I picked up a tired looking but mechanically great Marin out of the classifieds a few weeks ago (cheers Rob), stripped it back to raw an rebuilt it for the lad this weekend. It’s perfect for him, we took it out for a test ride and we felt inspired to do a video.

[video]http://vimeo.com/99431032[/video]

It’s taken with an iphone 5 and edited using imovie on an ipad. For now, imovie is more than good enough for me, but the question I have is about the camera.

I’m not after spending a lot, but does anyone have a recommendation of a camera that would perform a bit better than my iphone.

My main complaints about using my phone are:

– Capturing gradient. It’s so difficult to show the drop offs or hills. I tried to keep the camera low but it ends up cutting off the rider. Is there a lens type I should be looking at that captures this a bit better?
– It hammers the battery, it lasted about 2hrs tops.
– The image sensor isn’t great, it struggles with white levels.
– Again the battery, if we’d had a big off, I’d like to save my phone for calling for help.
– Storage, it’s a 16gb iphone with about 2gb free… not ideal.

Plus points are:

– Easily transfers to the ipad for editing, but then I have imovie on my laptop too so an SD card camera would solve this.
– It’s quite small and light compared to a camera.
– The screen is really useful to see where i’m pointing the thing.

I’m a bit of a camera fresher, so if you have any recommendations on kit that doesn’t cost the earth, or technique, then i’d love to hear them.

Apologies for the vague ramblings or asking for something that doesn’t exist!

Cheers

Try changing up a couple of gears.
It’s also a short film, edit is a weird term that seems to have been invented.

It’s really hard to get gradient on most cameras, especially with a fixed lens.
There are some things like the GoPro and the Sony action cam which might be more use. Considering how cheap SD cards are you can get huge cards for nothing.

On the editing maybe cutting it a bit tighter as long runs up fire roads is a bit dull.

Thanks for that. I was worried that any fire road would have been dull, but considering we’d not actually gone out to make a video, I just put in the footage I had, this missed the more interesting climbing. I’ve noticed that you have to be brutal with the editing, cutting out whatever isn’t absolutely necessary, It’s something i’ll keep in mind more next time.

I think a gopro is a bit more than I want to spend when I take into consideration the additional lcd screen I think i’d need, but the Sony action cam PSA the other day looked well on budget.

Not an expert by any means – however I suggest if you used even a point & shoot camera it’d give you a slightly wider lens so you wouldn’t have to get so far from the action.

Also position is key – line up the shot first before shooting it so you know where the subject is going to be in the frame.

I made a little movie recently – all self shot on my phone here it is… used a combination of a mounting the phone on a gorillapod low down & from trees.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUS2PPbWsz8[/video]

Unless you’re prepared to spend big bucks you’re always going to struggle with the image sensor. My 2nd gen gopro hd is also pretty bad at adjusting to different lighting conditions and is frankly terrible when the light is low (like in a forest!). Think the later ones are better in that regard but again, not cheap.

I think your setup is pretty good considering it’s just a phone and a tablet. Image is good and keeping all the file formats on the same platform makes for easy editing. Maybe free up some space on your phone and get a spare battery. Probably cost the same as buying a cheap action camera which won’t be as good as what you have (unless you want POV). A quick google says that you’ll be looking around the £200+ mark for a compact digital camera that can take decent HD video. Are they any better than the iphone camera? I’ve no idea.

Agree with Mike on the spinning yet going nowhere gearing choice and the editing – you gotta be ruthless, which is easier said than done. And Princejohn makes a good point re mixing up the viewing angles – keeps it interesting for the viewer. Here’s one i made a few years back. Lots of different angles to try to liven up a pretty uninteresting bit of trail. This is the second version i made as a few guys on here give me advice on how to make the original less boring 😀

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Ds7Uxey90[/video]

My own inexpert pointers on MTB video’s:

1- Most rider’s helmet POV footage looks dull and ‘flat’ the only real way to liven it up is by following another rider, this is a product of having a wide-angle lens, you need to lens angle to get everything you want in frame, but it flattens/squashes features as you move over/past them making the Gnarliest trails look a bit tame… a rider in the shot adds a bit of scale/context/movement and makes some helmet cam stuff interesting enough to watch…

2- It’s actually quite hard to take a decent ‘static’ shot, plonking the camera somewhere interesting and ride past/towards/over it, you’d think you could get something worth watching but it seldom looks as awesome as you’d hoped. A cameraman recording a subject(s) is better as they can do all the panning and tracking required, also a more normal aspect ration suits this…

3- Its worth finding interesting places to mount a camera on the bike itself (the handlebars are not an interesting POV), I’ve started putting a camera on the seatstay both looking forwards (past the forks) and back (with the rear wheel just in shot for reference), a low down position is good and an angle that can pick out trail features and/or the riders/bikes movement seems to look better than a noggin cam, again having another rider ‘chasing’ makes for a more interesting shot too…

4- Footage of your mate climbing or riding along some flat fireroad is boring, sorry, it might ‘tell the story’ of your trip to the trails, but its dull, we know you’re in the woods. its still not as bad as the staged ‘getting ready for a ride’ segment, where the subject purposefully strides around a two bed semi in full storm trooper kit, nonchalantly grabs their bike and pedals off towards adventure, but its on the same scale… don’t do it!

5- 98% of what you shoot will be crap, delete it and move on, shoot 20 minutes of video, you’ll be lucky if 7 seconds of that are particularly engaging… be prepared for wastage, fortunately memory cards are cheap…

6- Slow-Mo should be employed minimally and only if you have some really good, well lit, high frame-rate, decent resolution footage of something cool… Lots of slow-mo, of even worse repeating the same shot in slow-mo to try and drive home just how RAD it was tends to have the opposite effect on the viewer…

7- Proper two wheel drifting looks cool, a rider just catching the back wheel as it steps out at speed looks cool, the front wheel digging into some loose loamy dirt and flicking lumps up as it rails round a turn looks cool, a rider blatting into a rock garden and just holding his line, that looks cool… Stuttery, low speed, foot dabbing, skids look toss…

All IMO, etc, etc of course….

Some good stuff to work with thanks. So it sounds like I need to cut out a good bunch of the filler and get more angles in there.

I agree helmet cam looks terrible, I like the ideas of a rider cam mounted to the stays or forks in forward and backward directions. I might give that a try.

Cheers.

Quite liked the OPs video. Strangely watchable. Enjoyed the ending slam…

Some cheap tips:

Free up space on your phone – check what’s using the space in settings. 16Gb is always going to be tight though. But if you’re using a camera connection kit to transfer from phone to ipad, you can copy off in the field and free space. Or do a quick crop down on the phone, easy enough.

Cut cut cut. Then cut some more. If you’re showing the same shot for more than about 3s it will get boring. And if the whole video’s more than about 30s it needs to be seriously interesting or of some personal interest for people to watch it. You’ll be surprised how quick a cut you can get away with – clips of about 1s can be fine for action stuff. Don’t think “a sequence of short movie clips” think “a slideshow of moving pictures” if that makes sense?

You can get clip on wide angle and fisheye lenses for iphones cheaply enough. Quality aint great for stills but is fine for video, be about £20 and quite good fun. Various brands, just google/ebay/dealextreme. Olloclip is one make.

Try some camera motion, pan the shot, or walk slowly. Just focus hard on keeping the camera steady, and move a _lot_ slower than you think.