Some thoughts about the GoPro

I finally got around to mounting the "Hero White" GoPro my wife bought me for Christmas (thanks honey). It works really well and it's easy to mount. I road some of my favorite backroads for about an hour and stopped by the house to see how they looked. They were great. I was happy with them, but not with myself.

I had concerns that I'd be tempted to "show off". I've watched enough GoPro footage of other people on bikes to know how quickly it becomes boring to watch someone else rolling down the road at a leisurely pace. Especially for another rider. Even with a lot of edits to cut out the 'yawns', it's like the old days when the neighbors invited you to dinner and then brought out the Super 8 projector to watch their brats on vacation in Yellowstone. Of course, that was before my time.

It's easy to get "enthusiastic" on the backroads around my place. There's really no need for a GoPro to make you want to push it a little bit. But having the camera on the helmet is like having an imaginary audience looking over your shoulder, and you don't want to let them down.

So when possible, I road at around 70%, sometimes more. 101% and your horizontal. This meant more than doubling the speed limit at times, and as you know, that can earn you a reckless driving citation. While no passing was done in the corners I think I may have startled at least one cager on the straits . I also confirmed to myself that the VFR has a rev limiter.

I think i'm going to stick with still pictures. They do a better job of capturing the scenery and that's what most people want to see. If I can find some discipline laying around somewhere, I might keep the GoPro and just post a short clip here and there.

But I won't let the GoPro whisper in my ear......

 

The term ride your own ride also applies to riding solo with a camera. I have two cameras mounted to my bike and for the most part these are to capture the riders with me, more than my own escapades, as I don't typically ride alone (other than commuting. see below). Whenever I sport ride I usually like to practice my lines, throttle control and sometimes body positioning but I'm usually well within my limits. So to some it may seem to them that I'm show boating but whatever, I stay within my limits. The only place I feel I can push it, or raise it above 70% is on the track and having a camera here can be useful in determining where you might need to improve. If you ever look at all the crashes on youtube of 'The Snake', many are right where the camera(s) are camped at. Most of the crashes I've seen appear to be show boaters, guys hamming it up in front of the camera(s) they know are pointed in their direction. Riding requires discipline and riding with a camera should be no different.

That being said, another place a camera can be useful and/or a benefit is while commuting. I have a forward pointing camera on my 6 Gen, which is primarily my commuter and it's always on whenever I take it to work. You never know when some inattentive driver is going to be an asshat and cause an accident. Although video footage can point the finger both ways, if you are doing everything right it could help determine a settlement in your favor but conversely it could prove to show that you were partially at fault. You've probably seen the thread about whether the rider should be calling it quits. I'd say that is a good example of it pointing in both directions!

 

Oh come on now, where's the video at? Yea I get what you're saying though, what is it about that? I find myself to ride more stiff as I'm making sure my lines are good and of coarse then you are not smooth, still fun though. I wouldn't hang the Go pro out to dry quite yet they have there place and time. Me I need to figure out the 4 hours + of editing time after the fact, in that is my achilles heel, other wise it's fun.

 

I appreciate the tone of your post.

"They got me again" post. It sure looks like he came across the center line. My gopro was mounted on the right side of my helmet. While corning it looked like I was across the double yellow. Which wasn't the case.

 

Yeah RVFR, editing absolutely sucks, at least in the gopro studio. Just not use to it.

 

Now I mostly use the GoPro for critiquing style, body position, etc because unless something exciting happens (which is usually bad) the video is kind of boring for most.

In the past, I posted every new road I ventured onto, so there are a lot of boring videos on my YouTube page that I should take down, lol.

The other thing that I'm guilty of is just posting raw video. I very rarely post raw photos anywhere, but I'd throw up raw video like it was hundred dollar bills. Post production adds so much for the viewer. I still throw raw video on YouTube, but usually it's to share a ride or show a certain road. When I bought my VFR, I was concerned that it wouldn't handle the twisties the way I wanted to, and I couldn't find many videos of someone ragging on the 8thGen, so once I got comfortable on it, I posted some videos of me riding the way I was looking for before I bought it.

I'm thinking about getting a single axis gimble for that Motogp look, but new exhaust and suspension will come first. Even at that, it's hard to do something interesting that hasn't been done to death already.

In the end, my friends record me, and I record them so that we can critique our styles and improve. Video is such an eye opener for that. 9 times out of 10, you aren't going as fast as you think you are, you aren't leaned over like Rossi, your body position isn't as extreme as you think, or as good, and video can show you all of that.

My $.02.

 

Yeah, I always figured having other people watch your videos is like NASCAR: they're just watching for the crash, no crash=BORING. I used to do a lot of video, then I discovered I never watched the damned things. So now I don't mess with it, I just enjoy the ride like I did before they ever came out with itty-bitty cameras. :smile-new:

 

As Ragtop mentioned there is the after ride review. Although it doesn't change what happened during the ride it could help diagnose something that did happen. Maybe catch something you might have done wrong or a circumstance you might have run into.

A friend of ours had a low side crash while following me and OCLandspeeder up Palomar Mountain. We weren't going that fast but brisk pace enough to keep you on your toes. I would constantly check my mirrors to make sure the people following us weren't getting in over their head but obviously couldn't watch my 6 the whole way up. For the most part the rider was in view except for a couple of corners where it was hard to see around another bend but once I lost sight of him after several more corners I mentioned to OC that "I think we lost Josh!" (Another great use for rider comm systems!) We slowed our pace down just in case he only fell back a little but still no Josh. We then pulled over an started to wait, then we saw a car drive by, then we knew something happened, as the only cars at this point would have been well behind the whole group. We turned around and went back to check it out.

Sure enough we get back to a section before a curve, where we see the other riders in our group helping Josh get back up. When we quizzed him on what happened he said that he doesn't recall and that the last thing he remembers was detaching from the bike and then he blacked out. The guys who got there first said that he was under the bike when they got to him but he kept on insisting he was off the bike before he blacked out. Considering the group behind him were too far back to see what happened and OC and I were looking forward most of the time, we had no way of knowing what actually happened, or did we? Turned out my rear facing camera caught his low side and shows how he did come off the bike but the slid under it when it hit the guard rail. So both eh and the group were telling the truth.

Of course we all watched this video again and again and could not see a tell tale sign of what exactly happened but we did notice that his front tire was a little bit on the worn out side and believe that his tire just didn't have the traction he needed and thus caused it fold under and he low sided.

[video=youtube;4mPm9T4eXvs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mPm9T4eXvs[/video]

 

I just got a Contour Roam 3 (only $90) and mounted it on the right side of my helmet. I have have using it to document some of my favorite roads. I agree the videos are on the boring side, but I wanted a record of each route.


Palomares Road south of Castro Valley.

 

So do you have a long arm or extension? I see my faceshield in the video.

Do you have yours set on wide angle?

 

I was going to document some roads as well, but when I was doing research for my Norcal trip, I found none of the videos I watched could do justice to the mighty 36. This might be the best road in California, but the videos just don't come close to showing that. I think the same is true of Palomar, and while I've never ridden the Tail of the Dragon, it's probably true there too.

So I'm hoping none of my videos ever go viral, because the ones that do are usually pretty awful. I'm reminded of the newbie that smashed head on into a forest fire truck on GMR.

 

One interesting tidbit, the LCD displays on the Gen 8 are not on steady, they are pulsed at a rate that you eye cannot detect. When I view videos of the dash while riding, the numbers come and go in small segments as the frame rate of the camera is different than the dash. Kind of like the old days when movie cameras caught TV screens.

I chose the screen clip in post #9 because the numbers were in sync with the camera.

 

You can also notice this on some rear taillights. In one video where I'm behind Scubalong on his BMW GS, it looks like his rear brake is flashing. Same for my buddy Doug, who's BMW S1000R, taillight does the same thing on camera.

 

Ah Ha, now I know why. Both dash and the BMW tailights are illuminated by LEDs, which have ballasts that pulse the LEDs.

 

OOTV, your video is private.

 

I bought one and did exactly one video with it....that was 4 years ago. There is enough worthless bullshit on the internet already. For sound clips and how to's they are OK.

 

Even half (or more) of the sound clips suck. Some guy recording himself with a cell phone revving a cold engine to the moon does not a sound clip make.

 

Try it now.

 

Bingo! In my work sometimes we have to test whether Infrared remote controls are being emulated by the control system. Some of them have LEDs that flash when the sender is emitting the IR codes but others do not. If you take your iPhone and put it in camera mode, point it at the IR flasher you can see the IR flasher blink if the controls are working correctly.

 

Works now, thanks!

Tar snake?