Track Day!

[rtk1958]

Hi All,

Wanted to share my little video of a recent "track day" event with several members of our motorcycle riding club. "Track Days" are organized and managed by groups of motorcycle enthusiasts for the education, training, and development of riders all the way from licensed racers to casual pleasure riders like myself. It's a great opportunity to learn and practice new riding skills in a safe, controlled environment and have fun too! Had the GoPro mounted on my helmet for all footage in the video. Anyway, nothing particularly noteworthy, just a little video reminder of a fun and educational day on the race track.

Todd

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT_I_K_N-yE[/youtube]

[Dave McElderry]

What a great relaxing fun day that must have been! Perfect weather too. Nice to see responsible riders just enjoying the sport. Thanks for sharing!

[Francesco Carzedda]

Although I am not a passionate of the sport, I liked it a lot as an immersive experience.
I enjoyed the simple lines of the landscape and the (certainly: casual) research in space in movement: blessed that cloudy sky, the recurrent three bands of colour too.
I appreciated the idea of "cartooning" and defocusing the sequences now and then and the music fits very well.

[George Tyndall]

Thanks for sharing that.

Question: To get such great quality, what was the format when you uploaded to YouTube?

[Peru]

I especially liked the use of the blur effects.

[Ron Hunter]

Awesome! I'm a former dirt biker who has always wanted a street bike. Looked like you had a lot more brands represented than just BMW. Any knee dragging out there?

[rtk1958]

Thanks all for the comments!

Certainly took the opportunity to use a couple effects for fun that you'd normally avoid. For early August in Texas the weather was unbelievable with highs only in the mid-80's. Beautiful day for riding. There was no "knee dragging" in our group but probably a little "peg scraping" especially among the cruisers. The BMW group I was with welcomes all bikes and bikers so I was at home on my Kawasaki along with riders on Hondas, Yamahas, and Harleys as well.

Alas, the video quality is mostly a product of my own ignorance I fear. Even though the GoPro footage was very nice 720p HD in a .mp4 file, while the files play ok in my PE-7, once I added a simple effect or transition playback becomes very uneven and jerky, too much to allow for effective editing. Think I even tried converting the .mp4 file to a 720p HD .avi file but had the same problem. I match all but one of the minimum system reqs for HD editing listed in the Muvipix PE-7 guide: Intel dual-core CPU (T6400) at 2GHz, 8GB RAM, and a 7200RPM 4TB external disk drive connected via eSATA. Have redirected all of PE7's scratch disks to the new drive. The only thing I'm missing is an ATI or nVidia graphics accelerator but my system does have an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (4500MHD) but don't know much about it. Maybe it's the graphics card, just don't know. In the meantime, I have to convert the GoPro 720P HD .mp4 files to 720x480 (16:9) .avi files which is what I edit with. The output is rendered by PE7 to an NTSC-DVD Widescreen 720x480 .mpg file which is the file I upload to Youtube. Don't know what if anything Youtube does in the way of conversions or compression in the process, but think PE7's .mpg file looks a little better than the Youtube version, but not much.

Any advice on the above "quality" issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for the comments!
Todd