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During my recent trip to Germany I had the use of a small ATC3K Action Cam made by Oregon Scientific.

I fitted it to the bike by means of a camera mount I made 6 years ago to fit a stills camera via the left hand vacant mirror mount on the handlebars of my previous BMW R1150RT.

I’ve never used a small video camera on the bike before so didn’t really know what results to expect.

Using two 4GB SD Video cards I managed to shoot about 4 hours of video but because of the lack of a screen or viewfinder I had no way of reviewing the video until I got back home.

My observations are as follows:

I found it quite difficult to aim the camera correctly without a viewfinder.  The bike was on the centre stand when I set it all up on the second morning in Germany and it was a matter of guesswork to capture the right proportions of road, scenery and sky. I also had to allow for the different attitude of the bike once off the stand and on it’s suspension. In the event it seems I aimed a little too low and the road surface dominates most views.

The ATC3K does not have a remote recording button and although the unit was well within my reach whilst riding, pressing the record button when wearing lightweight summer gloves proved almost impossible. Knowing that I had 2 hours of recording time per card I set it to record and then continued on my journey. When the card runs out of memory the unit simply turns itself off.

The quality of the recordings leaves a lot to be desired although in all fairness this was almost exclusively due to my mounting of the unit, where handlebar vibration coupled with my choice of bumpy German back roads had a severely detrimental effect on the overall quality. Supplied in the camera kit were the means to secure it to a helmet but I could not make use of this as the flip up chin bar of my BMW System 5 precluded this.

I arrived home with around 4 hours of video, without a clue of how I was going to edit it or make use of it in any way. I experimented with Windows Movie Maker which I already had installed on my PC and discovered that video editing can be an extremely time consuming process. I soon discovered the very shaky quality of my video and decided that spending vast amounts of time mastering the editing software would not improve the quality very much and would be wasted on such disappointing footage.

This was my first trial of such a camera and I’m sure much better results could be achieved with better mounting to either the bike or a helmet but I have to say that I’m not inclined to pursue the trial preferring instead to continue with a digital stills camera to record my bike trips.

Any video camera used for this purpose would also benefit from a remote record button so that only ‘interesting’ footage was recorded in the first instance, which would make the final editing much more straightforward.

Using the stills capturing software in Windows Movie Maker I managed to save about 60 still images which give an idea of the quality potential given a better vibration free mount.

These images may be found here.