Archive for the 'Video' Category

Bealach Na Ba

Bealach Na Ba, once the only road into the remote western shores town of Applecross. Now a ‘must ride’ road for those that prefer the two wheeled mode of transport. Think of the road like any country road around Wicklow, except on steroids. Oh and with a perfect surface. Oh and with no cow/sheep/pig shit in the middle of the road just as you carve through a bend at speed. Oh and… You get the idea. I’ll spare you from the ‘if we pay so much road tax, shouldn’t the roads be better’ rant.

Just like the panorama you’ve already seen except not a panorama. Next time we go up here, we’re bringing a picnic. Very entertaining watching the bikes sweep around the hairpin bends, followed by the cars almost having to perform three point turns to get around them. Not long before we started the climb up to the top, we all (six bikes) overtook a vintage truck crawling out of a nearby town. Some time later, and while standing at the top admiring the view, a local passed by in his car informing us there was an old truck coming up the road and if we wanted to ride the rest of the road in style (my words, not his), now was the time to leave. I was quite tempted to hang about and see exactly how someone in a 30ft long truck was planning on negotiating the switchbacks. My guess; Slowly.

So you get down to Applecross eventually and you do what pretty much everyone else does. You go to the Applecross Inn for lunch. The above is taken from the car park of the Inn. Apparently rooms are expensive but from what I can see, they’re worth it. The problem now is that as Bealach Na Ba is the only good way into Applecross, it’s also presumably the only good way out. You can travel back the way you came or as we did, you head north about 13 miles, then east about 11 miles until you get back to an A road.

When we came back to Dublin, I checked the price of land and/or houses in the area. Although I think I’d have to change career; I take it there isn’t much in the way of demand for network engineers up there.

Published on May 13, 2012 in Landscape, People, Scotland, Video and X100. 2 Comments

Detour

A little bit delayed but better late than never. Premier Pro was driving me nuts so after upgrading to 12gb ram, it’s driving me slightly less nuts. Nuts slightly less. Either one. For some reason (after doing some minor colour corrections), it took about 1,000 times longer to export this video from Premier Pro than it did pre-corrections. I’ll figure that one out eventually.

I’m still pretty much in the testing phases with these drift cameras, their first big trip will be in a couple of weeks time to the highlands.

The above is the first part of the Easter weekend trip to Cork. We took the road to Cork less traveled by riding down to Carlow, into Wexford and onto Waterford before hitting Cork from the east. A surprise attack on a Friday afternoon to get the weekend off to a flying start. The reason for the detour was to get some otherwise pain in the ass photo rally points in the bag, namely the ones in Wexford near New Ross and the slightly less pain in the ass Waterford point just outside Dungarvan. From Dungarvan it was a straight run (via the perfectly twisty main road) to Cork.

As before, until I pay my $60 a year dues to Vimeo, the above embedded video is in bog standard SD. If you want to view it the way nature intended, go to the video page on Vimeo for some HD lovin’.

Part 2 will be along shortly and will be a much less time lapse affair. Off into the wilds of west Cork & Kerry for that one.

Published on April 22, 2012 in Cork, Video, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow. 2 Comments

Maiden Voyage

If you cast your mind back to this and lived to see the other side of it, you’ll understand why I recently bought a couple of Drift Stealth cameras to make the filming process a little easier and a lot less stomach churning. The above was the maiden voyage and very much a learning exercise. I need to see what the hardware can do, what it can’t do and what I shouldn’t make it try to do before the ‘big holiday’ to the Alps in August. This was a routine trip from Dublin city down to Wicklow and back again. Thankfully back again that is, the low/no petrol light was taunting me for most of the ride back to Dublin.

With the included mounting hardware, I ended up with a camera on the engine bars (more on that later) and one on the side of my helmet. That still left me with oodles of spare hardware, velcro pads and elastic straps to play around with so I’m going to need to come up with a few more mounting locations. The helmet was the winner, video (shot at 720, 60p on both cameras) turned out smooth. The engine bar location, if I decide to reuse it, will need some work. Perhaps a kind of shock mount. Thankfully the cameras have standard tripod mount screws on them so I can spoil myself with the myriad of mounting options out there.

Things I learned
1. I don’t need to check that the camera is still on the side of my head every 5 minutes. The velcro is strong and all the bobbing around to look at the camera in the mirror just screws up the footage.
2. Nodding or generally acknowledging other bikers on the road leads to further footage foul ups. I think I’ll have to adopt the standard European leg waggle. Not that many bikers in Dublin return the salutation these days anyway.
3. Mounting on the engine bar is generally going to be a no-no. There are certain speeds it works beautifully at and if I continue to use that point I need to become aware of those speeds. Otherwise it’s a rolling shutter fest.
4. Syncing footage between two cameras is a bit harder than I previously imagined it would be.

Another interesting thing I learned is that the majority of car drivers behave a lot better when they spot a camera on the side of your head. Some even slowed down to stare.

A note on the music is perhaps required. When I go out on rides like this, I never fail to default to two albums. “Between Two Lungs” and “The House That Dirt Built”. It’s proven to be great back road riding music. So before I get takedown notices from and/or sued by Florence And The Machine and The Heavy I invite you to play the above at the appropriate volume.

Also and somewhat vitally, the above is standard definition but the footage is actually in 720p. I can’t currently do HD embeds from Vimeo because I haven’t paid my dues to them for a ‘plus’ account. ($60 seems a little overkill at the moment and I may just end up using Youtube). So if that kind of thing bothers you and you want to view it as I intended it to be watched, you can get the 720p version on the video page.

Next stop, Austria.

Published on March 17, 2012 in Video and Wicklow. 6 Comments

Shakycam is Go!

What was intended to be a mostly entertaining way for me to record and review my very limited off-road jaunts while in the UK in April has turned into a public service video on the effects of motion sickness and a case study on why people buy those expensive little helmet cameras. While I wasn’t expecting Steven Spielberg results, I imagined in what I now know was supreme, unwavering naivety that I might get something other than a dodgy late 1990′s horror movie.

This is a very cut down version of the full experience, I didn’t want to subject anyone to the full six minutes. My most sincere apologies to sufferers of motion sickness and indeed to those that contract acute motion sickness as a result of viewing the above. Next on the shopping list, a helmet camera and possibly an Adobe Premier manual.

Published on June 17, 2011 in Landscape, Panasonic LX-3, UK and Video. 2 Comments