypersmooth of the GoPro 8s is really good, almost gimbal quality. So why the GoPro 8 and not the 9? Well quite simply the 9 was not out yet and I got a screaming deal on the GoPro 8 while working on a military base overseas. All told, I got two GoPro 8s for $425 out the door which is almost Buy One Get One Free compared to MSRP.

For those of you you ride at La Costa you will most notice there are a couple of scenes where things look amiss. When I had the gimbal in the inverter mounted position, if I leaned over a certain about in a turn, the gimbal would flip and lock on to stabilizing in that inverted position. I flipped the vertically in post, but forgot to also flip in horizontally as well. I did not notice this until after the video was published.

Cuyamaca – BLT Video Remastered

I have been working on remastering some of my older videos to bring them up to new standards.   My videos range from ancient lip-stick camera and 8mm camcorders to GoPros.     All of various eras of equipment will have their own challenges to remastering and some of them I’m just not going to make the time for the effort required.   But I am going to make an effort.

The video above is from 2007 where some of the usual suspects of the time rode from the Cuyamaca mountains over to the Lagunas by way of the Deer Springs and Indian Creek trails.   It was about a 40 mile day of great fun!

Neck muscles of steel!

This video was shot with a 1080i Canon HDV camcorder.  It shot good video with the exception of the image stabilization.  It used optical image stabilization which was consider really good for the time.   However it was optimized for handheld work and not for the rapid bouncing around that occurs during use as a helmet camera work.    I’m pretty sure that the optical image stabilization often made things worse not better.   It certainly did not work as well as the electronic image stabilization that was on my previous standard definition camcorder setup.

I had previously remastered my Galbraith Mountain video from 2009 but did not try to do any software stabilization of the video.  Many moons ago I tried software stabilization and did not like all the artifacts it created in the video.

For the Cuyamaca – Laguna video I gave the software stabilization another shot.   I’m using Adobe Premiere  CC 2018 and it has warp stabilizer effect/filter built in.   After a bit of trail and error I found some setting that work well enough.   There is a balancing act that has to be done with with the 1080i footage between smoothness and clarity.    The filter will do a good job of stabilization but at the cost of cropping the footage.   When the footage is cropped the clarity of the footage is decreased.    I found that trying to keep the crop below 125% typical kept thing looking good.   Some scenes I did not stabilize at  all.    Overall I’m satisfied enough with it as it is better than the windows media format stuff I was previously using.     There will be some more of this coming in the future.

Video Tinker Time in Alpine

This past week I made a long overdue appearance at Steve’s Wednesday Stoke ride in Alpine. The weather was great which made the climb up to the top go pretty well. 

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I was playing with both my Digital SLR camera as well my GoPro Hero 3 today.    This was the second outing with thing so I doing quite a bit of tinkering with mountings and camera setup.

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One of the angles I really like was using the roll bar mount near the bottom of the downtube to view the front tire action.   One downside to the roll bar mount was I needed use one of the extender arms on the mount to get the angle right.   No matter how hard I tightened the the knob for teh extender arm.   It would still sag down after some hard compressions like a landing or bigger chunk.   I will have figure out some kind of secondary support strap or something to use this angle much.

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My Canon 7D DSLR can also shoot HD video so I played around with shooting video with it.   It will be interesting to show how the whole video editing workflow is going to pan out with multiple formats and frame rates going into a single project.

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I also used the seat post/handlebar mount for a rear facing shot. I did not use an extender arm for this mount as the angle looked good.

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The “good” angle was based on the seat post being up.   Once I started going downhill and play in the chunk I lowered the seatpost and found that I was unable to get the camera angled up enough for my liking with too much of tire being in the frame and not enough view behind to keep from chopping off the head of a rider behind me.

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For the main run back down the trail I had the side mount for the helmet on.   The trail conditions were pretty freaking awesome that begged you to stay off the brakes.

GoPro HD3 Shakedown Ride

Early this week I got out for a lunch time ride out at La Costa.  The weather was nice and you good see Catalina and San Clemente Islands out on the horizon.   IMAG0442

I got a GoPro Hero3 HD Black Edition for Christmas and it was high time that I tested it out.   Other than some futzing with it on the couch this was my first time rolling with camera.   I decided to go for a side mount on the helmet for this test.  I slapped the curved sticky mount on about the right looking spot and stuck it on.   I was also using the double hinged adapter that came with the kit.  The kit also came with a WiFi remote but I did not even break that out on this test.  Instead I used the GoPro app on that I installed on my Android phone to control the camera.  The cool thing I like about the app is that it allows you to preview the angle you have setup instead of guessing or having to buy LCD accessory for the GoPro.    Right off the bat I’m rather impressed with the video quality and I’m sure it could be made a bit better some some of the advanced settings I have not tinkered with yet.   Of course there is no way to get image stablization with this setup but overall this thing is nice enough that and maybe another one are going to make it into the video equipment stable.     Oh yeah…tighening down those little adjustment knobs is highly recommended.   Here is a short completely non-fancy clip.

Galbraith Mountain Video

I finally got around to pulling together the footage I took on  Galbraith Mountain back in April.  Putting this video together was an awesome way to relive the great freaking riding there is on that mountain.  You may find the music a little aggro for your taste but these tunes got stuck in my head while riding these trails so it only seemed fitting put them on the vid.  

Right Click on the image above to download the 115MB video that is 8 minutes and 17 seconds long.

“Rocking In SoCal” Video

Okay I have been letting this footage pile for over a year so it was time to do something with it.  It is a locals rock hangout here in San Diego.   You can call it either the KTS #1  (Kinda Top Secret) Trail or the Ain’t Telling Trail.    It is really not much of a secret at all but I was asked not to drop the name so there you go. 

Right Click to download the 9 minute and 46 second video that will set your hard drive back 139MB.

New HelmetCam Setup

I have needed to retire the helmet portion of my old helmet cam setup for quite sometime now as I had simply worn it out. The adjustment mechanism on the back of the helmet was shot and overall the helmet looked pretty worse for wear. I have been tinkering with a new helmet camera mounting design that would allow me to get away from having a dedicated helmet for the camera system. Wearing the helmet camera on long climbs when you are not filming is a bummer so I would often carry a second helmet. I wanted carry a single helment and be able to quickly attach or remove the camera gear during the course of a ride. The new setup basically uses the quick-release mounts designed for professional/prosumer grade camera tripods. I find it much more versatile than before.

Here the main concept piece of the new setup, the quick release mounts. One piece (the plate) is on the helmet, the other (the latch) is on the camera housing. There was two main reasons I put the plate on the helmet vice the camera housing. The first was was because additional plates are inexpensive compaired to the latch. The other was the the plates weighed much less than the latch and I was looking to minimize the permenant weight on the helmet.

Here is a close up the mounting bracket for the plate. I needed to create a vertical surface for the plate. I ended up mixing up a small batch of fiberglass resin from a small repair kit that you can find at most automotive stores for under $20. I used the cap off of a can of spray paint as my mold and made up two small pucks. Once cured, I used a dremel tool with a sanding attachment to shape the puck until it contoured the side of the helmet and was vertical. I used a 1/4″ thick piece of neoprene as a vibration damper/gasket between the bracket and the helmet.

I used a single bolt through the plate, the bracket and helmet and secured with a recessed T-bolt on the inside of the helmet. I used a neoprene backed washer between the bolt and the plate as an added bit of vibration damping. I found these washers at a screw and bolt speciality surplus store in San Diego (They have like 5,000 of everything). Tightening the screw was enough to hold the camera angle inplace but once I had aligned the camera vertically , I drilled a recess in the bracket to allow the small alignment button used on the plate to ensure the plate stayed in alignment.

You may have noticed that the counterweight bracket is at a different angle than the other side. Since I can now switch the camera housing to the other side, I’m experimenting with some different shooting angles on that side.

Another thing I like about the setup is I can now move the camera gear from an XC helmet over to my full-face helmet easily. I actually made the full face rig first as it was much simpler. The extra padding of the full face helmet seem to have added a bunch of vibration damping that smoothed out the video some.  Now I just need to get out on the trail with XC setup.