This project has been fun and tortures. Admittedly, most of it I enjoyed because I got to ride the motorcycle around for class work, what can be bad about that. Additionally this is my favorite ride to go one, which is why I used it for the project.

The challenges started with mounting a camera to an already shaky motorcycle. Everyone raves about the new rubber mounted Sportsters® being so much smoother… I’d hate to see what the old ones where like.

The next challenge was deciding how to go about recording the footage for this project. This is where I made the biggest mistake. I would turn on the camera and just ride, with no scenes in mind. My goal here was to catch the unexpected turn, the deer in the road or 4 wheeled drivers doing something stupid. What this created was hours of footage to cut into a few minutes for Youtube. I spent nearly 40 hours cutting and splicing. To do this I had to watch every video in real time and take notes on it. This was a pain.

The second challenge was creating the google maps. I had never used this before so trying to create a route was furiously frustrating. Each time the program would automatically pick the fasted route from one point to the next I’d have to start all over again. I also think there is some limit to how many times you can manually control the route. I got around this by creating “legs” between each part of the route. Not streamline, but it almost works better for the rider who may use this.

The third problem I kept having was that Pinnicle is much to large for my computer. Simply adding text for a frame could take up to 3 mins. In that time the program may lock up or shut down.

Creating the directions video was less than exciting too. Actually I took the car out for that because I couldn’t carry a notebook on the motorcycle and take down distances and take pictures of each turn. I had initially intended on using my GPS to create a route, then hopefully sync it up to something on the internet. Unfortantly, I soon discovered the reason my GPS had givin out on me during my last ride… the charger port that plugs into the back had somehow disconnected from the wiring. So notebook it was.

Anyway, this has been a fun project, but more importantly I hope that someone actually uses it someday to take this ride.