What's new at sheldonbrown.com
New article about the GoPro Hero5 Session action camera, latest in our series of articles about shooting video from a bicycle. This is a very small and light camera which will not weigh down a helmet and is especially good for use on a drone. It has some advantages and disadvantages worth knowing about.Note: the photo may be larger than life size! The camera is about 1 1/4 inches on a side.
Sheldonbrown.com technical writer and editor John Allen frequently shoots video from his bicycle using more than one camera; sometimes a separate audio recorder. The output must be synchronized in post production. John has now performed a major update on his article about how to keep the recordings in sync, going so far as creating true surround sound without a surround recorder.
Thanks to Philip Carlson, our article about 360-degree video now includes a video clip illustrating the nighttime performance of the Garmin VIRB 360 camera. As expected, there is camera-motion blur, but it looks much different from that with a conventional camera.
We have many pages about shooting, editing and processing bicycle video. Here’s a new page about deinterlacing. What is that? well, the page will tell you. It can do a lot to improve the quality of older standard-definition video footage, and especially, footage shot with a camera in motion. Deinterlacing cleans up the image and doubles the frame rate for smooth motion. Here is a deinterlaced video running at 60 frames per second. If your Internet connection supports the 60 per second frame rate without skipping frames, this is going to look super-smooth. Click on the title and expand the image for best results.
Shining Sea Path at Ter Heun Road from John Allen on Vimeo.
What is this video about? Two cyclists cross Ter Heun road on the Shining Sea Rail Trail in Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA. The crossing is close to an intersection and has a gate in an attempt to slow cyclists down, and a sign instructing cyclists to walk their bicycles — which may be preferable for a person with poor bicycle handling skills but is slower than riding, and so increases the likelihood of being caught by surprise as the traffic situation changes. More about this intersection is at http://john-s-allen.com/blog/?p=7862
The video here is formatted at 60 frames per second. A display which runs at that speed or a multiple will show smooth motion. I’m getting that result when viewing the video on vimeo, though not with the video embedded in thsi page.
Harriet Fell, owner of this site, was one of the first Americans to finish the iconic 1200km Paris-Brest-Paris ride, and was one ammong several people to give talks about PBP at an event run by the Charles River Wheelers bicycle club in February, 2019.
Here is a video of her talk. You may click on the link to YouTube in the video to view it in HD resolution and with closed captions. (We are still looking for someone to clean up the Google translation into French…interested?)
Several other people also spoke at the February event. We have a new page linking to all the videos and to our articles about PBP.
Harriet Fell tells the story of her 1975 Paris-Brest-Paris ride. She was one of the first Americans to complete PBP. The story is online at sheldonbrown.com, and her illustrated talk is on Youtube.
A table of contents page for our articles about bicycling video, and some new articles too — camera reviews, articles about technique and video-editing software.
Melanie Morris from Somerville (Massachusetts, USA) Community Television will interview Harriet Fell and John Allen about Sheldon Brown — and it will be available over the Internet. Go to https://www.somervillemedia.org at 7 PM EST Monday February 5 (00:00 Tuesday February 6, UTC). The show will be rebroadcast at 9:30 PM EST Tuesday February 6 (02:30 February 7, UTC) and will later be archived for on-demand viewing.
Now, a video to go with Harriet Fell’s article recently published on sheldonbrown.com: her presentation on the MIT aluminum bicycle frame project at the 2016 International Cycle History Conference.
New post: the MIT aluminum bicycle project, 1974, where modern aluminum bicycle frames got their start as student Marc Rosenbaum’s thesis project. sheldonbrown.com site owner Harriet Fell built one of the original MIT aluminum bicycle frames, it came to be an exhibit in a Klein vs. Cannondale lawsuit — and she still rides it!
