This video project is (an experimental) report on a small bicycle adventure (~70 km). For a long time I wanted to share some of my adventures in a video format. Here i experiment with recording journey continuously – important parts as regular videos, and in-between fillers as time-lapses.
I am also integrating an overlay produced from GPS data.
github.com/time4tea/gopro-dashboard-overlay/tree/main/docs/bin
Although i dont use embedded gopro gps data, since: 1) timeplases dont embed gps, 2) would have to stitch together mupltile gpx files to have a complete route. So instead i have recorded my track via OsmAnd app :).
Hi. So, as the video name implies, it’s a video about cycling road and I was about to start doing a voice over and I realized that I have to do some kind of introduction because there’s simply not much time during the video due uh due its like high pace. So, uh the route it’s like a gravel or for forest route uh in my country Latia. basically from RI to Sigolda but uh mostly through forests that’s that’s generally what I do lately and maybe maybe we can start from like top top level idea of course I do cycling I do a lot of cycling I I’ve been cycling for many many many years and recently I have started doing gravel routes and I’m like exploring random Um, I just drive randomly basically and sometimes these adventures are somewhat interesting and I think it’s it would be nice to report on them. And for it, I bought a GoPro. I’ve been recording bunch of stuff during this particular season. It’s kind of fun, but you just don’t have it’s very episodic. So you maybe have like one one video per per your adventure and then but it’s like there’s no beginning, there’s no like end, there’s no story. So I’m I’m trying to experiment and think of the ways how how can I report it as a more like consistent like a borderline story mode. So yeah, and this is my first experiment. not super it’s not super good. Uh but it basically I have to do some conclusions and yeah what should I add? Okay this video it combines bunch of bunch of different interesting parts many experiments. For example, I do like overlays here uh from my recorded uh recording like GPS tracks. Uh but I don’t start really recording up until late later point because I just forgot. Um I have to because the journey is like maybe seven or seven hours or like long. I have to in order to preserve continuity, I have to basically record in some time-lapse mode, but it’s kind of a messed up because it doesn’t do stabilization and all this stuff. It’s very painful to to watch sometimes. So, yeah. Uh in the beginning, what I skip just in terms of route, we go this this road here through the forest. Uh start uh start a forest trail track. Go somewhere here, here, here, return to our road uh and move to this Sunnish neighborhood. Go through it and and then the the track will begin. Uh and so yeah, I hope you enjoy it. So yeah, we begin with uh that part though to sunnish. Um here I’m recording in a time-lapse mode like two frames a second which is the minimum. Uh, it’s somewhat cool because it allows you to record your progress without any without without like memory a lot of memory consumption, a lot of battery use. Uh, and it’s okay if the ground is somewhat stable. uh when you go off road like here in this forest part yeah it’s just it just gets so painful to watch and best I can do is just to accelerate through it but it will still preserve the continuity so the camera is attached here to my steering bar but later I will switch to using so-called chesty again also as as a kind of experiment It’s an interesting perspective. So, we are about to switch to normal recording mode just uh so you see for comparison. Uh, I’ve started recording here because I think it’s a nice well-kept neighborhood. It’s It looks very nice. Uh, but again, uh, I have to accelerate it a bit just to compress this video so it’s not like 5 hours long. Uh, of course it’s it was like what was it? It’s like uh October of 18th or something. I don’t remember what. So yeah, the autumn begins. You see this? The color of leaves changes. Uh it’s it’s very beautiful. So it’s nice to to have option to capture this particular time of the year. Although it was very cold. Um, basically in the morning it was one degree Celsius and the next day it was in the 9 a.m. it was like minus one which is unprecedented but it was like a temporary dip but still it affects how you can what you can expect to dress or or how you regulate during this long rides. And it’s it’s okay while the sun shines because in the in the end in the later part of this journey, especially if I take a long longer breaks in order to like have a snack, it’s hard to warm up back. So yeah, we go through this Sunnish neighborhood and as you’ve seen on the map, it uh basically abruptly ends and we will have to somehow traverse the the field that you will see in the in the front. Of course, there is a gravel road. It’s interesting place to have a house. And actually, it’s not my first time when I ride here. U maybe a year or two ago, I I just found this route like randomly. I was just exploring and uh as you will see now we will I didn’t know like anything on the map anything I just drove down drove down this path I saw some kind of some kind of a road through the through the field and decided to take it. Uh first thing to mention here it’s very overgrown. It’s not criminal overgrown but still you see it not it is rarely used and generally like from my experience it’s bad sign because this this kind of roads can terminate nowhere and you have to track back. Uh second is it’s wet. It’s been I don’t know either it’s because it was raining who week or I don’t know but there are puddles all over the place and it’s uh it will repeat. We will see it on and on even face some challenges. Uh we are riding along the shore basically of of this Leila Yuga river big Yugla river and although the path it seems that terminates there is a small trail probably for locals or or fisherman, I don’t know. But it’s also very overgrown. You It’s very hard to drive. Uh especially in these kind of wet conditions when there are roots uh on the ground, some kind of branches, it’s very hard actually to have like a proper grip. Actually, this this track is not even on the on the open street map. And maybe I should contribute in adding it because this there’s still is a trail trail for people who want to go from like A to B and you don’t have to actually go through through the forest or bushes. So, it would be very useful to know about it. So we emerge on a river bank. If you saw on the map, the river takes this kind of just a just a very tight turn. It basically a full loop. It’s I don’t know why why it doesn’t like go straight through. Yeah, maybe because of some maybe there are some rocks or just some no specific geological reasons. Oh, I remember first time I was here, you actually you have to drive through that overgrown track and you don’t really know like whether you you will be somewhere that is basically close to population and then you came came to this picnic area and you realize okay that that’s very nice that means I’m not in the middle of nowhere. Uh here you see I’ve turned I remember to turn on the GPS recordings then I will be using it. I will be using it because the road is so bumpy and when I switch to basically time-lapse recording which doesn’t have stabilization, it is just to be honest it’s just painful to watch and sometimes I let at least like have some option to focus on something that that is not that is not so shaky and yeah that that’s that’s way you can take a Look at an overlay. We travel along the river. Not not exactly. It It’s It makes bunch of turns there and we arrive at the second like interesting point in this trip which is this bank. Again, the river, it takes very sharp sharp turns and it erodess the the ground. That’s why we have this hills, this these drops. Uh it’s I don’t remember. It’s like 11. No, it’s like maybe 1:00 p.m. The weather is kind of it’s sunny, but it’s cold. And actually, I’ve seen a bunch of people here up until here. Cyclist. It’s just people walking, which is interesting because it was Saturday morning. People should be really interesting. So, bum. Here I switch to um time-lapse mode and yeah it is this how it is very very shaky as long the ground is even it is okay. So we will just go through I arrive to next city which is silicro to buy just some food. It’s a it’s a small small city with I mean I would call it even a village to some extent with a small shop. I just buy pastries, sneakers bar, something to drink probably. Then I start planning like where where do I want to go and I return back on my track but I just turn more to the north back back to back back to the river and then actually I know this region somewhat well everything to the east is kind of well known. Everything north there is this Lea River. Across it I also somewhat know everything but there’s not not much to to explore. Well, this is interesting place. You will see there are a lot of there are few fallen trees that that are blocking the the flow again likely due to erosion plus uh we’ve had few incidents with with high winds. There’s like some kind of grave gravestone grave I don’t know how to call it like grave border there for some reason. I don’t know what it means. Just say interesting. So yeah, we continue to travel along this kind of gravel road, but again it’s somewhat wet. It’s muddy. It’s you don’t it’s much harder to drive through it. So yeah, about this kind of northern part, I know it somewhat well and I take a look took a look that there is a kind of bridge, some kind of bridge across across the river. And so I decided, okay, it would be nice to check it out. So this this kind of kind of a time-lapse which is not time-lapse in this case it’s just accelerated recording it’s much more smoother again because GoPro does a very nice job and it it’s stabilization uh at least when the lighting is nice where where the picture is it has basically features available to which GoPro can latch on and like try to stabilize using them. But as long as you it works as long as the the brightness the contrast is high in the low light conditions as we will see in the like end of the video which was like 5:00 p.m. or a bit later. It will have a much harder job to do any kind of stabilization and the image quality will degrade. It’s probably a well-known fact for GoPro users. here. Maybe I should have skipped this part or I could just accelerated it. But yeah, I turn back which basically I want to return to the river. I’ve never been there. If I if I were to go forward, I would return back back to places which are well explored by me, which is not cool. There’s some dude walking and his dog on a bicycle. Oh yeah, I messed up. I forgot to remove the to set correct speed here. So, it was in slowmo for a bit. Here I find the bridge which was on the map. Uh, it kind of shows that it’s forbidden to cross. Uh that’s why I levitate across. This is kind of a new region uh for me. Also nice wellkept neighborhood Jeez, I forgot to speed up things here again. Yeah, just I had a playback at 60 fps. I’m recording at 30 fps. So, I was setting the wrong uh the wrong basically velocity video speed. So, your dogs I think dogs are bored of their mind. So I enjoy sometimes whistling to them or playing around with them to have them something to do. Actually, I’ve returned back to my usual route, which I am familiar with, although I’ve noticed there’s a turn into the forest, which I took. I I have no idea, of course, where where it leads. The fact that we’re watching the map here is kind of a luxury. I check it very rarely and and it often happens that I check something and like I very much like open street map because it shows so much information which is not available in other sources but sometimes it’s just outdated outdated uh sometimes there’s like a problem for me with the navigation Sometimes I don’t check the scales or sometimes I miss miss the turn. So I just have to force myself to focus more. So sometimes there should be some kind of trail but it’s uh it’s hidden in the bushes or something. It’s not not it’s not clearly visible and sometimes you skip and then you take a wrong wrong road. and it ends up in some kind of large detours. It happens somewhat often with me. Here I reached some kind of clearing. Usually these roads are very nice. They’re tight, compact, um kind of bumpy in this particular spot. Only problem is that there are a lot of roots roots on the road. And it’s very uncom unc uncomfortable to read to write. So in fact some sometimes it’s even like easier to ride uh through the forest and here there was some kind of a trail for a short short bit. Like when I was riding my road uh bicycle in the forest, it just was impossible to ride through the sand and and I had to take had to take the just go through the forest directly, which was at least doable. Actually, on the map, you see that the trail continued uh forward and I’ve turned left into this mess. and this kind of dirt. It’s uh it’s very awful. It’s uh it’s basically like a driving through sand. It has a lot of similarities that you have to you’re like drifting, slipping, and when you’re driving through the sand, if you do something very sharply, your wheels basically start to slide. It’s it’s it’s easy very to get starters or or fall or whatever. And in this case, it’s like this. Turn up to 11 because the stakes are much higher here. If you stop, you have to you will get basically you have to put your leg somewhere not to fall and it will it will be in the mud or or or the paddle. No other option. But I I have dealt with it uh very well. I think it’s a very very strange thing to be proud of. But it’s just you’re just gambling because one move you drive too slow straight to jail. I mean straight to wet legs. And when I came to the sand, I was I was absolutely relieved like, “Oh yeah, back back to known territory.” I checked the map to check where I am, where to go forward because I saw this kind of road crossing, but I realize that this road also loops back and I can and it’s a road nothing nothing interesting will happen there. So I decided to check the route forward and it returned back. So I’m back to the gravel road. So much easier to write here than than through the forests. There are issues with these roads. Sometimes they are and how to call it not even not straightened. If you know if a lot of cars drive, they they leave this kind of bumpy bumpy road which is awful to drive. So yeah, back to awful time lapses. I’ve also checked where in which direction I can go because this particular road it goes east and it’s not what I want. I wanted to go more like northeast but I saw that there will be the route which I took but more and more we see that it gets like very swampy. So there are instances where I don’t want to ride through something. It’s it’s too deep. I don’t want to basically make my transmission wet. So sometimes it’s easier just to carry across. And this trail, you see, it becomes somewhat sketchy. First of all, this fallen log, which which wasn’t clear cleared, and you see it’s it’s it’s overgrown. It’s very rarely used. Actually, when I looked at the map, I saw that at this particular trail, part of a trail. I mean, it’s not a trail like a well-known trail. Trail is just some kind of road. It went for a bit but I decided if it will be as bad as that kind of dirt road there will be an option. It was like 150 mters or so from it will be another road which I can normal road which I can skip onto and actually you see it on the map on the top overlay on the north and in fact this particular obstacle this large puddles where the short where the kind of this shortcut to the nor normal road. As you see, there’s no real track on the map here. So maybe it was not the best idea to rely on this kind of a being able to take this shortcut if it was so wet. Here I just decided to go around. It’s not the first time when I encountered these kind of obstacles, but even then I had to step on like this grass patches because there was water underneath. And also you see that probably these roads are only used by quad bikes or 4x4s. So they are very much degraded but we see this road going forward. Of course I didn’t know it because I didn’t like check check the map but it was interesting that there was an exit after this particular incident. So, it’s so interesting. We are like 30 minutes in and we’re only like I don’t know half half half like less than half of the total distance. We have done only less than a half and actually well I will record mostly time lapses from now on. This is particular particular interesting section because I had a small encounters with the with deer. I saw there is a deer on the road, but because I’m recording in like only two frames per second, there was no option to get a nice capture. And then also I’m using wide angle on this camera. So the resolution is not I either could not capture them because of skipped frames. But here I try to at least extract extract something. So yeah, they they were pretty close. It’s not super uncommon to encounter them. They are always spooked. And back on the crossroad I also checked out whether I will be able to actually go somewhere because that road which we were crossing it went in completely wrong directions and here I found this hunting uh tower also they are very common it just I haven’t been able this this looks like some something and I decided to climb onto it and check check it out. I’ve lingered on this direction because I think there is a clearing with some kind of I don’t know what what what was it was like a feeding station or something. So maybe there hunters are waiting for deer to go there and then they shoot them whatever. It’s kind of curious. Oh yeah, I have some kind of widgets on the on the right because I was generating this overlay from GPX GPS data separately. I forgot to remove them simply. I’ve used like default default setup so they don’t show like temperature RPM. I don’t have RPM man like or heartbeat. I don’t have a heartbeat. And actually I return to the not not exactly highway but okay highway which is which I’m already familiar with. It goes from Roger to Garcal and I took this route maybe two times. And so I decided, okay, I should take something new. And then I turn more like east, northeast. I took a break there. I went again off road because again that road went east, which is not where I want to. And there was this section through the forest. Actually, at this point, it was getting somewhat cold and also I I took a break. I’ve cooled down a bit here. I do like 180. I wanted to visit one one track trail here, but uh apparently it didn’t exist anymore. back very very weirdly. So I visited the store. I I found another place I wanted to visit. While I’m here. So there will be also some kind of trails. I wasn’t sure how much time it will take. I wanted to catch a train. Generally I tend to take a train uh some routes that will end up somewhere. There’s this kind of white cloud barking cloud has descended. So yeah, usually I try to tend tracks, trails or routes which will end in like reasonable proximity to trains because it’s so easy to transport bicycles by trains. Uh which which is not the case with buses. The bus system is not simply it’s simply not designed. It’s not it’s impossible. So they don’t accommodate you with like easy access at least to what I see. So I don’t use it and I have very much very many places explored which are like 60ks away from train train tracks and so on. So this particular track nothing special I suppose. I didn’t understand that it it will take so much time and I I was just wondering like how to synchronize myself with with next train which I had to skip because it took so much time in this particular train again all this particular track there are so many roots and the leaves you don’t really see what where you’re driving the it’s getting dark you see the elimination. It’s more like everything lost color more or less. Copper starts to struggle because of this kind of high frequency detail all the leaves. So this kind of last part is just uh for continuity sake more or less. So when this trail will be finished essentially I will take a look at the timets of of a train and I will just uh go straight forward to see and record in time lapse mode. But yeah it’s not far to seigolda. The sign was like seven kilometers. Uh, but the train was somewhat close, but I decided not to rush it because I was somewhat tired at this point and it was getting cold. And yeah, essentially that’s it. Enjoy your rest rest of this five seconds. Bye. Thank you. So let’s say some closing words. Um so for some reason when I record with IBS OBS it masks images here but okay. So what I think about first of all this particular tree I think it’s it was nice. It was I had an option to ride in forest. So no no no no roads, no cars. Um you were in the nature all along. It’s the fresh is the air is fresh and and so on and so forth. So it was perfect. It was challenging in new interesting ways and I’ve explored bunch of new places. Now what about this particular execution or this kind of experiment for reporting? So I think it’s cool to be able to preserve some continuity that you have a start and and a finish. It’s just this time-lapse recording in this particular execution are terrible. I think just because how shaky the camera is. I I’m not sure how bad it will look in like full screen. So yeah, I guess the proper solution would be to stack up on external batteries and record everything in like 30 fps, but it would be much better in 60 of course as I’ve tested many times. is just the memory requirements for that will will be somewhat astronomical. Not astronomical, but I would expect for a trip in 30 fps to be recorded in like 150 gigs or something. Uh, which would be a pain to process. So yeah, I think the overlay thing is very interesting and flexible being able to see the full path and like the local map. I mean the scale of local map can be changed. Uh I think it can be something that you play around with. So in general, yeah, I think it’s uh it’s an interesting experience. I got to relearn the Vinci Resolve. I’ve used it before, but it’s an amazing program. So, yeah, thank thank you I guess for watching and see you in next video, whatever it will be.