Critical Mass - Cycling in The City

It was about time I participated in Critical Mass.

So what's there to be seen in such a bicycling event? Pretty much actually:

• lots of bikes - trial bikes, old school bikes, downhill bikes, BMX bikes - you name it!
  
• lots of bikers - some timid, some show offs, some silent, some outspoken
• lots of drivers along the way - some angry and stupid, some intrigued, some jealous, some sympathetic
• one or two police cars escorting the cyclists - that's impressive really!
• pedestrians scratching their heads or blinking fast in amazement
• and much more (like in teleshopping ads)
  

It's simply a joyful experience and I encourage you all to burn fat not fuel!

Wear your helmets while cycling!

How To Edit Your GoPro HD Videos with MPEG Streamclip - MP4 to AVI Converter

Check out the latest tutorial: How To Edit GoPro HD Videos - A Complete Workflow 

In a previous post I mentioned about video editing software that will allow you to import, edit and export in HD the MP4 clips from your GoPro HD camera. It's always good to find a solution to a problem but if the solution implies buying a new video editor then it might not fit everyone. As the action sports camera alone costs 300$ then I don't see the fun in spending additional money for a new video editor. Maybe I'm not the only one thinking like that...

What you would like to do, perhaps, is to use your current editor to which you are already accustomed and get going with editing your outdoor videos. In order to do that, you need to convert the MP4 clips (H.264 encoding) into a more common format, recognizable by most of the video software out there.

A free and popular video converter is MPEG Streamclip made by Squared 5 - an Italian software development company. Streamclip is an MP4 to AVI converter but its capabilities go further than that. Here's the copy from their site:

MPEG Streamclip is a powerful high-quality video converter, player, editor for MPEG, QuickTime, transport streams, iPod. And now it is a DivX editor and encoding machine, and even a movie downloader. You can use MPEG Streamclip to: open and play most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in a DVD authoring tool, and use them with many other applications or devices. Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD,VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, ...

One of the fastest and most convenient ways to convert your GoPro HD clips is to open the video file with Streamclip and then save it with the .MOV extension. You will get a new file which should be importable by most editors - see picture below. Most importantly - the quality of the new file will be as good as the original!

Of course you can export the movie in other formats as well and you won't loose the HD touch. For example, when you export in AVI format you are allowed to adjust:

• compression type
• quality level of video output
  
• frame size (resolution)
• frame rate (fps = frames per second)
• brightness (Adjustments button)
• contrast (Adjustments button)
• saturation (Adjustments button)
• volume (Adjustments button)
  
• rotation (rotate the clip to a certain angle)
• zoom level
• crop (lets you crop the edges of the clip by plotting the corners of a rectangle)
  

I highly recommend MPEG Streamclip for converting videos as it's free, light and powerful! For download link and more information visit Squared5.com.

Go outdoors and shoot your adventures!

Downhill Addict II - Freeride Mountainbike T shirt Design

Download this drawing in GIF format (right click/save image as...)

Download this drawing in GIF format (right click/save image as...)

Download this drawing in GIF format (right click/save image as...)

My suggestion for printing your downhill mountain-bike T-shirts and hoodies

Free Mountain Bike Vector Design for Your T-shirt and Hoodie

Download this drawing in SVG format for your T-shirt

Download this drawing in SVG format for your T-shirt

My suggestion for printing your Dirt Bike MTB T-shirts and hoodies

Ride on!

Hangboard Training - Five Minutes Cycles on Crimpers, Slopers and Two Finger Pockets

Everything about building a hangboard + training plans now in my guide:
How To Build Your Own DIY Climbing Hangboard without Drilling The Wall Above Your Doorway

Free BMX T-shirt Vector Design - BMX Rider

The weather is getting warmer and I've already taken my bike outside two times. I figure I'm not the only one...

Here's one for the BMX riders!

My suggestion for printing your BMX T-shirts and hoodies

Keep impressing chicks with your stunts! ;-)

Where To Rock Climb in Romania - A Climbing Guide of Brasov Crags

During the last two years, as we went climbing, we would always find Cirpian Draghici at the crags with his camera taking shots of the routes and asking for information regarding difficulty and crux passages. Basically, when he wasn't climbing he was working on his climbing guidebook which was just launched this month - February 2010.

If until now we were heavily browsing the internet in search of climbing topos for Brasov, Zarnesti or Sinaia, now we have a more elegant solution with Cipri's Climbing Guide of Brasov Crags. Being written entirely in English, it makes a perfect guide for the foreign tourist climber as well who can also find contact information (emails, websites) for getting in touch with local climbers.

While the bulk of the work was carried out entirely by the author and his wife - Anamaria Draghici - many other climbers and photographers contributed with pieces of information, tips and photos. So as the community of climbers is well represented inside the guidebook - I have a cool picture in there :-) - we are all grateful to Cipri who mentioned about us even though everything was done at his expense.

What you can find inside the guidebook:

• 17 rock climbing crags
• over 700 sport climbing routes with full description, french difficulty grades and rating for the beauty of each climb
• photo-topos with route lines
• color codes for route difficulty - easier assessing the routes and sectors
• icons describing the route's character, steepens and beauty
• GPS coordinates
• approach maps drawn to scale
• inspiring climbing pictures

The first pages will introduce you to Romania and Brasov, highlighting location, climate, history, culture, what to see, accommodation and restaurants.

Since the guide is at its first edition, we know there's room for better so please send your suggestions and feedback to Cipri. Also you can buy the book directly from him by sending an email to
guide-book@romaniaquest.com.

The book can be found at the major outdoor retailers, mountain shops or climbing gyms in Romania: Himalaya, Sport Virus, Natural High, Vertical Spirit.
For ordering online visit Climbing Shop.


Brasov awaits you to Rock!

How To Edit Your GoPro HD Videos with Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus 15

Check out the latest tutorial: How To Edit GoPro HD Videos - A Complete Workflow 

A frequent problem all GoPro HD users have is finding the suitable video editing software that will both import and export in HD. The video output of the new action camera is MP4 with H.264 encoding which is a standard for digital video, remarkable for it's high compression rate.

Since I don't have a Mac laptop I can't speak for that but for the PC (Windows) users this information might be useful.

So if you're a Windows guy then you may have noticed that Movie Maker doesn't even import the MP4 clips form your camera. What you can do is convert the files into a more common format that will be then importable by almost any video editor. The bad part here is you'll loose the original HD quality of the video and then I may ask: What's the point of paying more for a HD camera if you can't show your edited footage in full quality?!

I tried lots of programs, looking for one that will run smoothly on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop.

To this point, the following video editors failed: Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead Video Studio Pro, Pinnacle Video Spin. Some of them can do the job but they need a much powerful computer than I have so they're useless for the amateur editor - who's main focus is doing crazy stuff outdoors not buying expensive computer hardware, not to mention the software (at least 500$ for Adobe or Avid).

Don't get me wrong - Avid and Adobe create world class software but their creations just didn't run well enough on my computer. Within the editor's playback window, the footage played like a photo-stills slide show thus I couldn't see exactly were the scenes began.

Ulead impressed me with its stability but unfortunately it doesn't import MP4 in H.264 encoding. You can see the .mp4 option in the File Import window but if you try to import your GoPro HD clips you will get a message like "File format mismatch" - see screen capture below.

My relief came with Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus 15, a software that I've learned about by reading comments on other outdoor blogs. Movie Edit Pro imports MP4 and exports it in HD just as you'd expect!

I had to go through my learning curve with this product as well and now I'm happy to see the results. At first I wasn't able to edit clips longer than 1 minute as I got a message referring to "not enough memory" - 2 GB RAM that is and a Core 2 Duo Intel processor at 2 GHz. Then I came to the conclusion that the source files should have been downloaded on a bigger partition on the hard drive. As I dragged multiple clips into my project and also made a lot of cutting, the video editor was creating temporary files which were saved within the same folder as the source footage. So all those files were slowing down my computer until I eventually ran out of space and consequently out of computing power.

Now I download all the clips on a partition where I have at least 50 GB free space available and I also make sure the project folder contains the source files.

Being able to export in HD using a medium computer makes it a great software to work with and all this comes at a fairly good price - 89$. The interface is as intuitive as it can be so you won't really need to go trough tutorials in order to edit your clips - at least for basic editing you'll be fine with trial and error.

I also wrote a few mails to their support team and they always replied fast and with valuable information. If you want to have a true experience I recommend you download the free trial and test it yourself.

Other recommendations for editing your videos can be found here - Computerworld.com article.



Cliff Jumping in Bulgaria - Edited with Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus


Cheers!

Snowboarding T-shirt and Hoodie Vector Print Design - Half Pipe

My suggestion for printing your snowboarding T shirt and hoodie

One for the half pipe snowboarding masters! For more inspiration, check out the amazing tricks at Shaun White's private pipe - Red Bull Project X.

Download this drawing for your T shirt in GIF and SVG format

Download this drawing for your T shirt in GIF format
(right click/save image as...)

The SVG format allows you to edit the drawing and change the fill colors. Use Inksape or other vector graphics software.

Go out there and do your thing!

Fingerboard Training - Forearm and Finger Strenght in Ten Minutes Sessions

Everything about building a hangboard + training plans now in my guide:
How To Build Your Own DIY Climbing Hangboard without Drilling The Wall Above Your Doorway

How To Create an Image Map for Your Twitter, Facebook and YouTube Accounts

An image map is nothing more than a clickable image that can replace, in this case, your Facebook or Twitter button.

The best aspect of an image map is you can define more clickable areas within the same image. Also you can define the shape of each area - circle, square/rectangle, polygon, etc. - and you can ad a title suggestion as to inform your readers about the landing page they will be taken to if they click on a certain area, on the image. The title suggestion is shown if one hovers the mouse cursor over the image.

Being able to create an image map for your social media accounts gives you more freedom to add your personal touch to, otherwise, a standard button. As long as you have an image editor you can do anything you want.

You should be aware that the image map can help you spice up your blog or website in various other ways. Let's say, for example, you have a blog about guitar lessons and you notice that readers tend to read three major posts. If you want to give your fans a faster and more intuitive way to get to those three posts, you can do it by creating an image map and placing it on the top of your sidebar. The image may consist of three symbols that each relate to the topic of a particular post, thus your readers will be visually urged to click on the image and read your guitar tips and tricks.

Here's the image map (and the HTML code) I use for my social media:

<img src="http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/6fa44b98b043e2d85bd3a2f070e5d74b4g.jpg" border="0" usemap="#Social_Media_Connect" /> <map name="Social_Media_Connect"> <area href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=563019460" target="_blank" shape="rect" coords="0,0,55,51" title="Connect with Me on Facebook" /> <area href="http://twitter.com/highballsport" target="_blank" shape="rect" coords="55,0,109,51" title="Follow Me on Twitter"/> <area href="http://www.youtube.com/catascouts" target="_blank" shape="rect" coords="109,0,220,51" title="Visit my YouTube Channel"/> </map>

And here are the explanations:

• The red line represents the link where the image is hosted. I use Media Fire for image hosting. I recommend you to sign up with them and host your images on your own account. If you take the code above (including the image link) and, for some reason, I delete my image later from my Media Fire account then you'll end up with a blank space instead of the social media image.
• The blue lines represent the URLs from my social media and YouTube channel. Replace these lines with your URLs, unless you want your visitors to land on my pages :-).
• The green lines are the suggestions that users will see when they hover their mouse cursor over your image. You can add whatever message you want but try to be brief and relevant.
• The purple lines define the shape of the clickable areas, in this case rectangles.
• The orange lines represent the coordinates of the clickable rectangles. The values indicate where a rectangle starts and where it ends by plotting the upper left corner (first two values) and the bottom right corner (the last two values). Use the syntax coords="left, top, right, bottom" and view the image below for better reference.

• The gray lines are the attributes of the area/anchor tags ( <area/> - <a>....</a>) that enable pages to be opened in new windows or new tabs in your web browser. The target="_blank" attribute can be used every time you add a link if you want to open the target page in a new window; Blogger doesn't have this option so you have to do it manually for each link in your post, in HTML view. Example: <a href="http://www.highballblog.com/" target="_blank">Highball Blog</a> - this piece of code will open Highballblog.com in a new tab (in Mozilla Firefox).

Give it a try! And if you want a colorful image for your social media image map then copy the PNG at the beginning of this post, have it hosted somewhere and use the above code as explained. Please note that the image width is 220 pixels.

For more information on how to create image maps visit this site.

Enjoy blogging!

Free Trekking T-shirt Vector Design - The Simple Pleasures

You walk up the mountain, carrying a heavy backpack, sweating a lot but... what for?

There's no ready made answer for such a question. The simple pleasures of admiring the view, lighting a fire and sleeping in a tent are sufficient. Passionate trekkers and outdoors enthusiasts know what I mean.

My suggestion for printing your trekking T shirts and hoodies

Be safe!

How To Light a Fire in One Try - Video

I love fire! For a few simple reasons: it brings light, it gives me warmth and it makes me happy.



There are occasions, often while being up on the mountains, when I light a fire for pure joy, just to lift my spirit. And since I'm such a big fan of fire I should be able to light one in almost any type of weather conditions, right? I thought so too but in my last mountaineering trip I had a little bit of a struggle...

It was dark, freezing cold, the snow was big and all the wood we could find was either wet or frozen. We even tried to light the fire using one of our camping mini-stove and still failed. So then we brainstormed and came up with a neat solution that worked first time like magic:

• Over prepare your fire starter fuel! Don't you ever think you've gathered too many twigs or that they are too thin. More is better and thinner is even better. Also, any other type of tinder will help - you can't find much in wintertime though - dry grass, leaves, pieces of dry tree bark.
• Find a small opening between trees. You want the smoke to go up and you don't want to set the forest on fire.
• Clear the snow or tread on it until you have a flat spot for your fire.
• Make a U shaped bed for your fire. You don't want to waste the fire's energy for melting the snow, at least in the beginning you don't want that as the fire is weak. Also by doing this, you will ensure a better ventilation for your fire as it will be slightly above the ground. Build the bed out of spruce branches, dried wood of various thicknesses.
• Take a few medium sticks and roll them into sheets of paper. Three or four will do.
• Put the kindling paper inside the U shaped bed and add the "paper sticks" across the bed.
• Add the bundle of thin twigs and tinder on top of the establishment.
• Light the paper under the paper sticks. Try to light it from both sides so you'll increase the chances of drinking hot soup later.
• You should now have a lively flame which asks for more wood. So add more wood to the fire. Increase the thickness of the wood as the fire grows stronger.

Now you can prepare your food, get some warmth, dry your clothes and let's not forget - tell stories by the fire.

Conclusions: It's essential to prepare thoroughly all the details before kindling. If the wood is wet or frozen you need more paper for starting out your fire. More tinder plus very thin twigs are always smart things to have before building the fire.

These tips are not necessarily for a survival situation. I usually carry matches and paper when I go outdoors, trekking or hiking, for more than one day. I sincerely believe it's good to be prepared for bad situations - frost or falling into water or whatever - and carrying some extra gear and gadgets is one way of being prepared for the unexpected.

Keep yourself dry and warm!