Miscellaneous & Temporary Stuff
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Home made camcorder mount

First vid shot with the home made mount and my first efforts at editing.
It'll get better - promise! I need to sort camera settings and devise a more
solid mounting system.  All vids will be hosted on You Tube to save on
my webspace so quality won't be brilliant even without the shaky camera.
Probably best viewed at the smaller pic size than full screen.

Opens in You Tube, select HQ for a better quality

Opens in You Tube, select HQ for a better quality

The result of the second mount shown near the bottom of this page....no music soundtrack on this one, so you'll have to put up with the wind noise and the sound of a V4 engine! Read below  for conclusion.

With our Europe bike trip looming large on the horizon - 2 months 3 days off at the time of writing this to be exact - I thought it would be good if this year for a change we shot a bit of video footage to add to to the still shots. Obviously as we'll be travelling some of the best passes that the Alps has to offer, it would be good if most of the filming is done from the bike so I set about finding a suitable camera mount.  Initially for testing I'll be using my Canon A650is digital still camera which although a lot bigger and heavier than a compact, does shoot shoot quite good quality video - actually better than a lot of dedicated video cameras!

Looking around at commercially available camera mounts, they are either stupidly expensive or not suitable.  Dez used a big clip on on thing on their recent tour down to the South of France, which worked great on his CBR1000, but I'm not sure it would successfully clip onto the much more curved screen of the V.Tec. I'll give it go though next time I'm round at his place on the bike. Other ones I've seen mostly fasten on somewhere behind the screen, but as we're using a tank bag they're no good.  Other types position the camera in such a place as to make it impossible to reach, fine for remote helmet cams but useless for self contained cameras.  In the end I decided the easiest solution was to make one to mount on the left hand mirror.

First off is the prototype - just to test the feasibility of mounting the camera on the mirror. The proper working version will probably be made from square section aluminium bar

This is just a quick mock up to assess if a camera will work without too much shake mounted to the mirror
This actually worked ok, but the thickness of the rubber tubing makes the whole thing less rigid than it should be
so there is a fair bit of camera shake as the sample vid at the top of the page shows. Before starting on the aluminium version I'll mount this one on the mirror without the rubber tubing, but I'm pretty confident it'll be vast improvement

Not pretty at the moment but it'll be "reet" in the end

Update - Second Mount

After trying various purpose made pipe clamps - which snapped as soon as they were tightened up, I decided the best thing to do would be to make my own clamp out of some aluminium bar that I had lying around the workshop. I've kept it as as small and stubby as possible to lessen the chance of any shake occuring. Another mooch through the cupboard in my office turned up an old tripod head that I'd forgotten all about, so that was cannibalised in the name of the cause. The horizontal swivel (panning) mechanism has been retained but the up / down capability has been removed as there's no need for it. That adjustment can be done by slacking off the clamps and twisting the whole thing on the mirror stalk.  The horizon level is fixed, I found with the first mount I made (above) that if the bike was put on the centre stand and the mount was aligned with a spirit level it worked quite well. The same method is used here, the camera mount is levelled & locked with the clamp bolt, and to ensure there's no side to side movement a roll pin has been inserted to hold it all in place. It all looks a bit "chunky" but it feels very solid now - a case of function taking precedence over aesthetics!

Simple but (hopefully) effective

It's not been tried out yet, because the weather here has turned really crappy but as soon as it clears I'll go shoot some vids for comparison to the first ones. This camera won't be getting used for shooting videos from the bike for long, a purpose made tougher "action" camera has been ordered - one of these: Oregon Scientific jobbies It shoots the same resolution as the Canon but is waterproof, over 100gms lighter and it has a remote control.

Update: Mount 2 has now been tried and tested the overall effect of which is improved, with the camera staying a bit steadier at lower speeds.  Hard acceleration seems to upset it a bit though as it picks up vibes from the bike, and bumpy road sections are still quite bad. The second vid at the top of the page is a compilation of two runs over the same route (chosen because it has some quite bumpy sections in it) some bits have the cameras Image stabiliser turned on and others turned off - there appears to be no difference between either.  The mount on the mirror is as solid as it will ever get and the whole thing is kept as "stubby" as pos to keep vibration to a minimum. Any shake now is coming from the mirror itself.  The camera is quite heavy at 375 grammes but we've just taken delivery of the smaller lighter Oregon unit mentioned and shown below. This one weighs in at just a whisker over 240gms so hopefully that will help with the shake, if not we have a few more ideas to try. 

The new camera is now sorted to mount on the bike. It comes with quite a few  different fitting options so it's not difficult to figure out one that works best. It feels a bit "plasticky" - but hey it wasn't that expensive and plasticky = light so we shouldn't complain too much. We did go for the dearer ATC5K rather than the ATC3K though which has no viewfinder, so it's a "shoot 'n pray" affair which we didn't fancy.  It's not been tried yet but here's some photos of it mounted to the bike:

The nice thing about this one is that it's waterproof down to 10 mtrs so it should keep out any rainstorms we get caught in

dearer ATC5k model thought rather than the

To be continued.................

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