…you’re on camera!
My first attempt at mounting my helmetcam to my RC truck didn’t work so well: it was velcro’d to the flexible body and shook around too much. This time I screwed together some 3/8″ dowels and other scrap wood to attach the camera to the frame, by spanning the front and rear body mounts.
The camera pokes a bit farther through the windshield now (so it records less of the hood) but it’s held on with elastic bands… so if it gets hit it can slide back into the body:
The video was better, but still very choppy. It’s never going to be perfectly smooth when the truck is flying across a lumpy lawn on little 5″ wheels. So I also washed the video though a VirtualDub plugin called “Deshaker“, then played with cropping and resizing the video to get this second demo clip:
Deshaker nudges the video frames in various directions to try to stabilize the image, but it leaves black bars around the edge to the scene (i.e. if it moves a scene a bit to the left to remove a shake, it backfills an empty black section on the right of the screen). So raw Deshaker processed video has black bars dancing around all 4 sides of the screen as it tries to stabilize the image, which is distracting. To get rid of the worst of it I cropped the 1280×720 video down to 1030×580 (so I lost a bit of my peripheral vision), then resampled the result back up to 1280×720 again. The resulting video is a bit less crisp… but a lot less shakey!
Nice job on the video.. I was watching it prior to reading about deshaker and thinking to myself .. wow look at that hood move to the left and right – that dowel fix was amazing – and wow the suspension insulates the powertrain from shock more than a standard vehicle .. and then I read the next paragraph and the wee bit of building wobble became noticeable. Camera performed nicely too. I especially like the puff of sand on reverse to show the untamed burst into reverse.