How I setup my Helmet Cam for mountain biking

So I thought some of you might like to see how I setup my helmet cam for mountain biking.

Firstly, what I was wanting to do was mount a small camera on the side of my helmet, so it captured everything that I was looking at as I rode. This also reduces the shaking and vibration of the footage, especially while you're off the seat, as your suspension and body naturally soaks up most of the rough bumps from the trail you're riding.

I got a small bulletcam (also known as a lipstick cam *snigger*), which runs 420 line resolution. I actually have a second bulletcam which is 480 line resolution, and can handle extreme changes in lighting level better, but for my initial helmetcam setup that I'm describing here, I stuck with the slightly cheaper one for the unknown dangers of field testing it! (Incidentally, I actually ended up staying with this one in any case, as the footage was perfectly fine for my uses).

This is the helmet cam - it has one small plug for DC power input, and one other small plug for the video-out signal. This was attached to the side of my fullface helmet using a length of velcro and some electrical tape. Not particularly fancy, but it did the job well, without any fear of the camera falling off.

As I mentioned, the helmet cam does need it's own power supply, so I used an 8xAA battery pack, the battery life of which lasted surprisingly well.

Now I just needed to send the video output signal from the helmetcam to my recording source, in this case a Sony MiniDV cam - an older model TRV33e, which most importantly, has a 3.5mm A/V input plug on it. This is vital that you check this out when buying a miniDV cam for this purpose, as many of the newer models do NOT have 3.5mm A/V input plugs. Ensure that it doesn't only have a 3.5mm microphone input plug, which are common!

This is the cable that I bought off Ebay for a few dollars. It has a 3.5mm plug on one end, and 3 RCA connectors on the other (designed of course for VIDEO / RIGHT AUDIO / LEFT AUDIO). The only thing I was interested in at this stage was the Video plug (yellow).

The yellow RCA plug on this cable was plugged into the video-output plug on my helmetcam, and the 3.5mm plug on the other end was plugged into the A/V input on my Sony miniDV cam.

This is the Sony miniDV cam TRV33e - which I bought quite cheaply secondhand off a local online auction site.

I could then go to the top of a mountain bike trail, set the Sony miniDV cam recording, wrap it in a Tshirt and shove it into my small camelbak pack, leaving only 2 wires intertwined with each other, poking out going to my helmet cam, the power cable and the video cable - and ride the trail, recording every moment!

And that's pretty much it! The footage is quite clear, and everything has survived to this day, despite several crashes on downhill mountain bike tracks.

Here are some videos of the helmetcam in action... my friend is riding ahead of me on his Kona Stinky, and I'm following on my Specialized Bighit...

A fun little local DH trail

The same fun little DH trail, when everything goes pearshaped