Videos

Videos can be a great way of recording driving sessions and they can also help you improve your driving or share the fun with your friends.

Howto make videos

Co driver training videos (rally)

On-board cameras

The popular GoPro camera once a favorite among racers has fallen into disgrace for its unreliability and battery life that has plummeted with every new generation. 

We have used ContourRoam cameras (https://amzn.to/4vatL3o) that are cheaper and simpler and we are still using them to this day. Unfortunately they have been discontinued.

The current go-to camera for onboard footage is the DJI line-up: https://amzn.to/4vedM4A 

• DJI Osmo Action 4 Adventure Combo: https://amzn.to/4vatL3o 

• DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro Essential Combo: https://amzn.to/4uy7gEr 

• DJI Osmo 360 Camera: https://amzn.to/4vPEYqi 

Here is an older video that shows our setup for RallyX:

Video rendering software

If you are taking videos from different cameras, you will need to edit the footage to integrate it in a nice looking video.

After using Sony Movie Platinum Studio 12 for more than a year, it is really painful to use and pretty slow especially to render final videos. The ergonomics are terrible and I would not recommend it to anyone.

I am now using Cyberlink Power Director (https://amzn.to/4owpBAH ) and while it has its reliability issues, it is much better, faster and overall easy to use. It allows you to synchronize multiple clips automatically by analyzing their audio track which makes it a breeze to edit multicam videos.

To integrate telemetry data, I started using RaceChrono2AVI which is free and allows you to render only the telemetry as a video clip that you can integrate the way you want in your own video using Power Director. It is not very reliable or pretty and can quickly become tedious to use. I recommend paying the $40 or $50 for RaceRender 2 that will give you many options to include a customize telemetry overlay in your videos. RacerRender also includes tools to visually synchronize the telemetry with the video which is always the tedious part.

Another tool that we tried as DashWare but at the time it was lacking some of the features of RaceRender and was not attractive at the asking price.

Here is an example of a video made with Power Director and RaceRender: