GoPro Cameras

[Julie GT07CS]

We have a blast using our GoPro Hero camera! We recently used it on our cars at Willow Springs. As a matter of fact, most of our friends that were there had them mounted on their cars! Check out how versatile this little camera is!

http://www.goprocamera.com/products/?area=2

Click on this link to enter yourself in a daily contest to win everything GoPro makes!

http://www.goprocamera.com/contest/?...gn=dailywinall

[blind]

love mine, however it died when I took it snorkling in HI last month Killed my 4gb sd card too,t he case seal failed.

they're based in half moon bay, the same city my parents live in up near SF, so I've got my fingers crossed they'll do something about it when I bring it in next time I go up for a visit.

[Glenn_03Cobra]

snorkeling shouldn't have made the case leak Hopefully they will help you out!

[Glenn_03Cobra]

We have a blast using our GoPro Hero camera! We recently used it on our cars at Willow Springs. As a matter of fact, most of our friends that were there had them mounted on their cars! Check out how versatile this little camera is!

So... where's the video of you driving on the track

[blind]

snorkeling shouldn't have made the case leak Hopefully they will help you out!

yeah, I couldn't have gone more than 25' down, it's rated to like 180' or something crazy high.

[reinaldo]

Mine is not working either. Too bad.

[Brakelate]

What stopped working on it???

Tetge and I have alot of experience with these cameras. I have the original GoPro Hero "Wide", and Tetge also recently purchased the HD version.

We have used them for countless hours on Motorcycles, Cars and even stuck on the side of my boat and swimming around Lake Tahoe.

These cameras are very fun, and capable of capturing amazing things. BUT, they are little more than a childs toy (you get what you pay for)!

They can be glitchy, especially in cold weather, they consume batteries and have horrible sound quality. The newer HD version addresses alot of these issues, but then you need to find a more powerful computer and program to edit and upload the higher definition video data.

Once you get dialed in, recognize it's strengths and weaknesses, they are a real hoot.

I just joined in over here, and I believe Tetge did as well. Soon, we will stockpile the Video section with our Cobra drag race and open track vids, as well as several of our better motorcycle ride and race clips.

Post up specific questions, and Tetge or I will try to help you get things rolling.

[Glenn_03Cobra]

I have the HD version. Definitely nice quality on the track but, I've been playing with it at car meets. It's small enough to pick up sounds of exhaust and capture the movement of a car meet. I took a quick video at SuperCar Sunday on the 30th that I'll post up over the weekend. They just released a review screen that snaps onto the back of the camera so you can now see what you shoot. Very cool "childs toy" worth much more to me than what I paid for it!

[Tetge]

Originally I was impressed with the support and attitude of the GoPro company. But, I was one of the first on the list for the HD camera and then it encountered delays in coming to market. After they released the camera I had a really terrible time finding a way to process the 1080p output and the promised upside down shooting feature which their printed materials that shipped with the camera stated was on their web site was not released for over one year. This bothered me since I shoot upside down from my motorcycle and car. The lack of an upside down feature basically meant that I could not play the videos back from the camera on TV's unless I stood on my head. The GoPro HD also would not recognise the SD card that I got that was specifically for HD use. Nothing wrong with the card, but the GoPro is fussy about memory. Naturally GoPro blamed the card mfg and accepted no responsibility.

I ended up spending countless hours trying every piece of software I could find under WinXP and then thousands of dollars on unnecessary upgrades to my computers only to discover that Windows7 Live!MovieMaker would process the 1080p HD videos. Of course, I had to upgrade to W7 at that point.
I had a number of back and forth e-mails with GoPro during this time and they basically told me that it was my problem with XP and my computer, not theirs. However, it should be noted that, unlike a number of other cameras, GoPro provides no software to use with their product nor do they have any really good detailed support on how to process the videos one creates. One last thing that I use that I discovered in my search is the K_Lite Full codec package and I keep it updated. The full package includes a very nice movie/video player.

Now the GoPro HD seems to work OK and I do like the one button start/stop feature that finally came with the long delayed firmware that enabled the upside down feature. I picked up a second GoPro 960, not long ago, at Costco to get an extra battery and some extra lenses and stuff, but I returned it since the case was defective and I was not happy with a defective new camera.

Sorry for the long post. I suppose I am trying to say that I am not sure how good the support is at GoPro these days. But, the camera is really fun when it works. My videos at youtube can be found by searching under Tetge. There are 47 over there and content and technique are still a work in progress.

[Brakelate]

Clearly the HD Version is superior in almost every way.

Here is a typical example of an original GoPro Hero Wide segment (actually this is above average sound and clarity from my experience).
http://www.youtube.com/user/Brakelat...12/vyY9hSmG60M

And here is footage at the same track, captured on my bike with Tetge's new HD camera.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Brakelat.../2/mYuwWBcBGIg

Granted, the first is shot with a suction mount to the side of the bike, and the second a helmet top mount, but if viewed in full screen and HD, the difference is immediately apparent.

[Tetge]

Clearly the HD Version is superior in almost every way.

Here is a typical example of an original GoPro Hero Wide segment (actually this is above average sound and clarity from my experience).
http://www.youtube.com/user/Brakelat...12/vyY9hSmG60M

And here is footage at the same track, captured on my bike with Tetge's new HD camera.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Brakelat.../2/mYuwWBcBGIg

Granted, the first is shot with a suction mount to the side of the bike, and the second a helmet top mount, but if viewed in full screen and HD, the difference is immediately apparent.

Yes, I never use the original GoPro at all anymore. Just the recharagable from USB battery of the HD camera makes it better. The big resolution and much better sound seal the deal. However, I keep the old camera ready because I am going to put it in my back window next time I run Famoso so that I can also show your car in the video since my HD camera will be pointed forward out the front window and your car would never be in the video.

[Glenn_03Cobra]

I have a similar story about vbulletin The videos are .mp4 so XP probably doesn't have the codec in the core. When I bring a vid into Live Movie Maker, I get sound but no video. I haven't had the time to research it yet. Works fine in media player for playback. I'll try XP over the weekend to see what it does.

Blind has been around the block a few times with the techie stuff... I'm sure he'll give GoPro a run for their money, when he visits their main office lol

[Julie GT07CS]

God, what a bunch of techie geeks I am surrounded by! Heeelllppp!

[Brakelate]

I am going to put it in my back window next time I run Famoso so that I can also show your car in the video since my HD camera will be pointed forward out the front window and your car would never be in the video.

That is not nice to talk to Glenn that way. He may have never even been to Famoso!

You ever hear of that guy that won ten out of ten races at the Willow Springs Drags? Now that was impressive!

[Tetge]

......I have a similar story about vbulletin The videos are .mp4 so XP probably doesn't have the codec in the core. When I bring a vid into Live Movie Maker, I get sound but no video. I haven't had the time to research it yet. Works fine in media player for playback. I'll try XP over the weekend to see what it does...

I finally broke down and went to W7 from XP as the end of life, no support, churning by Microsoft, was happening as well. I tried various beta versions of W7 first and it was better than Vista, which I skipped. Also, I wanted to go 64 bit so I could use more memory as I was using 64 bit Linux already on the same boxes. It was a relief to find that the W7 version of Movie Maker handled .mp4 files as no previous versions are HD capable. Now I run 64 bit W7 on my main two computers and 32 bit XP on the others and I have to say that, for the most part, W7 is working fine. I do run Ubuntu on my Netbook as a Win XP installed program but it puts a boot manager in and gives a choice at boot of which OS you want so you would not know it was installed as a Windows program as it acts as if it were installed in its own partition. However, since it is a Windows program, it can be uninstalled in Windows and also Norton Ghost makes full backups of it since Norton has no problems with its file structure. I like Linux and it is possible that I could edit GoPro stuff using Linux but I have never really made a real effort to find out since it is still a Windows world.

[Glenn_03Cobra]

I did the Linux thing for many years. Finally had to shut down the last server when I realized I was having too much fun constantly reconfiguring it. It's like a never ending open system of opportunity... lots of stuff to play with to do nerdy stuff My main system is the only Win 7 64bit box. All the rest here are XP Pro... set and forget

[Glenn_03Cobra]

Quick tip... there are two buttons above the message box and to the right of the text formatting buttons. The colors are currently screwed-up (fixed in next release) but when you hover over them with your mouse one says "insert image" and the other "insert video." Those the the two buttons that will help you get pics and videos into your posts. I edited Brakelate's post to show the video in the post rather than just the link. When I upgrade the system, I'll be able to fix the color scheme so we can see the buttons more easily.

[Tetge]

I did the Linux thing for many years. Finally had to shut down the last server when I realized I was having too much fun constantly reconfiguring it. It's like a never ending open system of opportunity... lots of stuff to play with to do nerdy stuff My main system is the only Win 7 64bit box. All the rest here are XP Pro... set and forget

I have some boxed Linux from about 15 years ago still. It murdered me back then. But, it is now pretty plug and play off the live CD's and it seems to work pretty well with most hardware. I do not understand Linux at all and my DOS commands don't work so I was never good with typing stuff in the terminal. However, Ubuntu has been working nicely for me for some time. I threaten to move to Linux everytime Microsoft churns me and who knows I might. I used to stick with Windows since I had some configuration skills but Windows is drifting away from the old W95 look and feel and I find it harder and harder to keep it looking and acting like it always has. Linux, under the hood, is alien to me even after fooling with it all these years. But, it can do most things that I wish and Wine is also always getting better so it can even run a number of Windows programs. Perhaps someday I will figure Linux out a little better so that I don't have to save all files to the desk top and so that I am able to navigate to various locations, etc. But, as it stands I appear to he stuck with Windows due to some legacy programs that I use a lot and inertia. At least I can restore my latest Ghost image when Windows punks out on me. I have not really found a open source backup for Ubuntu that I am confident with. Still, a freeware OS does appeal to me as I love freeware.

[Glenn_03Cobra]

I started in the DOS world and was one of those that whined, when GUI came into play. At the time, I could do stuff faster and better than the young know-it-all knuckle heads that wanted GUI... They're the same guys that have much more money than me now

[Tetge]

Yes, macros and batch files and all that. My brother still uses scripting. I always tell him that it is easier and faster to click an icon but he is old school. If you discount my Tandy that had 4k of memory ( I upgraded to 16k) and used basic Basic and a cassette drive, I really started with Win2.9, or thereabouts and DOS was required if one wanted to play games or have sound or almost anything. You had to run Memmaker and even that was not enough to truly optimise the upper and lower memory. You had to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get video and sound. It was not until W95 that things started to get easier and W98, particularly SE, got really nice from a no DOS was necessary point of view. I still have the last version of DOS on some floppies, BTW. I took a step back with NT4.0, as it was not plug and play but it also had no USB support so it was not long term viable. But W2K was my favorite OS of all time. When I got churned out of W2K, ironically due to no mouse drivers from Logitech, I got XP Pro. At first XP annoyed me but ultimately it got really smooth and reliable and it stayed that way for years. But then, along came the HD camera and it ruined everything once again since it did not want to play with XP very well. Now 64 bit W7 still gives me errors, such as side by side, and it dings my reliability index every time there is any gliche in any program, and it sometimes winks out and freezes or restarts for no apparent reason. But, Live!MovieMaker processes the MP4 GoPro stuff so??????? All these years of advancement in the OS and sometimes I have to turn off the power supply at the back of the computer to get it to reboot. Real progress.....

[Glenn_03Cobra]

Sounds like you have some driver / hardware issues. My W7 box gets rebooted about once every week or two. It has never locked-up nor given me errors. XP was also reliable for me even with all the crud I used to do with it. But, my XP boxes choked on video capture, mainly due to ATI AIW cards I used. And, I've had to do a few hard restarts I need to pick up a device that will let me capture video for the W7 box for my camcorder. I have about 100 tapes that need to be edited and archived. Lately, I've been using my GoPro HD cam instead of the camcorder.

[Tetge]

Sounds like you have some driver / hardware issues. My W7 box gets rebooted about once every week or two. It has never locked-up nor given me errors...........

That thought crossed my mind about drivers/hardware and this is why I have almost twin computers, power wise, since I replaced everything from the power supply up trying to get W7 more stable and I ended up with two complete systems, neither of which was terribly stable. In fact W7 has settled down some on both systems but it still is not rock stable. And, as time as passed, there have been a ton of 64 bit drivers and software and Windows patches released so some of them may have addressed some of my earlier issues. I do turn off the computer at night and perhaps this is one of my problems since those that leave them on 24/7 report better reliability. Some errors, such as the side by side errors, do not crash the computer or seemingly stop programs from functioning, and they seem to be related to the fact that I use an AMD CPU rather than an Intel as the config files that I looked at seem to be Intel based even though the computer knows that it is AMD based. It runs but protests but, there have always been little dings against AMD built into software, IMHO and this is why I was going to build a performance INTEL system for the first time since a Pentium 450, over clocked to Pentium 600 system that I built a million years ago before becoming an AMD fan boy. The hard crashes are seemingly random and may well be hardware related. perhaps issues with memory addresses? But, it is a fact that the same hardware works with Linux and used to work with XP, so I am going to continue to blame W7. Still, I have been encountering more and more difficulty building and configuring systems as hardware has evolved and software has churned and I have remained the same. I am both glad, and unhappy, that I now live so far away from Frys (they are the DEVIL) since back in the day the store was near and I could easily swap components using their liberal return policy, if I had issues with things like memory on a specific MB, etc. Now I live far, far, away, in a forgotten land and I usually get stuff from NewEgg, which has a much more repressive return policy. So, I no longer upgrade my system frequently after checking the latest Fry's ad which has saved me significant money. But, as I stated earlier, I was finally able to process GoPro HD video using W7. Although, I wish that I could edit the original MP4 files and stream the edited result as I could .avi files using VirtualDub. It would be nice to preserve the original MP4 quality rather than to deal with the diminished quality of the Microsoft .wmv conversion, although the abilty to make custom resolutions in Movie Maker did allow me to adjust to closer to the GoPro's bit rate with a custom 1080p save and this reduced the file size by 50% without any noticable reduction in the quality of the video. The GoPro shoots at about 15Mbps, or so, and, the default 1080p save in Movie Maker is 24.19Mbps and this uses 173.03MB/min. I lowered this to 12.23Mbps which still uses 87.46Mbps and the quality was good enough. I also created a couple of other wide format (scaled down from 1080p) non HD custom resolutions that only use around 6MB/min which allows me to send small videos under 25MB (the Yahoo limit) to people. They are not high quality but they work. So Live!MovieMaker is not all bad.

[Brakelate]

Holy Crap. You two used to attend Star Trek conventions together as well? Lets get back to cars, bikes and cameras before I gag myself with a floppy disc! Hahahaa. Guess we need to add a "Computer Corner" in addition to the "Motorcycle" area?

[Glenn_03Cobra]

That's a negative on the computer corner lol...

[Brakelate]

...but a "positive" on the Trekkie Conventions?

[Julie GT07CS]

Jesus, tetge, do you know there is a key on your computer that you can press (ENTER) that splits your sentences up and makes nice paragraphs so old folk like me can READ your posts without sticking a knife in my eye????

[Brakelate]

In short, no he does not.

[Tetge]

Jesus, tetge, do you know there is a key on your computer that you can press (ENTER) that splits your sentences up and makes nice paragraphs so old folk like me can READ your posts without sticking a knife in my eye????

I noticed that the white font on the black background sort of ran together. And it was small and somewhat hard to read compared to other forums that I sometimes post on. But, I assumed that the look was the preferred look of the site administration and, when in Rome.................. But, knife in the eye? That seems extreme but I guess that makes me a sort of a posting ninja. But, I am a master of the long sentence and lengthy post as well as the long GoPro video, so terse posts are not often made by me. Still, I can't help the format that the board uses. The font is tiny on my 27" monitor at 1920x1080, and, when I leave this site and go to other sites, I am initially blinded by the brightness that is masked by the black and green colors of this site.

And, I do use the space bar between sentences although it barely shows as well as the enter function when I deem it appropriate. It is the format and style of the board, not a mechanical failure on my part.

[Julie GT07CS]

I am glad to see you understand we are indeed, a ninja website. We are constantly in stealth mode to distract all newcomers.

And yes, it IS a mechanical failure on your part. You need to understand to concept of a paragraph. I will have to come to your house and physically show you, I guess. heh heh heh

[Tetge]

I am glad to see you understand we are indeed, a ninja website. We are constantly in stealth mode to distract all newcomers.

And yes, it IS a mechanical failure on your part. You need to understand to concept of a paragraph. I will have to come to your house and physically show you, I guess.

So, English sentence structure and composition are important on this site? Such pressure since I never done too good with that there technical English stuff and I always hated it in school. Of course, as an historian, I was required to write and publish, but, history is droll and historians often are wordy and they also tend to create long paragraphs, so I managed to survive. However, I would argue that it is appropriate to use one paragraph on a post, but opinions may vary. Still, one post, one paragraph seems to be a good rule. It could be argued that if one does not stay on topic, perhaps multiple paragraphs might be required, but, that would never apply to me since I never, ever, stray from the topic.