- Thanks to the amount of affordable gear these days,
it's really easy to make a great
mountain bike video at home.
Now, the cheapest and easiest way to do it
is by getting yourself some kind of action camera.
Now the reason these are so good is you can mount them
on your head, you can put them on your body
or your bike, or even just on a pole and film them
using them as a regular camera.
But there can be a bit of a tech overload
trying to figure out what you need.
Knowing which aspect ratio is right,
knowing which sort of memory card you want,
or your FPS from your H.264.
This video is all about action cameras
and how you can get the most out of one.
(laid back chill music)
First things first, and that is selecting
the right style camera for you.
Now there's obviously very expensive options available
and there's very cheap options out there.
Some are fully featured, some have barely any features.
some are small, some are 360 cameras.
Now what is it you're going to be using your camera for?
If it's just some occasional POV footage,
i.e. following your mate down a trail
and some crashes, stuff like that,
or even a screen grab to chuck on Instagram,
you're not going to need the top of the range cameras
that film 4K and have all the bells and whistles.
You can get away with a very modest camera,
it's going to save you a lot of money
and you'll still get plenty of great use and fun out of it.
What frame rates or settings
do you really need from your camera?
Well to be honest up to 60 frames per second
is absolutely fine.
And although many cameras, even the cheaper ones
do film in 4K these days,
you'll often find it'll be at a lower frame rate
and really, you've got to bear in mind
that you don't need to be filming in 4K,
1080p is absolutely fine.
And the other option of course, is something that films 360,
this particular one is a Rylo,
it has a camera on both sides.
If you're going to pick a 360 camera,
make sure it can still function as a regular camera
because of the fact that you don't always
want to have that crazy image.
As fun and as amazing it is,
what you can do on these things,
it can get a bit sickening.
So just make sure if you pick one,
you can also use it just as a regular 180 camera.
I'm just going to throw you over to Ben Deakin, The Deakinator.
And he's got some great tips on using an action camera.
- Hello guys, it's Ben Deakin here, Mr. Oi-Oi Man.
We are here in the Muc-Off workshop,
getting next year's bikes ready.
So I've got Rob Webb on the case.
And we're just going to show you a couple of GoPro tips.
I got asked by Doddy, to show you a couple of my top tips.
So the first one I'd recommend is the mounting hardware
that I use, so this is the first one I use,
just the normal handhold pole,
this is where I can film other people
getting all the angles, this is what I used
at Red Bull Rampage of Brendan, et cetera.
The next one being, is your helmet mount.
Now, obviously some people mount on top of the helmet,
I personally choose to mount under the peak.
The whole reason for this is it just means
that you can get the hands in, you can see some fat whips
and all that good stuff.
It's also another top tip to take a battery out
on the trails with you.
The main reason being, if you're going to a big bike park,
you don't want to miss every run,
so you just want to make sure
you've got a backup just in case.
And I guess the final one is the frame rates and things
that I use on the actual GoPro itself.
So I actually use a 128 frames per second,
if I'm going to get some slow-mo clips.
And then likewise, I use the super wide setting,
so the whole reason of the super wide setting,
it just means you can see a bigger field of view.
So certainly on things like the Megavalanche,
it means you can see the carnage either side of you.
Anyway, they're my top tips,
hopefully you've enjoyed my little part of this episode.
Until the next time, see you in a bit, oi-oi.
- So as Ben actually just said,
he's using various different mounts on his helmet
and off the bike as well.
Now, he actually showed one of these poles
to do the old selfie thing with.
But this particular one by GoPro,
I think Ben uses the same one,
you can actually use it as a mini tripod as well,
quite a versatile bit of kit.
So it's well worth considering something like that.
Now, if you're mounting onto your helmet,
a couple of things to consider are the safety aspects
and also how you look.
If you mount on the top of your helmet,
firstly, you're going to look like a bit of a Teletubby,
if you can deal with that it's no problem.
But secondly, something quite important
for your footage point of view,
is it actually slows down the footage
from that point of view.
So if you're going to be doing that,
make sure you're following another rider.
If you want the better form of view
that makes it seem like you're going a bit quicker,
mounting under the peak as Ben suggested is really good
because you've got better perspective.
You can still see your bike,
you can still see your handlebars
and you have the nice stability of it being on your helmet.
If your mounting underneath there,
it's kind of good idea to do it on the peak itself,
'cause if you have a crash and you land on the front
or side of the helmet, it means the peak can break off.
Next up of course, in the mounting it realms,
of course is the famous chesty mount.
It's pretty much like a bra that you put on
and you mount the camera on your chest, tilt it up
a little bit so it faces down the trail.
You can see the bike moving around,
it's a really dynamic place to mount it
and arguably one of the better places
because you don't have the additional weight on your helmet.
However, some people are a little bit bothered by this,
because firstly, it can be a bit sickening
if you're watching a really aggressive trail
'cause there's so much movement of the bike,
can be a bit disorienting to watch.
So if you choose to use a chest mounted camera
just be cautious of how long the clips are
and how aggressive your riding is,
because it can be a bit overwhelming to watch.
The other one of course, is it's a safety point,
because the camera is on your chest.
Now of course, the camera mount will most likely break off
but some people are put off by this.
Something you might want to check out,
CamelBak for example, make a chest plate
with a mount on, so it's actually a sternum protector
with the GoPro mount or the action camera mount
on the front there.
So, a good safety option if that is up your street.
Now a creator tip from our behind the scenes guys here,
obviously we make videos every day,
so Dan Dan the cameraman and everyone else here
at GMBN and GMBN Tech, they know so much about this stuff.
Now on a daily basis they're putting GoPros
and they're putting other action cams and stuff
all over bikes and trying to get this footage.
And the stock mounts they come with,
although they work really well,
they can be a pain when you're taking them on and off,
so they quite often replace those actual mounts
basically on a mounting hardware
with regular bolts and screws,
that way you can use an Allen key like a Topeak trail tool,
something like that, or a screwdriver.
Just makes it a more secure fit
and it makes it easier to get them on and off.
Now whilst on subjects of mounts,
there's lots of aftermarket mounts available
like these little fellas here from K-Edge.
This one is designed to go on underneath you
of your saddle rails facing backwards,
so you could have the camera facing out the back,
capturing the wheel rotating around and seeing the rider
chasing you down the trail.
If you're using any of these sort of mounts,
make sure they don't sort of clash
with anything on the bike,
because this one fits underneath the saddle,
of course your rear tire could hit it under compression.
So wherever you mount them, just take care
and make sure they're not going to hinder any part of the bike
or yourself hitting them.
Now you might hear people talking about gimbals.
A few years back they were really popular,
especially on that chesty mount, because you could get
the most insanely stable footage from them.
But thankfully, you can get around that these days
'cause most of the action cameras available,
have very good stabilization built in.
And if you've got a 360 camera,
there's some really cool things they can do.
'Cause they film a much bigger image size,
you essentially crop in on the image,
you can still crop in at 1080p
or even a 4K image and not even need
the stabilization of a physical device.
Although of course, all of that does involve
on good light, that is your friend.
Next up is the memory card,
in which you're going to record your information onto.
I would recommend getting the best one you possibly can
because sometimes you can get corrupt files
and it's painstaking,
especially when you've recorded like the run of your life
and you can't play the file,
so get yourself a decent one.
Now always look for a number 10,
so they're in a category of one to 10,
10 will be the fastest data rate,
basically it records, it reads and writes to,
so look for a 10, it might be so
that you've got a, I dunno like a GoPro Fusion for example.
It might require you have a high-speed card.
If that's the case, you're going to have to invest
and get a really good card.
And make sure you do a bit of housekeeping
on your card as well.
Get in the habit of formatting your cards quite regularly
because it cleans the card out properly,
and make sure there's no corrupt files on there
that could crash your camera
or more importantly corrupt files that are on there.
And of course, if you've got like,
two hours of riding on there, take it off,
you don't need to keep it on there,
it'll slow your camera down and take up that space.
And while we're at it, one last point to remember,
is you can get cards with huge capacities,
now this one's a 64 gig card,
this one from a GoPro here.
And I personally probably wouldn't want to go
any bigger than that,
you can fit an enormous amount on there.
And if you're going to be filming more than that,
there's still a chance you could lose that camera,
I'd rather have two or three smaller cards.
And when they fill up, just change them out
than have a huge one.
But that said, cards are very reliable,
so I wouldn't be too worried about the card itself.
Okay, so it's time to talk about a camera set up a bit.
Now despite the fact cameras are all different,
they're all going to have some similar options available
in the menus and the submenus on them.
Now, some of them are going to be the quality
you record at, it could be 720 or 1080 pixels
or it could be up to 4K,
as long as you remember it's got that stuff.
Now you also want to bear in mind that frame per second
is going to be one of those as well,
and of course the aspect ratio.
Now aspect ratio is something you definitely want to consider
when you're placing your camera
around on your body or your bike.
Now the cinematic 16:9 ratio looks amazing
but probably not the best one
if you're going to mount your camera on your chest
because you're going to miss out
on everything that's going on here,
so something a bit more square,
bit more like three by four or something like that,
is going to to suit that,
so just take that into account
when you're setting up the camera to go and record.
If you're going to be doing some presenting at all,
then you might want to consider a separate microphone.
You can get plug in lavs, so if you're doing say a POV run
and you want to talk your way through the run.
Oh, I'm hitting that burn.
I'm going left and doubling that, they're a nice option.
However, if you're doing stuff along the lines of vlogs,
then you might want to consider a plug-in mic,
something like this Compact one from Rode.
It plugs in, although on some cameras
you won't have that jack input,
you'll need an adapter for that.
And of course, it won't fit directly onto all cameras,
so you may need to buy something like this cage unit,
that has a cold shoe on the top in order to hold that.
Always keep the lens clean.
If you're doing a POV run,
the chances are a flick of mud or a dead fly or something
is going to end up on your lens,
so if you can, obviously be safe about this,
try and just like clean the lens
from time to time as you're riding.
Now, there are various different products available,
this is a goggle cleaner from Muc-Off,
but that works really well on the lenses of these.
And another thing to consider,
just like you might already on your mobile phone
or your device, is a screen protector.
I've got one on here and if you look closely,
you can actually see it's cracked,
'cause I actually hit something with this recently.
And I'm glad that's cracked
because I can peel that off and put another one on
and the lens is still absolutely fine.
If you have the option of Bluetooth or wifi
on your action camera,
try and keep them turned off as much as possible
if it allows, because that's sort of stuff
does drain the battery.
And also on the subject of batteries,
if you're taking a spare one with you,
keep it in your pocket, keep it nice and warm,
it will last longer than it will in the bottom of a bag
where it's going to get cold.
Batteries don't like cold conditions.
Finally and probably most importantly,
light is everything.
If you're going to film in the dark woods,
it's going to be grainy and you can't expect features
like slow motion to work very well
or even the stabilization that's built into cameras.
You need to head out on the days that look the best.
Just consider all the coolest footage you've seen
on action cameras is always in the best conditions
on the best weather.
Next up is your editing.
Now editing is something that you need to be careful with
because you can overdo the process,
and you can actually end up with something
that looks overcomplicated and a bit crap, to be honest.
Now there's lots of software options available,
most computers now will have some kind of free software
available on them.
Macintosh computers for example, like this one here,
will have have a program called iMovie on them.
It's perfectly capable of putting together
a really cool little video.
Now if you're going to be filming in 4K
at 120 frames a second and stuff like that,
you can choke your computer up a bit.
The software can't quite handle that as well.
But you'll still get a good result,
if you've got some perseverance.
Now if you really start getting into this sort of thing,
you might want to consider some more advanced software
like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere.
Now, Adobe Premiere is part of the Creative Cloud package.
Now this is a really cool system,
it's a subscription package
and you can check off a whole bunch of things
for an amount of money per month.
Obviously, if you're into this,
you might also be into Photoshop or Lightroom
or any of the other things they offer.
So definitely worth considering.
If you don't want to spend any money
and you just want to do it on your phone,
there's various bits of software
that come included with the action cameras.
GoPro's quite famous for having
its relatively simple stuff included on there
enables you to do screen grabs and stuff.
That works absolutely fine and sometimes it's all you need.
But app stores are loaded with different
video editing software, many of them are free,
but bear in mind, the ones that are free,
normally the better features you have to pay
basically to unlock them.
And quite often will have watermarks
all over the images you're going to be editing,
so it doesn't look quite as good.
If you choose to film on a 360 camera,
there will also be some sort of native software
that comes with the camera or they advise you to use.
Now, the things with 360 cameras,
obviously they're filming literally
everything the whole time,
and you can get a bit carried away with these,
so I just say, try not to use that effect too much.
Because you can trace around
so you can follow a bit of trail
and you get the nice stable view, that's cool
but you might be tempted to spin around,
look behind you, look up, look down,
do the tiny planet thing, use that stuff sparingly.
Now, if you're going to be exporting and uploading online,
somewhere like Facebook perhaps or Instagram, or YouTube,
then you definitely want to be doing around 1080.
If you go for 4K uploads,
it can take a very long time,
you're going to need very fast internet
and it doesn't always give you
the same result that you hope for,
because they do compress as you upload.
However, you might still want to be filming on 4K,
if you're intending on playing on your 4K TV
just by plugging in via the supplied cable,
'cause that can look amazing.
Now something some of the better cameras have on them,
is a sort of a protune feature,
which is similar in photography terms as a raw file.
Now most of you will be familiar with a JPEG file.
That is a stock file that a camera will shoot
and it will kind of grade the image slightly.
A raw file will be much bigger and it'll be quite flat
and that means you can process that separately.
There will be similar equivalents on some action cameras.
Now if you're going to be filming a lot of stuff,
it's quite good idea to set this up as a raw style
or pro tune, whatever the camera format is going to be,
and that means you can grade it in the software.
This is especially effective
if you're using the better software
like Final Cut or Premiere.
However, if you're just filming for Instagram clips
and stuff like that, save yourself the hassle
and go for the images straight out of the camera
because they look great.
Mix up your shots, no one wants to see the same clip
trawling on for five minutes, it's an action camera,
you can put them anywhere.
The whole point of them is you can mount them
all over your bike.
Stop at the side of a trail, put it under your saddle,
facing forwards down the down tube,
change it to your helmet, change it facing backwards,
move it around, it becomes much more exciting,
more exciting to film, more exciting to edit,
more exciting to watch.
A few little tips for you,
don't speed up your riding, it never looks good.
Slow-mo by all means is fine but don't go over the top
with that sort of thing.
Also don't go crazy on effects in editing,
it can look a bit amateurish, less is more.
Keep those cuts and fades quite simple.
If you're quite into your music,
you might want to consider doing some of those cuts
on the build ups or the breakdowns
in the music for good effect, it can work really well.
But bear in mind, if using a popular music song for example,
and your video starts getting noticed,
it could get taken down or the music
could be removed from it,
which basically just makes your video a bit boring.
So you might want to consider some royalty-free music
or some sort of subscription package.
There is a lot of different options available.
And it does save you the hassle,
and it's kind of fun as well filtering through
trying to find something that really suits
what you're making.
And I'm going to throw you over to our very own Blake Samson,
king of the POV.
- Hey, thanks, Doddy, yes I love action cameras
and working with them are super cool
but it does come with a few things.
Now here's my camera bag and there's a few things
that I've taken to consideration over the years
of using an action camera.
And the first thing comes to mind is audio,
now I'm going to show you a bit of audio,
things that I've got set up.
You can just run this foam thing,
now this foam thing is basically a diffuser
that diffuses all the wind that goes to this microphone,
so the GoPro has two.
So this does come up with some great audio,
if you run it on your chest or you run it on your helmet,
you can still hear yourself chatting going down the trail.
That is peanuts, that's not expensive.
Now mounts, I am all about the mounts
and my favorite one has to be this,
this is an extendable selfie pole.
Now this thing, I call it the unicorn mount.
and I basically duct-tape it to my helmet
and let the camera face back at me
and you can see my whole body
and my bike moving underneath me,
that looks insane, I love that angle.
There's another angle I like and that's not on my person,
that is this little guy right here.
Now take a look at this.
People ask me, how do you get that nice pan shot
in a time-lapse.
It's an egg timer, this is an egg timer
and this one right here, is from GoPole.
And basically, it's got certain times,
so if you want a 30 minute 180 degree you've got it,
you just twist it to that.
Or you got 45 minutes which is 270 degrees,
or you go for a full 60 minutes,
and you can get 360 degree time-lapse
of what goes on around you.
You could do it right here and it'll look insane.
That's a little hack.
But I got miscellaneous number of mounts,
sticky mounds, you got all of this.
Another good thing and I can't stress it enough,
when you're out on the trail,
I think Deakin's going to agree with me, is batteries.
You can never have enough batteries,
I always have one in my pocket, one in the GoPro,
fully charged so when that thing dies,
you can just flick one of these back into your GoPro,
continue to grab all that good action
that I love to see.
Back to you Doddy.
- Cheers for that, Blake.
Last up I guess then, is when you post your videos.
If you're going to post a video for example on Instagram,
you might want to do a bit of research
on the hashtags you're using
and things you're tagging.
That will help your video become found and seen
by more people, so you get more views,
you're going to get more likes.
If you're filming crash clips
or if you've got a good crash clip or a bike cave,
anything like that, send them in to us.
Tell us who you are, all that sort of stuff,
the link to the uploader is underneath this video right here
And we'll feature you on The Dirt Shed Show
or a GMBN Tech show.
And lastly, although it shouldn't be the last thing you do,
consider the thumbnail image that goes with your video,
especially if you're putting it somewhere like YouTube.
And if you want to little cool tip from our creators,
take a look at the thumbnails,
how they appear when you scroll through the app
on your phone, because the ones that stand out
are the ones that you're going to want to click on.
Well there we go, there are some tips
on trying to get the best from your action camera.
Go and make some cool stuff and show it to us,
upload it and all that stuff.
Now if you want to see some more stuff on these lines,
click down here for Blake's video
on how to self shoot your own video.
Now there's some tips in there on using action cameras
but also using proper cameras as well,
it's a good mixture of stuff, so it might inspire you
to make an amazing mountain bike epic.
Give us a thumbs up if you like this sort of content,
give us some comments down there
if you want to see some more things like this
or if you've got some suggestions, let us know.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button
and hit that notification bell, cheers, guys.