Had my first trip to FoD yesterday, spent all day on the uplift riding a variety of trails, also got my new gimbal setup out after lunch once I'd familiarised myself with the trails.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the footage, particularly with regards to the angle/viewpoint, does the gimbal make the trail look too boring? Am I showing enough bike/too much bike? etc.
Anyway video below so enjoy! (and make sure to watch in 1440p)
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You'll want to make sure it's looking straight ahead to start with! 🙂
Apart from that, looks great. Think about using 30fps (or even 24fps) as that will create some motion blur, will make you look faster and will allow the camera to capture more light/detail per frame.
Record at 4k if you can too, that'll make the 1440p option look crisper. Have a look at BCPOV on youtube, he records at 4k 24fps, loads of motion blue and loads of crisp detail, his footage looks awesome.
I'd mounted it at a slight angle to clear the buckle on my Stuntman chest mount, I didn't realise until I got home that this obviously confuses the gyro and makes it point sideways a few degrees!
I'm off to the Black Mountains Cycle Centre tomorrow so I'll try again with it mounted straight and see how some 4K 30fps footage comes out as that's max resolution on the Hero4.
pretty good other than the non centering - if you do anything steep, remember to tilt the camera down or you'll end up with your chin in half the shot lol
Nothing wrong with that. Good vid
I forget some of you live in bits of the country where it drys out fast. It might be 25 degs this weekend but still boggy as around here.
Mildly controversial - have we not done the FPV only ride to death? Nothing wrong with the footage being a keystone of a video but it needs to be balanced by other shot types (seatpost mount, footage from behind from a second rider, bar back mount to the rider, tripod/tree mounted flyby shots, drone shots) . Sadly that takes a shed load more work making a 60 sec edit a full day of effort to produce. I'm just not sure how much more chest/bar/helmet mounted cam footage the world needs.
I enjoyed that, the gimbal action made it look like a computer game. Look forward to seeing what you come back from BM with.
Nice and smooth footage.
Where did you get the gimbal from?
if you do anything steep, remember to tilt the camera down or you’ll end up with your chin in half the shot lol
It's tilted down roughly 7 degrees from horizon in that vid, I measured the diameter of the motor housing and then did some maths and got a set of stickers made with degree markers on so I can make sure it's in the same place each time.
Mildly controversial – have we not done the FPV only ride to death?
I do agree with that to some extent, I love watching external shots of people flying down trails like the stuff Will Greenfield shoots. But he's out there with a whole crew of people and probably spends half the day not actually riding, I just like to ride the trails, and if I can grab some nice footage along the way then great!
Look forward to seeing what you come back from BM with.
Just got home now, so probably an hour or so of editing and then double that again for encoding, uploading and processing on YouTube, this high res filming is really time consuming compared to 1080p!
Where did you get the gimbal from?
I got mine off Amazon, just seemed the safer option as I imagine they would sort any warranty issues themselves instead of me sending it back to China.
Why are your bars the wrong way round?
Looks a good day out to me. Thumbs up 👍.
Why are your bars the wrong way round?
You'll have to elaborate? Watching the video back I can see there's a kind of optical illusion that makes it looks like the 'sweep' is facing forwards, but I can assure you that's not the case. haha
I recommend looking up Seth's Bike Hacks, The Singletrack Sampler and BKXC on youtube. All have some pretty decent footage and post pretty regularly. In some cases they mix it up, but there is a lot of first person in there.
I was interested in a gimbal but have got two very different camera types and can not decide - gopro session (4) and some Sony action cams (with stabilisation). Have not progressed it further, but they impressive.
your wheels could do with a re-tension.
more constructively. It was good, out of curiosity how long did it take you to upload to You tube?
I recommend looking up Seth’s Bike Hacks, The Singletrack Sampler and BKXC on youtube
Funnily enough it's actually BKXC which inspired me to go down the route of the Hero4 and gimbal, I'm pretty much mirroring his setup.
your wheels could do with a re-tension.
You're the second person to say that, what noise are you hearing that means I have a loose spoke/spokes? All I can hear is stones/trail debris pinging off the hollow aluminium downtube (which you can't normally hear on muffled Hero5/Hero6 footage).
That groaning spring noise you can hear as you land heavily after little jumps is your rear wheel complaining about the landing.
As you have stated you are using the stuntman harness, you can make an even better connection by sacking off the ball joint and screwing the gimbal straight in to the harness.
I used a screw from one of the adaptors and trimmed it, then screwed straight through the plate from the back into the thread on the gimbal.
It makes it more stable with zero clicking, and it means that the gimbal is an inch closer to you which means the angle is better and lower.
That groaning spring noise you can hear as you land heavily after little jumps is your rear wheel complaining about the landing.
I've just listened to it again carefully and I can't hear anything, you're not mistaking the metallic ping/echo sound of my rear hub engaging as I start pedalling after the jumps for loose spokes are you?
Because I'm sat next to my bike right now and the spokes are fine. lol
Thank-you for calling it a video rather than an edit. I get inexplicable angry when people talk about an edit.
...you can make an even better connection by sacking off the ball joint and screwing the gimbal straight in to the harness.
That was the first thing I did when I got it, it's mounted directly to the chest plate with a 1/4" thread d-ring screw, although I needed a 4mm rubber washer so the housing didn't foul the buckle as I'm also not using the fat spacer thing it comes with as standard.
Thank-you for calling it a video rather than an edit. I get inexplicable angry when people talk about an edit.
I do my editing in real life, if I screw up part of the run I write-off the footage and try the run again. So the end result is one continuous uninterrupted video, no choppy restarts splicing in the second attempt at a big jump!
you’re not mistaking the metallic ping/echo sound of my rear hub
nah, it's a distinctive noise and different to that, but it if you've checked your spokes it's probably nothing to worry about.
more constructively. It was good, out of curiosity how long did it take you to upload to You tube?
Missed this comment as I was too busy checking spokes earlier. haha The new video I uploaded last night from BMCC was 3 minutes of 4K 30fps totalling 1.3GB and took around 20-25 minutes to upload on a fibre connection running around 7-8Mbps upstream.
Got the new footage from BMCC uploaded on this thread: https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/some-of-the-best-trails-ive-ever-ridden-bmcc-gimbal-pov-4k/
