In-Car Camera
We managed to rig up an internal camera for recording our exploits for less than £650 which, considering some of the costs
involved in hiring professional video footage companies, saves a lot of money in the long run. We decided to site the camera in the conventional place,
hanging off the roll cage and shooting forwards through the window of the car, over the bonnet.
Technically there's nothing stopping you from bolting these brilliant little mini-cameras anywhere you like - they're waterproof and fairly shockproof,
so can be mounted on the exterior of the car too (bonnet, wings, pointing at suspension components, bumpers, etc).
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The square camera from RF Concepts
is mounted onto the main over-bar on the safety cage. This provides an analogue signal to the video camera.
Using a separate camera like this, rather than a camcorder itself, eliminates any camera shake from the resulting
picture. Also, since the camcorder does not have to be rigidly mounted to the car, it suffers from little or no
'head shake' during recording, keeping the recording quality at it's best. |
| The camera we use is a Canon MV500i - fairly old now, but modern alternatives can be found at a bargain price (you can find
them on the 'net for less than £400 mail-order). It includes DV in and out, and analogue in and out. The analouge-in feed is ESSENTIAL
if you want to use an external camera like the one from RF Concepts above. We run it off a modified in-car adapter so you never have to worry
about swapping any batteries. Add onto this a "LANC" remote button, which is positioned conveniently for the navigator to start/stop the
recording without having to gain access to the camera itself.
The format of the camera - "MiniDV" - this records in digital, so picture quality is the best you can get for home use and degradation over
time is non-existent. The format is also very versatile for home editing, and can be easily edited using a fairly conventional home PC
and no professional video editing experience... |
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A slightly closer view of the remote camera. You can see the BNC connector for analogue video out.
The camera takes a simple 12v feed which is run from the car electrics, obviously.
Some example footage (Hixon and Weston Park) can be downloaded; this has been
left in fairly high-quality MPEG2 format in order to preserve as much of the video quality as possible - so the files are quite large.
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