Last friday afternoon (2009.08.21), I took a long break from work, picked up Cris, then joined Bruno, Alan, Paul, et all to try out the Aguinaldo track. Then after, I went back to work until the evening hahahaha. Talk about making time for cycling.

This is first use of my HD helmet cam… and my first attempt at After Affects (since I found out it was installed along with CS4.

Since it’s uploaded in Vimeo, I’ll just explain the two “bloopers” you’ll come across the video (you can’t miss the “audio indicators” hehehehe)

First was when I overshot the turn. I try to avoid the muddy parts (because I try not to get the bike dirty if possible), which means I often end up riding near the edges on a lot of turns. That particular turn was manageable, but I ended up going past the “strings” and I thought if I tried pedaling back, I would get caught in the strings and fall… so I just stopped, re-oriented then continued.

The next was when I was supposed to stop behind Paul, but my shoes didn’t want to unclip; so I ended up braking beside him and using him as a “post” to keep balance hahahaha.

Editing this video sucked because

1. After Effects doesn’t seem to be as straightforward as I would’ve hoped.
2. Audio of the cam sucks, period. Had to do a 12db gain just to hear things properly… but would suck when riding in the wind.
3. On my quad-core machine (though I only assigned 3 CPUs on the rendering) it took more than an hour to render TWELVE minutes of video. It was probably because of the 720p resolution.
4. The output filesize for the 12 minute footage was huge; 6GB, compared to the 500MB of the raw footage cut straight from the cam.
5. To bring it back down to 500MB, I had to decrease the quality considerably. This sucked because the “cleaning” footage below, which has better compression quality, was taken/cut straight from the camera and posted to YouTube.
6. YouTube has a 10min video length limit; the run was 12 mins. A shame, since I like using YT’s annotation feature.

Next video I’m going to post would probably be a summary on the Sta. Rosa ride I did with Ria yesterday (Sunday), I’ll make sure it’s within 10mins this time. I’m contemplating just resizing the HD (1280×720) to 480p (720-480) which is basically DVD resolution, think that’s still ok for “helmet-cam” viewing.

post updated on August 31, 2009 @ 5:49 pm