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Video shooting while riding
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First thoughts
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For this project we have invested about
two years work of testing and reconstruction with different concepts and mounts for camcorders and have had these designs installed during several motorbike trips in the European Alps. During that time
we have learned two things. It makes only little sense and does not look too good in the final video, if you only see a street and a moving landscape and if there is no connection to the motorbike. So at
least one piece of the bike should be seen that moves.
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 The first concept then was a mounting plate, installed above the instrument panel and we shot the
video through the front wind shield of our Varadero during travel. The large disadvantage of this setup became immediately visible in the finished video. There is no motorcycle windshield on the
market which is 100 transparent. All windshields are made of some kind of plastic, normally produced in a mold and are not flat. In addition the windshield, when installed, receives mechanical
stress and wind load that adds additional mechanical load onto it.
Further the windshield is facing huge changes in temperature, vibrations and natural UV-radiation.
Therefore any windshield shows always micro scratches in its structure. These micro scratches are the most worst when you have the sun in front of you. The light beam of the sun gets broken up
into millions of small light beams and your video picture shows only some sort of light clowd.
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When installing the camcorder behind a
windshield an additional effect shows up when you have the sun directly behind you. Then you see the camera itself on the video, since the windshield is behaving like a mirror. We then purchased a video
camera mounting plate for the fuel tank cap to avoid that effect. But now we have had the speedometer, the instrument panel, again the lausy windshield and not enough street or countryside on our video.
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The concept
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Several things are very important to produce a good and valuable motorbike video.
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 The camcorder should be a digital camcorder. We use a Sony DCR-HC85. This camcorder operates
with a Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T lense with a standard focal lenght of 45mm and a resolution for videos of 2.1Mio pixels.You need to upgrade the camcorder with a wide angle lense that does supply a focal lenght of less than
20mm. Otherwise the human eye is unable to follow the video since the angle is too small and the speed too high. We use the Sony wide angle with a focal lenght of 18mm. The camcorder should operate with mini tapes. We also have tested units based on mini DVDs, but
gave up. Based on the vibrations on a motorbike that you never can completely eliminate, the video showed permanent drop outs since the DVD recorder was unable to buffer that with the intelligent
vibration control. We have sold these units on e-bay. In addition the camcorder mount should be designed that way, that it can be installed aside the
motorbike. With that setup, you may see the moving wheel, the suspension fork, the street and enough landscape. Therefore we have installed that mount onto the left crash bar. The mount itself has a flat windshield made from standard glas, which we have glued in with silicone. We used a piece of glas from a
picture frame. The camcorder must have fuzzy-control installed. In addition it should have the option to switch off the autofocus function. Using a wide
angle, the autofocus is not needed anyway. So you zoom out to the maximum, focus manually to the farest point and install the
camera into the mount. If you cannot switch off the autofocus, the camera gets confused and sometimes focusses to the windshield glas. The mount must be buffered with at least 2.5cm rubber foam to eliminate the high frequency vibrations. They can kill your camcorder
within two hours of operation. Oh, I nearly forgot. You need to pack enough liquid window cleaner and Kleenex when you go on tour. The windshield stays clean for
maximum 20min. during ride. Then you have the first fat fly smashed to it and this looks like a monster in your video. The sequence is then ready to be filed into the trash can.
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The camcorder mount
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The camcorder mount consits of two parts.
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 One piece is an aluminum plate that is screwed on to the crash bar with three water pipe clamps
that should be isolated with a rubber layer. You may purchase these in any hardware store. This plate serves as foundation for the camcorder housing. A 1.5mm aluminum to build that plate is
absolutely sufficient.
The pipe clamps are available with different diameters. You should measure the diameter of your
crash bar and then choose the right set. We only use one half of the pipe clamp. We have not published a plan of the plate, since every crash bar is different. Just use a piece of carton, tape it
to your crash bar and use a cutter knive to cut out the profile. Then use a marker to mark the crash bar tube on the rear for the holes to be drilled.
Since nearly all crash bars are black, we have painted the plate in black as well. Then it looks
better on the motorbike and is not so eye-catching. You need to use self-secured nuts to fasten that, otherwise the vibrations will hep to loose it during ride.
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 The camcorder housing is build from the same sort of aluminum plate we used to build the
foundation plate. The housing is just bent like an “U”. The housing lenght is set by the dimensions of the camcorder you plan to use and you should add 2cm at the front and 2cm at
the rear.This is needed to install the glas afterwards and the camcorder is protected against damage. If you bend the sides, add 2cm on each side as well, since you need to install the
rubber foam as vibration protetction. We have in addition installed a threaded bar to releif mechanical stress from the glas windshield.
Finally the glas gets installed in the front with the help of silicone glue. Add two stripes of thin
foam rubber to prevent your wide angle lense from direct contact with the housing. The camcorder should fit in under soft pressure. Just cut out the profile in the rubber foam as
required. We have not yet drilled any holes for the connection between the base plate and the camcorder housing. This needs to be done
when the camcorder is installed in the housing and operational. Because only then we know exactly how to position it to get the correct
picture content which you should compose based on the criterias listed below.
the front wheel must be seen on the video you should have a maximum of landscape on the picture. Best setup is 1/3 road, 2/3 landscape and sky.
you should install the camcorder that way, that nothing is seen from the entire housing.
 Have you found the best setup, then the camcorder housing is fastened with two screws onto the
base plate.
IMPORTANT!
you must install at least a 2mm foam layer between the two elements. This type of rubber foam can normally be purchased in any hardware store and is usually used to seal
windows as wind protection. This foam damps the high frequency vibrations in addition. We have tried with different setups of rubber dampers that can be screwed between the two plates, but
that didn’t work out since the camera was swinging in some kind of resonance frequency after every bump on the road.
With that kind of setup, we have shot already lots of great movies in the European Alps on DVD. Most impressive are left curves, because
then the camcorder nearly touches down to the street and the middle line just shoots in the video. Thrilling.
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 We have added a link with a small session from one of our videos. It shows a 40sec ride sequence up to the Oberalp Pass from
Andermatt in Switzerland. We had to reduce the quality down to Mpeg1, therefore the resolution is bad. The downloadable
sequence has 7Mb. The original sequence in Mpeg2 on DVD has 34Mb and shows the same quality as a tv film. What we try to
make you aware off is the fact, that this shot was done against the evening sun. This small sequence clearly shows the brisk advantage of that type of setup.
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