On The Climb.

One of the great joys of technology today is the ability to record special moments.
 
Over the past few years the video camera has come to the fore, some people like to use their smart phone for media image capture, others purchase a serious kit of high end video cam gear, but what we’ve found is that the GoPro packs a mighty bang for the buck when it comes to recording your special sports car drives.

There is an embedded video down further if you want to cut to that right now…. keep scrolling.

If you couple the GoPro with some good mics or audio recording gear, then the final video edits should produce a pleasing result. But don’t expect the latest and greatest in cinematic video experience with low end gear, but applying a few skills with some knowledge, it is surprising what you will be able to produce.

Video work is something that the writer has enjoyed for along time, and what better way to use those skills than to capture the best of the occasional lotus drives.

The video below is just that, a longish clip of a recent alpine drive that was captured, edited, and uploaded to the Vimeo platform. If you can stream this video to your wall TV, the sound will be better, (Especially the bit where the exhaust sound bounces of cliff face wall) if viewing on desk top PC or MAC use a good pair of speakers.

For the international viewers, sit back and enjoy this great stretch of Aussie road as it twists and winds, ducks and weaves around the mountain terrain, (It’s no Klausen Pass) but sit back (make your self a coffee as the run time is about 17 mins) and enjoy the Aussie scenery, the great drivers road, and the sound of the 1700cc twink doing its thing.

The keen Aussie skiers out there will know this road, but its a different place in the winter, and so much more fun to drive in the summer months.

Just a few additional notes regarding the video. Unfortunately with the compression that is applied during the upload, the nice sharp original image is lost from the original footage, which is disappointing.

While the exhaust sound is pretty good, there is also a noticeable amount of wind flutter in the background, due to recording in the open cockpit, and the wind flutter perhaps creates a true open cockpit reality, the main reason for the flutter was that the dead cat (Fur wind muff) for the remote WIFI mic was left behind…. we’ll hope to get a better sound recording on our next “On The Climb” video.

The high angle video POV was achieved by fabricating a special sturdy camera mounting rig that was clamped to the passenger roll over bar hoop, this provided a high mount point, a second camera may also be added in the future.

The Go Pro is operated via the remote WIFI which is paired to the camera before recording starts. there are also phone apps for camera control, but they are complex… for simplicity, all we required was either to record or not to record.