Opinions on bar-mounted cameras?

35dollars

Hi all. After seeing this https://youtu.be/6qycF0raqpg , which occurred on my normal commuting route (fortunately not to me), I'm tempted to get some sort of video camera.

I'm not keen on the ones that mount on the helmet, though obviously they get a higher viewpoint, so was thinking about this one, which is a combined front light and camera:
More details here

Has anyone either got one, or anything similar, or just have any opinions on how useful a bar-mounted camera would be?

I like the idea of convergence of lights and camera so I'm not adding yet another item to my bike (which already has mudguards, pannier rack, pannier, water bottle, Garmin & 8 lights attached)

TheBigYin

one of the members on here @Jakess1971 has just that unit IIRC... think he may have the corresponding tail-light as well, come to think of it...

Roza42

I have a cycliq, but I haven't mounted it yet. My setup for summer makes it difficult to find space to mount it, and I haven't felt that energetic. I also have a Fly6, the original from kickstarter. It had some problems that were taken care of in the newer version, but I don't use it any more. I did like it enough that I bought the cycliq though.

CincyNeid

I bought a GoPro Hero 3 silver off eBay from a site that factory [GoPro] reconditioned it for like $129.99 bucks. And use it all the time for recording road Rides, Mountain Bike Rides and everything in between. Plus the option to helmet mount, chest mount, saddle mount, or hand bar mount really add to the value in my opinion. And I even found a way to over lay metrics onto the video so you can show your HR, Cadence, Speed, Elevation and other stats over the video. Which I know the Garmin Virb and Fly12 both do as well. Over the off season I'll be getting the Garmin Virb just because it has a ANT+ radio, GPS, and G-Force Sensor built in where it will over lay the metrics directly onto the video automatically.

Filmed on my GoPro Hero 3 Silver.
This is a Sample of my rides last year.
This is a Sample of a ride with metrics.

35dollars

Thanks for all the replies - though now I want a video feed with my stats superimposed as well! Which means I'd also have to upgrade my Garmin Edge 200...

CincyNeid

As long as you can pull the GPX files from Garmin you shouldn't have to upgrade it.

35dollars

ah, OK - so you can do a kind of post-production merge/overlay? I was thinking that the camera had to take a wireless feed from the bike computer to overlay in real time and then record the composite image.

CincyNeid

This is the method I use.

ntnunk

I use a first-gen Garmin VIRB Elite and VIRB Edit for editing. The VIRB connects with my various sensors directly and makes adding the data overlays completely painless.

Some recent examples:
A road race from Sunday, 6/12/2016
A criterium from Wednesday, 5/18/2016
A cyclocross race from Sunday, 10/10/2015

Off topic a bit, but VIRB Edit is free and isn't restricted to VIRB cameras. All you need is footage and a matching .fit file with your data. Time-syncing data to the video is sometimes tedious/finicky but otherwise it works pretty well.