GoPro cameras – Action Cameras call them what you will; at one time or another, most of us have considered mounting a GoPro on a motorcycle.
It was trying this that led me to the Sena Prism, which is the best results for the effort camera I’ve used – hands down.
Agreed, it doesn’t have image stabilisation or twenty fancy features, but that’s the point. Lightweight, easy to operate, good battery life and the file sizes are easy to work with in free video editors. You can even upload the video to Youtube and use their online editor.
That is what the camera was designed for, and it does the job perfectly.
Nonetheless, there are people out there who can create outstanding quality videos using GoPro cameras, something I’ve struggled to achieve. It is never as simple as it looks – for me anyway.
Having decided to have one more go and see if I can create something that is more entertaining than a recording of country roads, I set everything back to standard and started again.
Desire and Determination
Our friendly video editor TT Kiwis is still promising to write an article on the things to consider when mounting a GoPro on a motorcycle.
He is an “artist”, or so he jokingly points out, and as such, I must allow him time to work. It is something to do with the creative process.
Meanwhile, I dragged out of him some advice on where and how to mount a GoPro Hero 8 and a GoPro Max 360 camera on the KTM.
I chose 1080P video at 60 frames per second as the video format to keep the file sizes reasonable and to ensure that the battery would run flat before the memory card was full.
I have no delusions of creating a masterpiece. What I’m trying to achieve is something that is easy to produce and be mildly interesting, without having to invest hours of my life editing video or substantial piles of cash in hardware or editing software.
Recording 4K video sounds good, but the bit rate, which is the important thing when it comes to the quality of the video, produces massive files.
1080P looks excellent on a phone or a computer screen and more than acceptable on a large TV.
Mounts
I have a large collection of Ram Mounts, sticky pads, clamps, angle brackets and extension bars, all bought in the name of mounting a GoPro on a motorcycle.
Having bought this collection of bits, the lesson I learnt was to buy GoPro accessories. They are expensive but better quality by far than the copies and much more durable.
Both the GoPro Max and the Hero 8 have been mounted on the KTM’s wing mirror stem and engine bars using the GoPro Pole Mount. The base, on which the camera sits, rotates offering 16 positions to help get the right viewing angle.
That said, I did have to supplement the GoPro Hero 8 with a couple of the brackets from my large collection to get the lens pointing in exactly the right direction when mounted on the wing mirror.
The pole clamp comes with two inner rubber mounts, which are easily swapped, allowing the clamp to attach to the mirror stem or the engine bar (just) with equal ease.
For the rear-facing camera, I used an official GoPro sticky mount. This is one of the gems that TT Kiwis mentioned.
The most reliable sticky mounts are the genuine GoPro ones. Having attached cameras to motorcycles and sidecars racing on public roads and billiard table smooth race circuits, he has worked out what works and what doesn’t.
The copies found on so many websites use different glues that have been known to either removed paint when being taken off or have failed to remain attached.
As always, it seems that you get what you pay for. With a GoPro camera costing a few hundred pounds, there is no point trusting it to a cheap-arse mount.
Recording
Batteries fully charged and with the right video modes selected – I make this mistake more times than I should own up to – a test ride through the back roads around Melton Mowbray provided the video footage to edit.
I’m told that video editors use about 10% of the video they record. From my test route, much of the video was of mildly interesting country roads, and whereas I thoroughly enjoyed the visceral experience of riding them, it is a bit dull when played back on a TV.
So far, our famed Financial Controller, who has no interest in motorcycles, has managed to watch about 30 seconds of the video before muttering “that’s nice” and wandering off.
In the world of video creation, camera sequences are planned. Cameras are stopped and started, and batteries recharged while others are in use.
They don’t do what I did – press record and bugger off.
The “big dipper” route (officially the B6047) is an invigorating section of tarmac, yet even this road has its dull parts that do little more than connect up the mind-warping sections.
Perhaps this is why Vloggers talk to the camera. They are filling the dull bits of the road with commentary.
With a bit more planning and arranging the ride around recording video, I could have recorded less dull footage and more awe-inspiring road sections.
My purpose, though, is to ride the bike first and record video second.
I don’t want to stop and mess about turning cameras on and off or swapping memory cards and batteries. I want to ride my motorcycle.
As a consequence of my desire to keep riding, the vast majority of the video recorded ended up on the digital cutting room floor.
Battery Life
The GoPro 8 ran out of battery after 56 minutes of recording, while the GoPro max in 360 mode was out of battery after 62 minutes. The Sena Prism recorded for 115 minutes and on a smaller memory card too.
Anecdotally, I’m told that a Ghost-S camera will record 3-hours at 1080P even when the outside air temperature is 3°C.
Editing GoPro Max
The editing process is not without its frustrations, especially the GoPro Max 360 footage, which was hard enough to get off the camera until I was advised to take the card out of the camera and use a card reader instead. GoPro Max cameras and Windows PCs do not mix well, it seems.
We have several different PCs in the office (no Macs) and had different levels of success with the GoPro Player application, which is needed to output the 360-degree files as normal video.
Some of the high specification machines would not work with the GoPro player application, whereas a 4-year-old Microsoft Surface proved to be the most compatible.
If you are considering buying a GoPro Max, you may wish to establish how compatible your computer is with GoPro Max files before you part with your cash.
Editing GoPro Hero8 Black
To shoot the rear view in the video below, we used a GoPro Hero8 Black. The video is straight out of the camera. There is no colour correction or filters applied.
Whereas, once you get everything working, you can create some engaging videos with a GoPro Max, the video quality lags behind that of the standard GoPro cameras.
Flexibility or quality appear to be your choices.
The standard GoPro cameras have been around long enough for there to be no compatibility issues. The files transferred to any of the office PCs and could be edited with all of the free programs we tried.
If you want an easy life, the Sena Prism is still my choice, but if you don’t mind making the investment, then the GoPro Hero cameras produce outstanding quality videos.
What To Look For
Below is the video we cut together to show the difference between the GoPro Max and Hero 8. The same video quality was used for both cameras – 1080p at 60 FPS – although the GoPro Max records in 3K.
Early in the video, when the GoPro Max is looking forward, you can see a line running across the video.
This (I’m told) is the “stitch line”. The place where the camera joins together the images from the two lenses to create the 360-degree view.
I should have mounted the 360 camera at a different angle, so the stitch line is somewhere I don’t want to show. It is a small point but one of those things you learn from experience.
When the camera is looking back at me, you can see part of the GoPro mount on my mirror arm. The “invisible mount” only works for items running directly away from the base of the camera.
There is also a degree of blurring around the mirror. This, I believe, is simply due to where I had the GoPro Max mounted, and with a little experimentation, I could remove these mistakes, which I’ve highlighted in red.
We are not filmmakers and won’t be starting Vlogging anytime soon. That was never our intention. I’m also sure that there is a lot of knowledge that we are missing. The quality of some 360 videos that I’ve seen is far in excess of what we have achieved.
And perhaps that is the point. If we wanted to create well-edited high-quality videos, then that is a different requirement too what we were trying to achieve.
We just wondered what would happen if we mounted a GoPro on a motorcycle. How easy – or difficult – would it be to create a video to remember our ride by.
