Video Camera For Filming Own Progress

[chieffo]

I have owned this since last summer and there are a few things I'd let people know:

 

Microphone quality is poor. You get a lot of clacking and whine on a motorcycle. I've had it set to the minimum sensitivity plus covered the mic area, and still I get a lot of junk noise over my aftermarket exhaust. This is when mounted at the handlebars or upper fork tubes. I wear earplugs because of the exhaust, I'd expect it to be possible to drown out everything but the exhaust, and I haven't managed it.

 

To mount an external mic, you have to leave the rear door of the camera open. There goes the water resistance. Not sure if the memory card or battery could vibrate out. I haven't tried this because the mic port is a funky data style connector and I haven't seen any mics available like that yet.

 

Video quality seems good, though it seems a bit undersaturated in terms of color. The world just sems a little lifeless through this lens.

 

The fish-eye output of the camera absorbs the sensation of speed, so you have to be really whipping along or find a mounting position very low on the bike if you want to capture anything like the sensation of riding.

 

Filesize becomes gigantic pretty rapidly. My dual 3GHz processor with decent RAM doesn't like when you try to skip ahead in the raw footage.

 

Filetype is truly the biggest problem for me. Only producing mp4s as video output has me hamstrung as I try to use Adobe Premiere Pro 2 to work with the footage. The software itself doesn't like it, and I've tried a dozen of freewares that just don't put out good windows-compatible formats from the mp4. I looked at buying full quicktimebut see users complaining that it wouldn't do this job right for them.

 

I don't think i've gotten much value out of the camera so far. I'm maintaining my raw footage on the hard drive in the hopes that later a good solution will present itself. I'd rather have bought a different camera.

 

 

 

I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with the product below, nor am I promoting or receiving any commercial gain from it.

 

Now that is out of the way, after looking long and hard at many different forms of on bike video recording, the most suitable for me would be the

DRIFT 170 HD Stealth.

 

It has a remote control, a built in screen, captures to SD cards(most important for editing, just drag & drop, no rendering like with tapes)

it is water resistant,big battery and doesn't make you look like a "Telly Tubby"