Sony HDR-AS30V in action :-)
Mounting the camera on my bike’s handlebar was not a good idea even if special mount was being used. Vibrations (especially during acceleration) are so strong that built-in stabilization features don’t make any real difference. Recording is “shaky” and nothing can be done about it. So I have decided to mount my camera on the top of helmet, but easier said than done as mounts supplied by Sony with this camera model are useless – the curvature is such that the mount can not be safely mounted. One would think that designers employed by Sony would have more imagination but this is not the case, so I had to find an alternative. I found cheap Chinese-made mounts which fitted and mounted them on my helmet with 3M extra strong tape. Result was very satisfactory, although people are giving me strange looks when they see camera mounted on the helmet top 🙂Â
I do not know anything about video editing so I have used simple software which was available to me: Play Memories & Vaio Movie Creator which was bundled with my Vaio and Go Pro Studio which apparently is available free of charge from Go-Pro
Results were as follows:
1. Camera mounted on handlebar with Sony supplied mount. Edited with Play Memories + Vaio Movie Creator. Hopeless…
2. Camera mounted on handlebar with special mount (theoretically it should be more stable. Edited with Play Memories + Vaio Movie Creator. Slightly better but still hopeless…
3 & 4. Camera mounted on the helmet’s top. Edited with Play Memories + Vaio Movie Creator. Reasonably stable. Software takes care of the movie creation.
5. Camera mounted on the helmet’s top. Edited with free GoPro Studio. Stable, but editing requires a lot of time and effort. Additionally Firefox did have a problem with displaying the output file created directly by Go Pro software. I opened the file in Windows Movie Maker and saved it from there as .mp4 in order to correct this problem.
Conclusion:
Very good camera, although it’s WiFi function drains battery rather fast. Sony mounts are poorly designed as far as motorbike applications go. Maybe they fit bicycle helmets and maybe they provide enough stabilization if you ride a bicycle, but if you want to mount this camera on a motorbike then you have to find another mounting solution.
Video editing software – if you do not want to learn new tricks then use Play memories + Vaio Movie Creator. Go-Pro Studio is much more complicated, so editing process is much more challenging and time consuming but it does provide much wider range of options.