Shooting video from vehicles - kit required?

[Psychobert]

Folks, going on a bit of a road trip in Jan and want to capture some video of it. Have no kit, and even less idea what I'm doing..

It would be handy to keep the physical size of the media to a minimum as I'll be away a while and unlikely to get the chance to download onto a laptop; I'm wondering about a pile of 2gb sd cards as they seem cheap as chips these days.. Would be good to keep the overall size of the kit to a minimum too.

So, whats good to buy these days for reasonable performance at a reasonable cost?

[TheKeyboardDemon]

You might be able to get a Camcorder that records direct to a HDD. This would most probably need some sort of clamp that could attach to the back or headrest of the passenger seat using a mini tripod type device, I'll see if I can dig up some links or info when I get home.

Possibly might want to add a small laptop and external harddrive to remove data from the camera and make room for more recording.

Depending on how reasonable a budget you're working with, however this should give better quality results than using a smaller camera with SD cards. HTH

[Psychobert]

Hmm.. Hadn't thought too much about quality on sd cards, but that could be an issue..

Going to need a fairly sturdy mount as we'll be bouncing up and down over sand dunes a fair bit..

[hawkaye]

mount you say? look no further

[Matt172]

Simon, Have a chat with Darren if you're down the pub on wednesday night, he's got a camera set-up on his race car

[Psychobert]

Chances are I'll loose it in a haze of San Miguel, but worth a try..

[cw42]

Go for the mount on the page Hawkeye linked to, you can't beat a b-hauge mount for what you're going to do.
Get yourself a dv camcorder, and a load of blank dv tapes. Label them up DAY 1, DAY 2, DAY 3 .......ect
Mount the camera on the windscreen, pop a dv tape in, hook your camera upto the mains in the car using this: http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/553821/art/cap10/c...
and you have hours of cheap dv quality footage to play with when you get home.
Have a look at my stelvio tour film here, amongst others: http://www.scoobysmacs.co.uk/Videos/stelvio%20day%... 24mb wmv vid.

Once you get home from your trip, you have easy to access footage on a day by day basis. Pop it back in your camcorder, hook it up to the pc using firewire, and using simple built in editing software, you can then make your own movies

Easy!

[Lambochick]

I researched this before my trip to Italy, and the advice I got was definitely go for Mini DV as hard drives don't cope as well with vibration and memory cards don't have the quality.

For mounting externally I was recommended to go for a remotely operated bullet cam, but to use one of those requires a camcorder with the appropriate input sockets.

I got all of my bits from this place http://www.actioncameras.co.uk/acatalog/ who were able to supply absolutely everything required, including suction mounts etc.

A sample of the results can be seen here bullet cam sample

Edited by Lambochick on Wednesday 1st August 17:01