Here is my experiment of HD1 mounted on my donwhill bike.
You can see how it performs under a lot of vibration and moderate speed (at this point the video was shot, I already dropped HD1 a couple of times, so I could not go any faster). This cam is sturdy but the mount is plastic and it won't hold for this much vibration.

Here's the link. (http://web.mac.com/kakuito/iWeb/affordableHDstudy/VideoPodcast/VideoPodcast.html)

Seems to handle the vibration quite well. Thanks for the video

surprisingly, yes. Too bad about the mount tho. I will take the photo and post it to show you people how it's gotten stripped.

My Quick time won't even play it, all I get is audio, and Quicklime says it needs components that are not on QT site. What should I do?

It would be useful if I could save the file, as it is likely to disappear when I close down and reboot, and I could then play it with Vlan.

Good to see you are enjoying this camera Kaku.

You need QuickTime 7 because it is H.264.

As you mention before, this cam is perfect to take around as a second cam. I did have my hvx200 that day but I would never take it around to ride that would hinder my riding, but HD1, it would hardly hinder my riding.

You may find it helpful to find a piece of 8mm thickness aluminium plate or flatbar no smaller in area than the base of your camera, have somebody drll and tap some solid bolt holes into it, also a hole for the tripod mount on your camera.

Use the bolt holes to mount the plate firmly to your bicycle.

Get some car inner tube. Glue it to top surface of the aluminium. Make hole in it for the tripod mount hole.

Find some thick rubber bands or make some from motorcycle tyre inner tubes. Use these to strap over your camera after your have mounted it to the plate with the normal tripod bolt hole.

With the extra contact area between camera and plate and the inner tube to stop the camera from twisting on the plate, this should steady things up a little.

The best mounting point for the cam might be as close to centre point between the front and rear wheels as you can place it without risk of injuring yourself.

Bob,

Thanks for your tips and sharing your ideas. I was going to strap the camera around, too but I could not find any appropriate bands that time and I was there for more enjoyment of riding. Now the plastic thread is totally wasted, I probably have to send it back to replace that part and then do what you are mentioning. My mount to the frame of the bike is good, it is made by Silk, and I will take photo of that to show it to you all here. Lighter than manfrotto. As far as rubber bands to wrap the cam, I have bicycle tubes :).

As far as mounting point, another addition of getting a good video is center of the bike in the vertical range, too. But the center of the bike is impossible because of its nature of the downhill ridings that you have to be pretty active in moving one's body back and forth, up and down.

So much for auto updates, it just tells me that the clips need extra components it doesn't have, not that I needed to upgrade to QT7, which my machine needs to be reinstalled before I should do that. Unfortunately, I think I just accidentally deleted the cache version. Are there a direct address I can access from Vlan?


Maybe a close hugging underwater case wrapped in foam might help stop it getting damaged, is there any?

i made a file download link in that post for you. Hope that works.

Little off the topic, but I used iWeb to make multiple websites in very short period of time and all of them includes video and still from HD1 and other cams.

http://web.mac.com/kakuito/iWeb/Kakugyo/

Coool Clip, the camera really did great on the changing light on the way down. Too bad about the crash cam effect.. still it really prove that the camera is able to take some serious punishment.!

I wanted to attache it to a sailplane but gave up at first after seeing the plastic treads, but am right now making a "cradle" which lets you slide the camera in about halfway for support and then only use the tread to hold the camera in the cradle, the cradle itself supports the camera to prevent it from leaving.. but after reading Bob's suggestion Im thinking that maybe I should just make a one sided bracket with a piece of bungee cord to lock the camera in place.. unlike downhill racing gliders do not experince a lot of serious impacts (not if everything goes well ha Ha) maybe except for the vibrations at take off being dragged over the ground and also the time sliding after landing.. I will post a picture once I have it together. (along with some footage)


Bo

www.bophoto.com/HDV

Bo, I did see your invention some time back and wanted to ask you.
Yes, the cradle thing would be better, but I might just mount it on my helmet with foam and bands. However, any reliable mount other than using the plastic mount would be better. I'm debating to send the cam back to sanyo to have the plastic mount replaced or not.

The Samsung h264 17Mb/s 720p solid state camcorder is about to be release in August, so their should be some advanced versions available for testing? Will you be reviewing it?

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=58261


Thanks

Wayne.

I've been looking into that Samsung because it is H.264 based. I will ask the editor if I will be able to put my hands on it.

Thanks

If it actually turns out to have good picture performance, it would have been good, but now Panasonic and Sony with their similar h264 AVCHD camera codec has muddied the water. Meaning it might make us wait to see their models with 1080 as well (Panasonic may release one by the end of the year, Sony, I think, might be a lot closer, as they have a number of new models expected). For you I think their will be a lot more new bike cam.

I wonder if Sanyo will have a better model to compete.

Hi Kaku, that's some nice footage.

Hard to believe the Sanyo performed so well.

Is that a Z1 or FX1 that I see in the picture used with a glidecam and steadyarm?

I was surprised, too. I can probably do a lot better with more preparation.

And I have a Glidecam V8 and also formally owned FX1 and HC1, currently own HVX200 and A1.

Hello, your sample is very interesting but it looks like the recompression quite blurred the image... Could you post a short extract (like 10 sec) from this video, straight from the cam ? I'm really interested by the mpeg4 encoder performance in those shaky conditions... Thanks !

Quite good? Time to compare serial numbers of the cameras, to see if they have improved the latest batch. How is the split screen low light problem, actually all the problems we have seen in the past with your camera?

I will work on the short raw file and the version numbers as soon as I can spare my time.

couldn't think of how I could extracting a part from the original clip (QT pro wasn't installed in this machine at the moment), so I posted a similar clip with 30 seconds length. It is about 35MB and it is at the same post in my blog.

Finally managed to get that video downloaded (well 70MB over a dial up). Will have to reboot to play smoothly.

OK, I checked it out. I must say, I love the color, looks good. I went through it at 13% speed, and I must say, at slow speed that spinning picture is one of the coolest things I have seen.

There was a large amount of macro blocking and bland detailess surfaces (so 19mb/s H264 is definitely needed). The h264 codec tries to cover this up by blurring the block borders, but this leaves blurry smudgy crawling blobs in many places and missed some blocks. The footage quality keeps stuttering, I didn't note if it was related to image gop or not.

When the camera fell on the ground there was a lot of crawling detail as the exposure changed to compensate. I did notice some pixel crawl in the beginning bend.

This is ideal footage to tell what the limits of the camera are, but so much of this could be from, or made worse, by the SD h264 transcoding. Is it possible to get a 20 second native Mpeg4 extraction from the beginning, and maybe 15 second that shot from the ground. That should show what is doing what.

Thanks for the help Kaku.

Wayne, thanks for your detailed observation.
I guess I should be able to extract using QuickTime Pro....oh, I just remember that I can probably put the clip back to the camera and use its edit capability to extract. I will do that.

Kaku

How are you doing with extracting the footage, and do you have a Samsung yet?

Kaku

How are you doing with extracting the footage, and do you have a Samsung yet?

My employee took the camera to Canada for awhile so I could not work on it, but now he came back so I will extract and post it.

Kaku

How are you doing with extracting the footage, and do you have a Samsung yet?

The files are ready here (http://web.mac.com/kakuito/iWeb/affordableHDstudy/VideoPodcast/BC13A8C2-690A-42EB-8BB8-17B6C27A3FC9.html).

Thanks Kaku. Still no sign of next months Samsung camera?

Thanks Kaku. Still no sign of next months Samsung camera?

No, as matter of fact, Samsung does not sell video cameras in Japan.

Why isn't Samsung selling in Japan?

I am downloading those videos in those little plug-in web windows at the moment. I will try to look for them in my web cache and use Vlan on them, so I can view full screen and snap shoot true 720p frames for comparison.

Thanks again Kaku.

Why isn't Samsung selling in Japan?



FACT.
Sony, Japan and Samsung, Korea have a lot of technological co-operation. e.g. there is a lot of Samsung technology in the Bravia HDTVs made here in Kumamoto, Japan.

WILD GUESS.
Maybe part of the co-operation deal is that Samsung does not sell cameras here.

Another fact is many foreign companies don't come in or gave up selling audio/visual products here because of frenzy competition here in Japan, for example, Philips.

OK, sorry for the delay, I have had to try to download most of clip three times, due problems, it being a plugin, and needing to be done in a single session (unlike a download).

There was a large amount of macro blocking and bland details surfaces (so 19mb/s H264 is definitely needed). The h264 codec tries to cover this up by blurring the block borders, but this leaves blurry smudgy crawling blobs in many places and missed some blocks. The footage quality keeps stuttering, I didn't note if it was related to image gop or not.

The footage looks much better. H264 was blurring things out. The stuttering/shuddering of the original image is more obvious. The stuttering seems to be more gop like, with inter frames having compression problems, like speckled. Macro blocks are more obvious. Much more detail, the blurry blob problems of the first bend are cleared up considerably, replaced by real detail. Movement still works, looks strange, but for consumer it gets there. H264's features on h264 cameras should further improve the appearance of motion artifacting, but I think that 18Mb/s rate of AVCHD will be needed at 25/30fps to offer a worthy alternative to HDV.

If anybody wants to buy a H264 camera to look much better, I suggest using at least an bitrate that is equivalent to the one you are comparing too, bitrate is significant. I think this camera really needed 19Mb/s to let mpeg4 show up 19/mb/s Mpeg2.

When the camera fell on the ground there was a lot of crawling detail as the exposure changed to compensate. I did notice some pixel crawl in the beginning bend.

The crawl is much less noticeable and finer. I looked at it quickly, with very little sleep, so I don't remember seeing any crawl on the first bend, it could well just have been because of the macro blocks at reduced resolution.

Unfortunately the clip finished just as you started filming your friend, where I was hoping to examine the pixelisation I saw there last time. I still saw some before it stopped. This pixelisation problem, we have seen from the baby clip on wards, it is one thing that mars the cameras performance.


New cameras:
I would like to outline some of the problems, and some work arounds, in case Sanyo is reading. I have posted links to various threads on another forum for a Sanyo rep. And why shouldn't Sanyo be a major video camera maker, delivering the best cameras they can.

Noise. We see there is a lot of noise in various clips filmed in less than ideal conditions. This kills compression performance, reducing quality, as noise is irregular and not very compressible. A solution would be, bigger aperture lens for low light, bigger sensor pad size better binning functions, higher bit-rates. After these are applied, noise removal/pixel restoration software working across pixels and frames would be effective.

The Jagged diagonal edges, from the blocking bug, and that pixelisation problem gone.

Latitude:
The sky is not white or yellow, when it is blue, shadows are not black. Multislope/autobrite senors, bigger sensor chips/pad size would help.

Motion problems:
Steals compression quality away. Higher bit-rates, better Mpeg4 support are two solutions. Better image modeling. Sacrificing quality in fast moving objects, while maintaining outline shape of the object and outline shape of inner details is preferable to blocking. It is preferable to maintain detail on static, or slow moving objects the eye can still track (obviously the speed level this can be supported to will have to be adjusted for bandwidth. This would be a graceful degradation in performance from motion compared to what happens in Mpeg2 cameras today. I believe that the camera already seems to support some shaping, because I have noticed round bubbles under magnification.

Focus/Zoom/exposure stepping. Needs to be smooth and seamless.


The suggestions so far are of minor cost, the following suggestions are still small cost but less so that the previous suggestions.

10 bit Uncompressed HDMI out, live USB uncompressed out, and camera control (yes, I would like to mount it on a tripod and use an external recorder, for live events or in studio, novel, but lovely). Would be nice if it could be used as a desk computer cam too.

Lanc jack, sync, microphones, or remote I could put on tripod handle with all Lanc functions (rec, stop, individual variable focus/zoom/aperture/gain etc).


Despite my objectivity, I don't think Sanyo will release a Mpeg4 handheld camera with a pro quality codec, that would require probably 36Mb/s Mpeg4. So, even if they go to 19 or 25 Mb/s, when things get moving it maybe just prosumer quality, but enough to keep many of us satisfied.


Actually, what about a Windows CE/Mobile version, even with phone, that would be cool, like the old Sharp viewcams. There seems to be a lot of media player/pocket digital TV devices around, those features could also be incorporated into one device.


Thanks for the help Kaku.

Dear Kaku
Here's the link. (http://web.mac.com/kakuito/iWeb/affordableHDstudy/VideoPodcast/VideoPodcast.html)
yeilds
"We're sorry but we can't find the iWeb page you've requested."
I would be very grateful if you would post it to Vimeo.
Tim

Here's the link for my old site.

http://xtream.ne.jp/kakugyo/affordableHDstudy/VideoPodcast/VideoPodcast.html

That was quick, thanks!
Tim

Kaku Ito

Wow, it's great to see a fellow DH'er on this site... i DH as well, my site (not as great as yours) can be located here:

http://downhillpics.googlepages.com/

i take my pictures with the Nikon D40, here are a few of me!

http://downhillpics.googlepages.com/PhantomDrop.jpg/PhantomDrop-full.jpg

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c285/dtufino/Flat%20Pics/DSC_0037.jpg

I Plan on taking my Sanyo HD2 out to the mountain very soon, can you do me a quick favor? can you take a picture of the HD1 connected to your bike so i can get an idea where to connect my HD2?

thanks!

David,

I had a lot more good stuff, but leaving links to this site ending up inviting hackers, so I stopped providing as much video clips.

Your shots at Diablo looks great! Let's get together at fujimi or takamineyama in the future!

Maybe I will show you more in the future (after InterBEE).

Answering to your question about the mount, I use Manfrotto SuperClamps and their attachments.

Anyhow, if you were to do it, probably better to tape or wrap the cam on your helmet. Make sure mount it well so it does not shake.

If you ever come to Tokyo, I will show you.

David,

Also, I see you use iWeb nicely, too. Congratulation.

My new site is here, too
http://www.onebikeguy.com

Go to Kakugyo and you will see more stuff there.