3 Tips: Action Cams

With the rise of biking during the pandemic, there also has been a sudden surge of YouTube bikers and the wonderful world of vlogging. Hell, we even tried it ourselves during the early lockdowns and yeah, it was fun, but it’s much more fun to just ride downhill (for us, at least).

But hey we still shoot our rides a lot, mostly to see what we’re doing wrong and check our progression. In this article we’re going to go through just 3 TIPS that’ll instantly improve your footage, your vlog, or whatever it is you use your videos for, regardless of what camera you’re actually using.

CONSIDER YOUR VIDEO SETTINGS

Remember, most of the people that will consume your content will do so with their phone — so this tip saves you not only SD card space and battery life, but time exporting/importing/editing as well. We only need to talk about two things here: resolution and frame rate. Everything else is to taste and you can set it as best you can (white balance, exposure, image stabilization).

RESOLUTION
Now, we know it’s tempting to go all MAXIMUM RESOLUTION with how most action cams go up to 5K (even 6K ish with the newest ones). But the question really is: do we need all those pixels?

Not really, not quite. It takes up a lot of space and eats through battery life like crazy, so set your resolution at the most sensical one — 1080.

Too low? Okay, hear us out.

You CAN go higher if you want to, by all means if you have a huge SD card, extra batteries, and all the time in the world and/or a team to edit for you, go all the way. But like we said a while ago, consider your audience habit: they’re on their phone watching your video— trust us, most of them are, about a good 90% of them. Add to that the wild internet speeds in the Philippines and Facebook/YouTube’s auto-resolution-magic and you’ll get it, you’re really best served at 1080. I have YET to watch and enjoy a video on my phone/tablet that went past 720. 1080 is great, trust us.

Especially if you match it with great frame rates.

FRAME RATE
This is the special sauce and we’ll break it down for you — basically, traditional film cameras shoot at around 24fps, keeping what’s being shot lookinh soft and smooth, all with that “film” aesthetic. Digital-slash-modern cameras (including most phones) shoot at a DEFAULT of 30fps, which is great for everyday life, vlogs, talking heads, etc. Sports cameras, most of the time, shoot at 60fps because of the dynamic movement and erratic action involved (Double that and you’ve got slo-mo: 120 and 240fps).

60 fps, or Frames Per Second, is our best recommendation to shoot biking with. Why? Because it gives justice to the speed, keeps the motion blurs at a minimum, and makes things feel more “action”. Plus, you can safely slow it down at 60fps, and it’ll still look great

Trust us: 1080 + 60fps = fun. For example, this video below was shot with a GoPro HERO 5 SESSION, a camera which was launched way back in 2016. The clip is not edited at all, but with the right settings, it still holds up and looks fun— even from a six year old camera. So imagine what you can do with more modern cameras.

CONSIDER WHERE YOUR CAM IS

Where you mount your camera affects not just what view you and your audience will be seeing, it affects two other things as well: how much your in-cam stabilization will be working (if at all), and how fast and steep your run will look (angle). We’ll talk about the three most popular placements, starting with:

ON TOP OF YOUR HELMET
This one is the most common and convenient mounting point because most helmets have an attachment for this and/or there are a multitude of accessories for this part because of how easy it is to tie/clip/attach things to the top of something. This placement makes your footage look floaty and is visibly the slowest-looking, you have to go really fast (think Bernard Kerr) to actually LOOK fast. The “GoPro Effect”, which basically makes things look easier than they are, is most obvious in this placement.

ON YOUR CHEST
This is tricky. On one hand, it does give you a better view — you can now see your handlebars and what’s in front of you more. However, because the view is STRAIGHT AHEAD, it removes almost all feelings of steepness. This is because the camera and the bike are level with each other, almost all of the time. Our chest area isn’t a dynamic place for angles at all, also this placement has the most shake in our experience.

ON YOUR CHIN
You know how a chicken’s head stays in one place even if you move the body around? (WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLwML2PagbY) We’re kinda like that when we’re on our bikes, because we firmly believe that we go where our head and eyes are looking at/pointed at, and most of the time this is true. So following that theory, this is actually the best place to put your action cam. Not only will it follow best where you’re pointed at, but we’ve found it to have the best view and stability among all the other placements.

This was shot with an Insta360 TWIN R, chin-mounted:

CONSIDER YOUR EDIT

This is the shortest and, in our opinion, our best tip: shoot for your edit. We know it’s tempting to just let it run and shoot everything but 1) you’ll run out of space and 2) you’ll run out of battery meaning 3) you’ll run out of opportunities for awesome.

Think about how your going to edit your video while shooting. That really just means plan a little bit, or if you want something great, plan everything out. Every section, transition, and even everything you’re gonna say and do (send) in the video, plan it out. You’ll save time, you’ll save space, battery, and you’ll have more room for spontaneous magic, believe that.

Now when it comes to actual editing, trust your phone but use your computer if you have to. GoPro and Insta360 both have amazing apps for mobile and Apple’s iMovie is pretty powerful in itself on the iPhone, but to really maximize your video: invest time and money into a desktop process. Coloring, cutting, soundtracking, everything is easier and more powerful on a computer.

Anyway, with all that in mind, here are Red Bull’s TOP 5 videos you need to see from 2021. You know, to inspire. We hoped you liked this article format we’re trying out, lets us know what you think!