Tips for filming with a helmet camera

Helmet cams are becoming more and more commonplace today with everyone wanting to film their adventures and upload them to YouTube for the world to see. But as I found out, you can easily shoot a lot of junk footage that doesn’t amount to much when you get to edit your movie. Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your helmet camera.

Check alignment – There’s nothing worse than shooting a bunch of great images only to realize your subject is out of frame! So check beforehand, shoot for 10 seconds, line things up with what you’re looking at both horizontally and vertically, and check that this is what you’re shooting. There’s nothing worse than filming your partner falling and finding out they’re out of place.

Big memory cards are your friend – Running out of memory is never pleasant and you can guarantee that’s when the interesting stuff happens. So make sure you have a big SD card to capture every moment.

short bursts of video – Personally, I find short films much easier to edit and manage. For example, when I’m snowboarding at the end of each run, I stop the camera before I get on the chairlift and start again from the top. Sometimes I check the images on the ski lift and see if there are good images, if not, I delete them immediately to free up space. It is very easy to collect a lot of boring images that you will never use and will clog up your hard drive forever.

Be fierce with your editing – The next time you watch an advertisement or even a TV show, count the number of seconds between each shot. It’s fast about 2-4 seconds, to keep attention. Even if the same subject is being shot, the editor will cut between multiple views of that shot. For us fans, this isn’t always possible, but you can make it interesting by keeping the shots short and interesting.

Remove unwanted images – I already mentioned this before, but it is an important point to keep in mind. The footage takes up a lot of memory on your device and also on the computer you’re using to edit the footage, so delete any unwanted footage. Movie editing uses a lot of RAM and requires available space on your hard drive, so keeping things clean and tidy will really help. A good tip is to buy a large external hard drive so that all your footage is not stored on your computer, freeing up key space on your computer for processing and editing.

Choose your helmet camera carefully – Do you need the best helmet camera or can you use your existing compact camera with a helmet camera mount? Many compact cameras have higher specifications than today’s high-end helmet cameras. Compact cameras have better stabilization and higher resolution for photos, and you can review your footage instantly, a big plus when editing on the go.

Context filming – A big mistake with helmet cameras is shooting just the first person view all the time, that’s fine until you get to producing your movie and you don’t have footage showing what you’re actually doing. You have to give the film footage in first person.

Let me explain, imagine you are shooting a first person view on a roller coaster, you will have the whole ride but only from the rider’s perception, to get the context of the whole experience, you need to film the roller coaster externally to show what it looks like, with all its loops and twists, and cut it into the footage.

Well, easy with a roller coaster, not so easy with skiing or mountain biking. Actually it is, all you have to do is stand still and film a passing friend or even better have them film you so you can be the star. If you can film together, that’s even better, ie you with your helmet camera and your friend filming your run. Edit them together later and voila, you have a decent action movie to impress your friends.

Above all have fun, go out and experiment and have fun, we are from a generation in which digital media have never been so accessible, so abuse them and become a pioneer in your field.