Motorcycling is an addictive hobby, to some people it's a way of life, others purely to commute more quickly and others to travel the world. No matter what type of motorcycle you are riding, on road, off-road, motocross, trials, track days on your sportsbike or supermoto or cruising about on a large tourer or cruiser. You can add a helmet camera to your setup and record your rides.
There are so many types of action camera now that finding the right one for you and your motocycling adventures can be difficult, that is exactly why we have created this page, to help you find the best cam for you. Above, we mention we have filtered the action cameras by being able to record high definition videos at 1080p, that they are waterproof or without a waterproof case and that they can fit an external microphone in to them. The cameras on this list are also sorted by best battery life, so the ones at the top have the best battery life range and they slowly decrease as you go down the list.
Motorbike Action Camera Mounts
After working out what camera you want, with what features, you're going to have to work out where to place your action camera on your motorbike. Easily the most used location for an action cam whilst riding is on your helmet, either just to the side or on top. By placing it on your helmet you should get the smoothest of videos from any other part of you or your bike. This is because your head and neck naturally smooth out the bumps and jolts in the road, adding the suspension to your motorbike as well and the results can be very good.
There are various motorbike helmet mounts that you can buy online, a 3M adhesive mount is probably your best bet as it can fit on any part of your helmet, they come in curved shapes and with one of these attached you can attach a gopro style mount to fit your action cameras case to. If you are using a 3m adhesive mount, you can place this on top of your fuel tank to face forward and get a riding POV from behind your bikes screen.
You then have bar mounts and chest mounts as other alternatives, or you can even pre fab your own camera mount and screw in a mount to a fixed position on your motorcycles plastics. This will be especially good if you want to get a good and unique angle for your videos.
With the bar mounts, you can obviously place these on your handlebars, but you are not limited to that position. You can face your camera forwards or backwards and this will reward you with shots of yourself riding along, or by facing forward, footage of the scenery and landscapes you are riding through.
One of my favourite positions for an action camera whilst motorcycling is on a chest mount. These are easily placed on your chest with a stretchy harness that goes over your shoulders and around your back and you clip your camera in to the front plastic plate and it will give you a nice angle of your arms, front of your bike and everything in front of your motorcycle as you're riding a long, it's a great angle for action shots and context to show what your body is doing whilst you're riding along.
There are gimbal mounts as well, if you are more in to your racing on tracks or motox then a gimbal may be what you want. Just like when you watch MotoGP, you can see that the video stays horizontal and parallel to the track surface, this is because they have their cameras set up on a gimbal.
Commuting On A Motorcycle
If you're more interested in capturing videos and footage whilst commuting, you may want a camera that has a loop mode function. This way, you continually have the last few minutes of your ride recorded, and if anything where to happen whilst you were riding along, this footage would be saved. This will only work if you have the camera facing forwards or backwards and not at yourself, so that the footage being recorded shows as much of the road as it can.
We haven't filtered for this feature in the cameras shown above, but you can check what video modes they have in the camera summaries under the top list. There are a few that show loop mode.
Another feature that could be important whilst commuting is using a microphone, this is important if you wish to narrate your videos and you can easily add a microphone, either via the 3.5mm audio jack input or by using a mini USB microphone. All the cameras above are filtered for this feature and you can happily plug in a mic depending on its input, 3.5mm or mini USB. Micro USB 2.0 doesn't work with microphones as it doesn't send enough data through its 10 connections inside it, where as mini USB has 20 which is enough for a small microphone to send its signal through and in to your recording.
