Video: Vedder DH, The Sound of Shredding!

Ethan Saathof and I went up early on a Saturday to film all day long at Vedder mtn in Chilliwack.

So my idea was to make a video with no music in it and just have the bike sounds be the soundtrack. These type of videos barely get made, but I have seen a few here and there. I brought my Zoom H1 digital Audio recorder to record all the sound for this video, I used a separate tripod to put it on. I wanted to capture the best sound possible of course. I usually use a shotgun mic for my Canon 7D in most other videos, but it's not as good quality so I didn't want to use it for this video.

For the Helmet Cam shots I put the recorder in Ethan's back pocket, I had it on a manual volume set at 30, and the low cut filter on to take away some wind noise and distortion when there are bigger impacts. I had to edit the audio afterwords though, raising the volume everywhere except for landings or other loud impacts, and eliminating some wind noises by using a highpass filter.

Otherwise for everything else I just had a dead kitten windscreen on to filter out the wind of the rider riding by, and I also had the low cut filter on and tried to keep it at a volume that was low enough so that it would not get distorted. And I usually had the recorder much closer to the trail than my camera was as well.

One thing I did to try and make the video as interesting as possible is I filmed more close ups where the audio recorder was pointing, so it would sound accurate with the loud rich sound of the rider. And I also did quicker cuts so it keeps your attention better because there is no music to help entertain you.


It took longer than it usually would to get all the shots, because since I had to sync the audio with the video every time, so I had to tap the zoom h1 on the 7D so that it creates big peaks in the waveform so I can sync it in post.

I even got a few GoPro shots in there, with my hero 3 black edition. I don't mean just on his helmet, I even got a few other stationary shots with it on the ground and in a tree, see if you can spot them! I really like the hero 3's I can actually use them as a secondary camera which is sweet!

Ethan crashed while he was riding with the GoPro on, I'm glad it was at least captured on the Go Pro! He was ok, but he said it was a good thing he wore his full face and goggles because he just smashed into that tree!

This video was filmed with a Canon 7D and a GoPro HD Hero 3 Black Edition. My GoPro was recording at 1080 60fps on the 'wide' field of view.