Biking and Videotaping

Yesterday we biked the Mud Creek-Skull Creek Trail again -- but this time I took my new camcorder. It's made by Panasonic and designed for rugged outdoor use, in that it's waterproof, shockproof, dustproof, and quite small. In fact, it fits easily in one hand as seen here...



The old Sony camcorder, which has been a good unit, is much heavier and larger as seen here...



As you can imagine, I never took the Sony camera on backpacking, mountain biking, hiking, rafting, kayaking, or canoeing trips. It's just too heavy, bulky, and fragile. But the new one seems to solve all those concerns, so I put it through its paces while we were biking. Then I assembled the footage into a movie using Apple's new '09 iMovie application, and here's the result...



For comparison sake, here's a 1 minute movie including 2 clips using the old Sony camcorder last month...



And for more comparison, here's a 27 second clip using the "video" capability of my compact digital camera...



The new iMovie software also seamlessly uploads the finished video to YouTube. I consider this first "experiment" with the new Panasonic camcorder to be a success and will continue to test the new camcorder next week while we are in Cedar Key (FL) and then decide if I want to keep the new camcorder -- so stay tuned!