There are a ton of ‘here’s my commute’ helmet-cam videos on YouTube. Some feature extreme examples of SMIDSY, sorry-mate-I-didn’t-see-you. If your commute is often spiced up with bad driving, consider fitting a small video camera. It’s what I did in the video above (also available on YouTube).
Of course, fitting a camera on your handlebars won’t capture the moment when some texting idjit hits you from behind but, for those with seeing-red problems, riding with a bike-cam may just calm you down. You can stay serene behind the lens, surreptitiously filming the rants and raves of the apoplectic motorist you’ve just dared to impugn.
YouTube is so all-powerful, it’s crazy. Because it has such a bonkers big global audience it can serve ‘related videos’ to millions of viewers, and the other online video sites don’t stand a bloody chance.
I’m not really complaining, I love the fact my YouTube vids have had 794,900 total views, but I put a lot of effort into promoting my Bicycle Anatomy video on Vimeo.com yet it’s now been overtaken by the same video placed on YouTube at a later date and given zero link love.
Simon o’Hagan, deputy comment editor of British newspaper The Independent, has just said some great things about the Bicycle Anatomy video on the Indie’s blog.
In 1994 I was the presenter of CHAIN GANG, a six part magazine series on cycling, produced for Tyne Tees TV and Yorkshire Television.
One of the show’s interviewees was Jason McRoy, Britain’s first truly global MTB superstar.
The video below contains footage - with permission of Tyne Tees and Rose McRoy - of Jason more than a year before he starred in the famous MBUK video, Dirt.
I don’t yet have an HD camera, but when I do I’ll def load hi-def vids to Vimeo. When you embed Vimeo vids they don’t play in HD. You need to go direct to the site. This is no chore, it’s a beautifully designed site.
If you have fast broadband and a desire to view online vids in 1280×720, Vimeo HD is the place to hang out.
This Tour de France HD vid is from Eurosport and features some funky graphics and, of course, Kraftwerk’s emblematic TdF anthem.
There’s lots of other HD content on Velovimeo, such as:
I’ve produced the above video for bike virgins. Click on full screen or go to the Vimeo site for the video in a wider format. The video zooms into bike parts and names them. It’ll hopefully get newbies up to speed on ‘bike talk’.
It might be aimed at people who don’t know their dropout from their seatpost but even enthusiasts will get a kick out of the music. It was created from twanging and fiddling with some of my bikes.
I recorded the sounds (my favourite is the disc rotor pinging) and then music maestro Greg Johnston turned my disparate recordings into ‘bespoke’ music. The track is now on Libsyn (or subscribe to my podcast on iTunes): it’s an MP3 called Bong. Psst. Twang. Whirr. Psst.
If you like the music and you have an iPhone, download this free ringtone and manually place in iTunes to sync, or subscribe to the Quickrelease.tv podcast on iTunes for the download and sync to be automatic.
Check out the credits at the end for the list of folks who helped me nail the technical aspects of the vid. It was especially helpful to get the American ‘translations’ for bike part names.
I’d really appreciate your feedback on the video and, of course, would love you to pass it on to any newbies who you think would benefit from a crash course in bicycle anatomy.
I love YouTube. It was the first kid on the block and gets huge numbers of visitors. The Quickrelease.tv videos on YouTube have had 464,993 views between them. A Tour de France movie vid has had 71,233 views. YouTube is great for quick vids but is not so hot on delivering hi-res footage.
To date I have also been loading some vids to the Quickrelease.tv podcast on Libsyn and iTunes. These were OK for iPod viewing but, after watching HD podcasts on the latest incarnation of the Apple TV, I’m going to deliver the vids in Apple TV’s m4v format.
Despite the name, the Apple TV podcast-to-movies-to-Flikr set-top box thingy is syncable to a PC as well as a Mac. In fact, with the latest software, it doesn’t even need a computer of any sort, just an HD TV.
If you’ve not got an Apple TV, the next best thing is to watch videos loaded to Vimeo.com. I’ve just created an account and will load all future vids to Vimeo as well as Apple TV. I’ll continue to place lo-res vids on YouTube.
It features a load of kiddie bike racing at the beginning and then leads into a bike mechanics training session for the Newcastle Phoenix kids.
I was really surprised at how enthusiastic they were to fix their own bikes. Some of the older kids had never mended their own punctures, always letting mum or dad get on with it.
I hope the Weldtech session by mechanic Jeff Beach gets them to do their own bike fettling. After all, if the older kids want to go out for long rides by themselves, they’ll need to know some bike tech basics.
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