I just finish fabricating a video camera mount in my car. Last chance at the track tomorrow, the weather will be great and hope to have some fantastic footage.

Just to see how well it works, I fired the car up to take it out of the garage and check things over. I turned on the camera when I fired it back up to bring it into the garage. About 44 seconds of video. The mount isn't super stiff but since it's in a race car, I doubt it could be any better.

Hopefully after the weekend, I'll have a bunch more footage.

Click here to see Video

 

That looks to work pretty good, how`d you construct it? I was thinking of making one myself and thought about using muffler clamps and a piece of steel plate for cheap.

 

Exactly what I did. A 1-1/2" muffler clamp with a piece of angle metal about 3" long to attach to both studs of the clamp and a hole drilled at the end. I pickup up one of those mini tripods for the camera at Walmart. With the legs folded up, I wrapped a hose clamp around the legs and around another piece of flat metal with a hole drilled in it. The flat metal is attached to the angled metal that's attached to the muffler clamp. This gives me enough pivot points that I can position the camera in just about any angle. Total cost of fabrication was less than $15 including the cost of the mini tripod. I also have a quick release safety strap to put through the camera strap then around the roll bar in case the camera falls off.

Depending how many passes I make tomorrow, I want to try a bunch of different camera angles. I could be out at the track today but the morning started off too cold since it was really cold and wet yesterday. I didn't want to load the car up tonight to bring it home only to load everything up again tomorrow morning to go back to the track. No rain tonight but the temperature will be dropping to -1c.

 

we put a camera inside the car and i guess its the image stabilization but under accel it looks at the sky and braking looks down, driving in the pits it works ok, i am going to move it foward in the car to see what happens, right now it is on the x brace at the back of the cage almost over the rear end, mostly you can see a blurry tach and clouds in the video and it wasnt on when i stood it on the bumper, i would have found a way to post that

 

Hmmm. I thought image stabilization would help. I can turn it off if I have too especially if the camera is mounted so it doesn't move. So far, the little bit I've played with the camera has been easy and fun. I guess I'm going to have to buy my own now.

This is a Canon Elura 65. Uses mini DV tapes or can record to a SD memory card but the frame rate to the memory card is lower and it's saved as a compressed AVI file. After recording to tape you then use Firewire to import the uncompressed video into the computer for editing, it can then be saved to DVD in an uncompressed form for better quality. You can get 2 hours of video on a tape. The 256Mb SD card in the camera is good for about 30 minutes of compressed video. I was looking at the mini DVD video cameras. They only get 30 minutes of video on a mini disk.

The video I uploaded is a compressed WMV file. The raw video I have is much better quality but is also about 10 times the file size.

 

Here's my cheapy mount. It mounts on the diag of the main hoop. *edit*If I remember right, my clamps are for 1 5/8" (or was it 1 7/8"?) muffler pipe for my 1 3/4" roll cage. *edit*


A great thing that a buddy of mine has on his video camera was a little remote control. It saves the having someone else turn on the camera thru the hatch or the awkward twisting/bending your arm back to hit the record button.

 

the boss at work bought a new hd camera so we put his old one in the car, I did not really study it but i know its a sony and newer than my camcorder since its pretty small, i didnt even look at what it records on, hey i had to work on the car and drive the car and answer questions all day, espically after i put it on the bumper, then everybody there i think came over, and looked under the hood and just scratched their heads not understanding how a small block just did that, i said its just a 267 with a 150 shot whats the problem. hey by the way steve love the sound of the car, and love seeing the antiquated ignition handheld programmer (have the same one ) I was really hoping the coil was the problem i had with the ignition since a new ign. sys. that does less then the pro strip aniahlator is expensive! i dont use all the features in it but having all the rev limiters and switches and retards is handy, and its really easy to change stuff like timing (has crank trigger on car) just grab controller dial rpm and change timing done, just need to see if i can change or disable the start retard, pulls so much timing out the car is hard to start when cold (and im only talkin 65 degrees) and i am shure it would get worse when the temps get lower soon, right now i have the advance at 500 rpm real high so when it retards it is about normal (really big cam has low dynamic compression) i read the book but didnt see anything about start retard