This was my first visit to Gooseberry, but is was certainly not my last. St George and Hurricane is one of my favorite MTB destinations (certainly in the reach in one day and still get in a ride category)
I meet a lot of really cool people on this trip and many of them I still keep in touch with to this day. Such a great place to ride.
Another remastered video from the Pre-GoPro Era of camcorders and burly neck muscles. While working in Japan in 2004, I had the opportunity to circumnavigate Lake Ashi (Ashinoko) using the lakeside trail and the Skyline trail. Lake Ashi is located in the Hakone area of the Kanagawa Prefecture of Honshu Japan. It is very scenic and Mount Fuji can often been seen from spots along the shore shore and the ridgelines around the lake. This was a big day out on the trails and a whole lot of fun. Here is my account of the day.
Here is the next video in the remastering project. This from a ride or two on the Hub Trails of Idyllwild. As this was in the pre-GoPro era, this was shot with a helmet-mounted standard definition digital video camcorder. You will see the shadows of this beast in the video from time to time.
South Mountain in Phoenix is a a pretty impressive and technical trail system right in town. This is my latest video to be remastered into a modern streaming format. The video contains bits from two days (March 14th and 15th 2008) of riding here on the Telegraph, Mormon, National, Javalina, and Geronimo trails.
Such an awesome place to get your chunk on!
Man did we (Kevin, Greg and JD) have some fun on those trails. Here are some additional pictures and ramblings about SoMo. During our third day in Phonenix we did Goat Camp, but that is another story. I found some footage for Goat Camp that I never made into a video so I have put that on the get done someday list. But Goat Camp is another story.
I am using some of my off-bike downtime to remaster my older videos into modern formats and shift them over to my Youtube channel. I’m not sure remastered is exactly the right term for what I’m doing but it seems to fit. I am first focusing on videos that I already have an uncompressed full resolution file of the finished video. With these I am upscaling them to 1080P using the Adobe Creative Suite with a filter to help preserve some of the details versus doing just a simply upscale. With the said, there is only so much you can do with with 480P source video.
Along the Flume Trail July 9th 2005
The first video in this series (which I am shooting to get one done a week) is from the 2005 MTBR.com Lake Tahoe Gathering. This was a great weekend of riding mostly on the eastern and southern end of the area. I meet some really great people on that trip and some of them have been friends ever since.
Some of the hooligans’, scoundrel’s, friends and all-around good folk headed out to Driscoll Lake July 8th 2005
I rode the McKenzie River Trail in September of 2018 and I can certainly see why it was once rated as the best trail in America. It is certainly finds itself in the discussion when setting around the campfire. This footage has been languishing on my hard drive as it had all sorts of problems such as my gimbal was starting to go bad creating some high pitched noise that the camera was picking up. I also did not have the camera setup properly and created some lighting issues. I finally decided to put in the time to correct those things (as best as I could) and put together some clips from the incredible experience of riding this trail.
The McKenzie River Logo shown here is available as a sticker. See link in the description for details if you would like one.
Riding at Mt Saint Helens on the Ape Canyon Trail and Plains of Abraham is a pretty incredible experience. From old growth forest to riding across the destruction from its eruption there is something here that should move you as a human. I went out to Windy Gap onto the top of the Smith Creek trail before heading back. This video on the back portion of the ride. The views here absolutely amazing. Here is my blog post from that outing.
What an amazing place
This video sit around for over a year as the audio was horrible. The Hero 5 did not have particularly good audio in the first place but my gimbal was having issues as well as it was starting to get noisy enough that the mics of the GoPro focused on that noise and it also managed to start picking up my heartbeat. The whole setup was aggravating. I thought about just covering it all up with music but I was able to get it mostly wrangled in with some filters in post. The video does not do this place justice. If you are ever in the area I highly recommend this place.
I had been out here the year before and the weather was not cooperating. I did shoot video on that trip and looked at incorporating some of it into this video but none of it made the cut. Here is my blog post from my 2018 visit to this area.
Got through this footage, I am very thankful for the modern era of tiny GoPro cameras and gimbals. I did some stabilization work on some of the clips, but it is a balancing act between cropping and smoothing out the video. Crop too much and the field of view gets to narrow and quality goes down. Clearly I need to get back up to Downieville and get some modern footage!
I recently upgraded by GoPro cameras and replaced a gimbal I retired. I finally broke them out at to tinker around with the setups. La Costa is pretty much a local trail for me so that was where the tinkerfest was held.
While I managed to goon up some of the footage with the gimbal in wrong mode or the mounting positions not best for all conditions I did get some usable stuff. I put most some of that together here.
I moved from Hero 5s to Hero 8s and I am quite happy with the audio in in Protune mode vs what I had to deal with on the 5s. I have added wind mufflers over the mics in addition to setting changes.
The hypersmooth of the GoPro 8s is really good, almost gimbal quality. So why the GoPro 8 and not the 9? Well quite simply the 9 was not out yet and I got a screaming deal on the GoPro 8 while working on a military base overseas. All told, I got two GoPro 8s for $425 out the door which is almost Buy One Get One Free compared to MSRP.
For those of you you ride at La Costa you will most notice there are a couple of scenes where things look amiss. When I had the gimbal in the inverter mounted position, if I leaned over a certain about in a turn, the gimbal would flip and lock on to stabilizing in that inverted position. I flipped the vertically in post, but forgot to also flip in horizontally as well. I did not notice this until after the video was published.
I have been working on remastering some of my older videos to bring them up to new standards. My videos range from ancient lip-stick camera and 8mm camcorders to GoPros. All of various eras of equipment will have their own challenges to remastering and some of them I’m just not going to make the time for the effort required. But I am going to make an effort.
The video above is from 2007 where some of the usual suspects of the time rode from the Cuyamaca mountains over to the Lagunas by way of the Deer Springs and Indian Creek trails. It was about a 40 mile day of great fun!
Neck muscles of steel!
This video was shot with a 1080i Canon HDV camcorder. It shot good video with the exception of the image stabilization. It used optical image stabilization which was consider really good for the time. However it was optimized for handheld work and not for the rapid bouncing around that occurs during use as a helmet camera work. I’m pretty sure that the optical image stabilization often made things worse not better. It certainly did not work as well as the electronic image stabilization that was on my previous standard definition camcorder setup.
I had previously remastered my Galbraith Mountain video from 2009 but did not try to do any software stabilization of the video. Many moons ago I tried software stabilization and did not like all the artifacts it created in the video.
For the Cuyamaca – Laguna video I gave the software stabilization another shot. I’m using Adobe Premiere CC 2018 and it has warp stabilizer effect/filter built in. After a bit of trail and error I found some setting that work well enough. There is a balancing act that has to be done with with the 1080i footage between smoothness and clarity. The filter will do a good job of stabilization but at the cost of cropping the footage. When the footage is cropped the clarity of the footage is decreased. I found that trying to keep the crop below 125% typical kept thing looking good. Some scenes I did not stabilize at all. Overall I’m satisfied enough with it as it is better than the windows media format stuff I was previously using. There will be some more of this coming in the future.
