This past Christmas, my partner Nikki thought it would be a good idea to gift me a GoPro Hero 4 for Christmas to give me an incentive to make time for mountain biking again. To cut a long story short, I had a minor wee downhill accident a year ago (just a couple of broken bones; nothing major) and it kind of knocked my confidence a wee bit so I’ve only been back on it a couple of times since 🙁
So it’s only taken me a little over a month to try this thing out and overall I’m pretty impressed. It’s easy to operate, picture quality is clear , it’s sharp, the attachments are all well thought out AND they fit without any hassles. But of course, there are plenty of reviews out there to discuss that sort thing, what I want to comment on are my experiences so far with vibration showing up in footage.
Nikki, to her credit, did her research and found that the GoPro Chesty is the mount to use for stable footage over rough terrain. But unfortunately it isn’t simply a case of throwing the camera on and getting stable footage as I discovered.
The first ride I had I didn’t put alot of emphasis in ensuring that the straps were too tight and as a result the footage bounced around ALOT. I also didn’t pay too much attention to where I positioned the camera either which was in that area of the torso between the pects and the abdominals.
So on the second ride, I made the straps a little tighter and also moved the positioning of the camera so it was directly over my pectorals where there was less flappy skin. This improved things a little further but the footage still bounced all over the place.
Third ride, I made an effort to really tighten the straps while keeping the camera positioned over my pectorals. This improved the footage alot but there was still some vibration but it was nowhere near as severe as the previous two rides.
Finally on my fourth ride earlier today, I made the straps as tight as I could so the chesty was rock solid, I also made my rear suspension a little harder (I usually like a them soft for downhill), and finally I let some air out of both tyres for a little extra cushioning. I usually climb at around 40psi so I dropped that to around 25-30psi. All of this produced the video that I’ve attached to this post. There is still some work to do but I feel I’m on the right track to getting it stabler now.
Just for interests sake, I tried a bit of post production on the video using both Adobe Premiere with the Warp Stabilizer plugin, and VirtualDub with the Deshaker plugin also. Both produced some impressive results but the appearance of stability was overshadowed by the illusion that bike speed was completely lost. So minus the couple of edits, this video is straight from the camera without post production.
Finally, there’s adjusting the video mode and this will take some trial and error on my part over the coming weeks. The above video was shot in 1080p@60fps and I’ve a suspicion that if I lower the resolution and up the fps a bit it may improve the illusion of stability even further.
Anyway, so far these are my findings.
- Turn the GoPro upside down
- Use a Chest harness (a genuine GoPro harness, that is)
- Tighten the straps as tight as you can while still maintaining comfort
- Examine your torso makeup and place the camera in an area where there is less movement. (ie. less flappy skin :-))
- Setup your rear suspension damper to descend and maintain abit of hardness in the sensitivity
- Let a little air out of your tyres for extra cushioning.