If my UPS tracking number is correct, my Vholdr ContourHD helmet cam should be delivered early next week. That means that Mountain Biking by 198 will officially be up with the times and broadcasting in HD video. The ContourHD is the only wearable, self contained camera that is supporting this kind of resolution and is still easy to use as of this point in time…as far as I know.

It will be interesting to see how this compares to the GoPro Hero Wide Angle and the V.I.O. POV.1.5 that we have in currently. I will post up the specs of all three once it comes in, but since it is Friday…I thought you would like to sit back, relax and watch some sample footage. It seems like a lot of these guys are using the goggle mount which does not appear to be incredibly stable. I am getting in several different mounting options, so we will just have to experiment and see which works best.

During my long weekdays of work and on those rainy days that I can’t get out and smell dirt, I sit back and watch a couple of mountain biking movies to pass the time. It allows me to visualize riding different terrain and lets my mind wander off in imaginary land as I watch riders rip up sweet mountain biking trail bliss. Luckily, there is a website like Freecaster.tv that I can fulfill my insatiable need to part take in mountain biking stoke even when I can’t make it out to the trail.

For those of you that aren’t already in the know, Freecaster.tv is an action sports video streaming site that has everything from mountain biking to surf videos just waiting for you to waste massive amounts of time watching in front of your computer screen. What Hulu is to broadcast tv, Freecaster.tv is to action sports. You can even follow the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup DH races live! Does it get any better than that?

Anyways…check it out…bookmark it in your browsers and enjoy the stoke…and here are a couple of videos to get you through today…

GT Bicycles Webisode 1:

Team GT riders Andrew Cho and Tyler McCaul ride their prototype slopestyle bikes.

Santa Cruz Syndicate at MTB World Cup in La Bresse

The Santa Cruz Syndicate Team at the Nissan UCI Mountainbike World Cup in La Bresse.

Dan Atherton rides La Bresse DH with Helmet Cam

Dan tears up the DH in La Bresse with our helmet cam. Check out the Fox Racing Shox Coursewalk too to see him send it off the first jump when followed by Gee.

198 Note: This one cracks me up but it really shows how much skilled riders move the bike independently of their body.

It’s Friday and you are bored at work just begging for something to tear you away for a couple of minutes as you daydream out this weekends ride. You have a hand print on the side of your face as you watch the Windows XP logo move randomly across the screen. Good thing you don’t have a window office because seeing how beautiful it is outside would just be salt on the wood at this point.

I want to do what I can to get you through the rest of the day and help you be even less productive than you were 5 minutes ago. Here are a couple of mountain biking videos courtesy of simple searching…enjoy!

Sea Otter Jump Jam

You might not like the background music, but watching the utter flow of these guys as they hit this huge jump park known as the Post Office is a great watch.

Santa Cruz Syndicate Testing

Check out some of the fastest DH riders in the world as they test out their new V10′s from Santa Cruz. Steve Peat is one of my favorite riders, so this video was a blast to watch.

Danny MacAskill on Inspired

This one I have posted before, but it is worth showing again. This guy is flat out insane on a trials rig. I would love to see a video of him and Hans Rey urban riding together. That would make for a great clip…

Whenever you guys see videos online that you think everyone else would like to see. Hit me up and I’ll make sure to get them posted. While I like to watch videos that are geared more towards the FR/DH/trials side of things, there are some great XC/AM styled videos out there…so send them on!

Some of the videos I come across online are too good not to share right away. Pro trials rider, Danny MacAskill, rips up some urban riding on his Inspired Bicycles Foreplay trials ride in rare fashion. For those of you that haven’t tried urban and trials riding, it is an incredible way to improve your trail riding and it is another outlet to release your 2 wheeled pedal propulsion obsession.

About Inspired Bicycles

Inspired Bicycles was registered as a Limited company early in 2007 by former TartyBikes founder, Dave Cleaver. Set up initially as a business to contract out time and creative ideas to Mountain Cycle (legendary US mountain bike company concentrating in freeride and DH), this venture has recently given birth to an all new trials brand…

Bearing the same name as the parent company, Inspired aims to bring some fresh design and product creativity to the trials market, both in the UK and ultimately World wide!

Music Credit: The Funeral by Band of Horses

It’s time to share some mountain biking videos. As you are all trying to procrastinate through your Friday workday by daydreaming about your weekend rides, I thought I would help add to the stoke by sharing a couple of videos that have come across my desk this week.

Big Creek Freeride with Robb and Chad

Chad Oliver and I got together this week to shoot some footage of the Trek Session 88 FR in the slalom section of our local freeride/downhill area. Ironically, Ben showed up with his Trek Session 88 DH, so it is also featured in the clip.

I am riding the Session 88 FR through the entire first half of the video…from the very beginning to the end of the run after my name appears.

Shot with the GoPro Hero Wide Angle.

Andrew Waldron’s Bootleg Preview

Andrew is continuing to pump out some incredible HD mountain biking footage. This is a preview of what is to come out of his Bootleg video.

Jill’s Pugsley Video

This video was brought to our attention by one of our readers…thanks Rhonda! It is always cool to see Pugsley riding in the snow. This clip came from Jill’s blog and you can find it here.

If you guys ever come across a mountain biking video, picture or anything else that you think would fit the site…shoot us an email at info at mtbtrailreview dot com.

High impact, adrenaline rushing mountain biking videos are really starting to become mainstream. While these types of videos have been around since the birth of mountain biking, it seems that after the huge explosion of Roam from the The Collective…we are seeing even more huge mountain biking productions hit the screen. These incredible displays of the sport are really showing a larger audience the progression of the freeride and downhill segments of mountain biking. The stunts and tricks these guys are pulling off these days are insane! Take a peek at this latest teaser of from Kranked – Revolved from Radical Films.

A friend of mine, Rob Howard, over at BikeSkills.com, sent me over their latest video posted to YouTube. Johnny Moseley visits Mark Weir’s backyard pump track that attracks everyone from local kids to pro mountain bikers. Marin county is the birthplace of modern mountain biking and this makes for the perfect backdrop for this mountain biking video that promotes advocacy for all ages and skill levels.

From Rob @ bikeskills:

Last night I uploaded a video and just a few hours ago, made it public. This video has a very important role, not just for Bikeskills or even our non-profit The Bikeskills Foundation, but we believe for all of cycling, especially when and where people are trying to build community support to design and build various bike parks – as we are here in Marin County.

We felt that by combing the notoriety of someone like Jonny Moseley and combining it with what we think is presented as a family, mainstream activity, we can get people to see and think of something like a pump track (although it could be a jump park, or any other “built” cycling venue) as what they are: places for people of all ages, of all skill levels, to have safe fun and get some exercise in while they’re at it.

This coming Friday we will have another meeting with the City Council members in Novato CA, where this video was shot some time ago.  We hope that not only will the video be persuasive in and of itself, but that lots of views, good ratings, etc. will send the only kind of message that politicians (as they should) respond to: people like it. Lots of them.

For obvious reasons, we feel the same way on the eastcoast as those guys do on the west…and for that matter…around the world. The more positive light we can bring to the sport of mountain biking, the better the sport will be for every rider involved.

Oh yeah…for those of you that haven’t experienced a pump track…get out there and try one out! It is an absolute blast and a great way to spend time with riding friends. You will be surprised how much of a workout it really is while perfecting your mountain biking technique in a whole new way.

Kick the video up a notch by clicking the HD button in the lower right hand corner of the player. Feed readers….click here to watch the video.

Last weekend, two friends of ours, Rusty Wouters and Joe Hair drove 11 hrs each way to enjoy the pure bliss that is Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park. Luckily for us, they took along an video camera to capture the action of this one of a kind indoor masterpiece. For those of you that are into jumps, trials type maneuvers and just a different kind of riding on your two wheeled machine, Ray’s provides something like you won’t see anywhere else.

Ray’s is located in Cleveland, OH. For directions, pricing, pictures and more information, hit up RaysMTB.com. In the meantime…check out this clip from Rusty and Joe…did I mention they have the skills to really rip that place up?

Feed reader subscribers…click here.

Note: You can press the HQ button in the player for the high-res version.

For the first ride with the V.I.O POV.1.5 helmet camera, I went up to Asheville, NC for a run on Bent Creek’s Green’s Lick DH trail. Otherwise known as the Bobsled run…Green’s Lick is also famous for beginners getting in way over their head. Not a very technical dh run by any stretch, but given the right soil conditions…you can really let your speed get pretty high. I took the Ventana El Terremoto up for this stretch of dirt and remembered quickly how much I miss riding in North Carolina.

This is pretty much a rough cut because I am still messing with what format I want to use. With more work on the compression process, I’ll be able to smooth the video out some more and get rid of the little amount of pixelating there is currently. That said, this unit from V.I.O does put out some great quality for its relatively small size. One thing that I did notice was that the field of view of the V.I.O is not as wide as the GoPro Hero Wide Angle.

I was having some issues with the export file out of Adobe Premier Pro and Vimeo. Once I brought that file into iMovie and exported it, it showed up fine. When I find that sweet spot with compression, I will post the exact export settings to get the best picture quality.

So…Andrew Waldron shot me an email with a link to his Vimeo account that contained some must see sequences of the Fontana downhill and dual slalom events. 10 seconds into the first vid…I knew I was going to have to share these with you guys. I will contain myself from sapping up this post with words so you can get onto these amazing sequences.
If you are reading this in a rss reader…click here!

DOWNHILL FONTANA MOUNTAIN BIKE RACE Video 1 of 3 HD from Andrew Waldron on Vimeo.

DOWNHILL FONTANA MOUNTAIN BIKE RACE Video TWO of 3 HD from Andrew Waldron on Vimeo.

DOWNHILL MOUNTAIN BIKE DUAL SLALOM NORBA NATIONALS SANTA YANEZ CA(HD) from Andrew Waldron on Vimeo.

As much as we all love watching videos like Seasons, there is something about watching friends rip the local trails on videos that make them that much better. Chad Oliver has been playing with the MTB by 198 GoPro Wide Angle for awhile now and is starting to get creative with multiple camera angles. Check out some of this sick riding in Tennessee.

 
Coon Country from Chad O on Vimeo.

And…just because I know you can go without some Pro action…here is Cam McCall gapping the hood river…

Mountain Bike Action Shots by Colin Stewart

Incredible action shots of mountain bikers are hard to come by. I often find myself just starring at the shots in Bike magazine imagining I am riding in those fantastic locales. You can imagine my excitement when Joe pointed me in the direction of these shots taken by Colin Stewart. Colin resides in Munich, Germany (most of these shots were taken in Austria) and…by the looks of it…they are making very good use of the terrain. 

After a quick email to Colin, he gave us the permission to post some of these incredible mountain biking action shots for your enjoyment. So…without ruining this posts with more words…lets see the shots!

Note: These are copyrighted images…they are not for public use without expressed, written consent from Colin. Thanks again for letting us post them up! Images were compressed for web use. 

Photographs by Colin Stewart

www.alpinepics.net – For more pics by Colin

As an added bonus…Colin shot us over a video to watch too…

From Colin’s Blog:

A short film about Harald Philipp made by Sebastian Doerk fotografie. Considering the 5d MkII was barely out it’s box and this is his first film then I think it’s an extremely good effort. Harald’s riding is as insanely good, as ever, and this video succeeds in capturing some of his summit ride flow. I especially like the D300 snow shower piece near the end, and this, to me, epitomizes the value of mixing video with stills. I have a feeling there’s a lot more of this to come through 2009. Let’s hope so.