Eyes on the Road

I was wondering the other day about the best place to mount a camera on a motorcycle to get the best footage. I’ve made some previous videos by just attaching my GoPro camera to the front fairing of the bike but it tends to show quite a bit of vibration and road bump.

I added a couple of GoPro mounts in different positions on the bike, and some are better than others but none are as good as I’d like. It’s possible to remove some of the shakiness in post production by using the Warp Stabiliser tool in Premiere Pro, which does a pretty reasonable job of removing the vibrations by doing a frame by frame analysis of the footage, and realigning everything. It works ok but is very computationally intensive even on my MacBook Pro and it still creates some seriously wavy artefacts in the footage on the really shaky bits.

Anyway, I decided to try a few experiments with five different camera mount positions. On the front fairing, on the front mudguard, on my helmet, using a chest mount, and using a chest mount with an extender. There are pros and cons of each, but I think some are definitely better in terms of actual watchable footage.

Here is the resulting footage so you can make up your own mind. You know, just in case you ever want to do something similar.

CC BY 4.0 Eyes on the Road by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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