Camcorder mount for TJ

Hi all,

I have been doing some wheelin in the desert trying to hand hold a camcorder while taking the trail. For obvious reasons I would like some form of a hands free mount.

I think there was a gent called 4x4play or similar who had a mount on his dash. Does anyone have a plan for the mount or some ideas?

At first I thought hey, why not use a head band like a miners light on the forehead, but in this case, mount it on the side of the head. I fear, that would be a real pain in the neck, literally.

Sandbag with camera velcro'd to sandbag? Nah, sand bag, would bounce off dash in short time. What do you all suggest?

Drill a hole through top dash, put in proper screw for bottom of camera?

Reply to
ULB
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While inside a Real Jeep the camera must stay inside a foam lined case! Let a passenger out and film if you want to keep it. But then if you're just driving down the road, then duck tape it to anything:

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God Bless America, Bill O|||||||Omailto: snipped-for-privacy@aol.com
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Reply to
L.W. (Bill) Hughes III

We hard mount a digital tape Sony HandiCam to the roll cage on the Porsche all out racing machine. The mount is a race shop bought multi swivel affair with bolts, ends up with the same hard rubber mount you would see on any camera tripod. It works but we have continuing problems with tape drop outs due to heat and vibration. We shoot though the windshield, you get the extra glare from the glass and any bugs you've collected. It also befuddles the auto focus, you have to manually set it to infinity. The tape pops out the bottom, you have to take it off the mount to change tapes RPITA!!!

The resulting video is not anything like pro quality but it is certainly good enough for driver debriefing. You would expect that the thrashing around of the vehicle would give you vertigo to watch but it is remarkably easy to view.

I'd expect that your head would bounce around a LOT more than the camera.

ULB wrote:

Reply to
RoyJ

I got a set of mounts awhile back to mount an old Garmin GPS, and found something that worked on eBay. It was a base that was hard-mounted to wherever you wanted it, different sized arms for the distance and angle you wanted, and several types of mounts, including a camera mount. I looked but didnt find the system on ebay but I did find this

Reply to
Matt Macchiarolo

If you have the bucks, look for a gyro stabilized mount for the camera. The digital ones have less tiny bits to bust than the old mechanical ones, but they still have 'em. I oncet ruint a Bolex by subjecting it to too many trips offroad around Green River and Moab.

Reply to
Lon Stowell

I used this company's stuff for mounting my GPS and other things in my boat. Maybe they have something you can use:

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Chris

Reply to
c

Well, if you're not working with "what you got", then why not try out a "helmet" cam? They make units that are small enough to work with a headband (even dedicated ones), and if you already have a digital recorder, you're into the deal for a bill....

Something like this:

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or this:

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Can't quite recall the "adventure sports" market distributor at the moment, but you get the picture. You can imagine the trade-offs here, i.e. battery life, memory capacity/recording time, video/sound quality.....but any cage-mounted video I've seen produced on a budget left plenty to be desired as well....

Reply to
Jon

First place to look for mounting just about anything electronic to just about anything that moves is

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Another approach is
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or
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Note that this will clamp to a 2" tube but not to a 3". Another
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Manfrotto has suction cup feet for most of their tripods.

Instead of putting the camcorder on a headband, motorcyclists and bicyclists often use helmet-cams--one example is

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but if you google "helmet camera" you'll find many others. If you're in New England, Eastern Mountain Sports carries a decent one. Most of them are light enough that you can tape one to the frame of a pair of sunglasses. You run the signal cable from the helmet camera into the VCR input on your camcorder (if your camcorder doesn't have a VCR input this approach won't work). To get an idea of what they can do you might find it interesting to search youtube on keywords "helmet camera". There are gyro-stabilized mounts available but they cost $1600 and up and are really overkill unless you're doing commercial video production. There are plans online for inexpensive ones but they're designed for model airplanes and won't hold a full-sized camcorder--might be possible to trick one up to work with a helmet-cam though, but if you're going that route you're pioneering--if you can get one to work then you're going to be the expert.

Reply to
J. Clarke

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