Headcam Timelapse Experiment - Bike Pride Torino 2010

Yesterday I've been to the first BikePride organized here in Torino, my city. It's been a pretty great and funny experience. Lot of people, relaxed environment, funny persons, sun and bikes everywhere! I really had a good time.

I always liked the time-lapse technique and always wanted to try it. So, a bike pride, with 2 hours of biking between lot of other bikes was the perfect occasion for such a test. Obviously, as I was riding, I couldn't use a tripod. I needed an headcam!

The 0.01 $ headcam setup

Well.. I managed to get a "professional" headcam setup by placing my video camera (fortunately it's pretty small and light) with some tape on my helmet and I was ready to go!

Picture courtesy Grigio.org

EDIT: La Stampa, our local newspaper, published a picture of me wearing my wonderful camera helmet!

Recording while biking

Well, it's been pretty easy. The camera didn't weight a lot so it was pretty comfortable having it on my head while biking.

The only problem it's been keeping the recorded image stable. When you ride between tens of people you have to watch around for the movements of the others so you have to move your head around. This obviously caused instability on the recorded video.

Editing

So, I got one hour of headcam biking recording. I then edited everything with Kdenlive, a free (as in speach) and open source video editor for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. Kdenlive is becaming my favorite video editing software: it perfectly suit my simple video editing needs.

I used the Speed effect of Kdenlive using a 900% speed up. Added a Creative Commons licensed song: War and Sleep by Ambient Teknology from the album Phoenix.

The resulting video

So here it is! My first headcam timelapse experiment! What do you think about? Let me know on the comments below!

Sorry for the Flash only version of the video. Somehow I've not been able to get a stable OGG/Theora version of the video.