My lovely husband gifted me a GoPro 3 video camera for Christmas. I wonder if this means he wants me to try more adventure sports…

Anyhow, we picked up a handlebar mount for the GoPro since biking is the closest to any adventure sport that I get. I tried it out over this weekend and used iMovie to create two YouTube videos.

A few lessons learned from using the GoPro:

• The handlebar mount can’t just be hand tightened. There’s a reason why the finger screws have a phillips screw head in the center of them. To use a screw driver so that the camera doesn’t end up filming the ground!
• The battery doesn’t last that long. From a full charge I road my bike for about an hour with the camera on, but it wasn’t taking video the whole time. I took about 18 minutes of video and the battery was already showing just one bar out of three.
• I need to learn more about video formats. Both of my YouTube videos look sort of grainy / pixelated. I used all the default settings in iMovie.

Back view of the camera on my handlebars

Front view of the camera mounted on my bike

For the first video, I took two clips from my ride and cut them down a bit. I sped up the speed to twice the normal speed. The afternoon Texas sun was strong so the trails aren’t the easiest to see in that contrast-y light. I’ll have to redo them in better light on another day.

For the second video, I selected shorter clips and let them play in real-time. If you look closely, you’ll see some dogs playing in the creek crossing.

I have at least one more video from that day of riding the BMX loop that I want to edit and upload. I expect that to take a bit more time. Maybe I’ll learn how to create clearer videos by then 🙂