Tag Archives: Walnut Creek Park

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January 20, 2013

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Cycling

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Another video made

I finally came back to the rest of the video I took with my GoPro Hero3 while mountain biking a few weeks back and edited down the footage from the BMX Loop at Walnut Creek Park. While this trail has a couple of technical spots, it also has super fast sections where you get to go over small ramps and zoom around switch backs. Towards the end of the mountain biking trail is where you find the BMX park. On the day that I took this video, there were some people out doing maintenance on the BMX ramps. Whenever I come across people riding their BMX bikes in the park area, I like to stop and observe them for a while. It looks super fun!

Once again, I need to learn how to make these videos less grainy, although this one does appear slightly better than the previous two. I think it looks best if you go to YouTube to watch it, rather than watching it in the embedded size.

Previous videos: First try at making a video

Today’s video:

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January 8, 2013

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Cycling

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First try at making a video

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

Back view of the camera on my handlebars

Front view of the camera mounted on my bike

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 🙂