GoPro HD Hero 2... Someone persuade me not to get one...

[Doodles19]

Hello chaps!

I realise this has probably been done to death, I did a search, but to no avail.

Someone persuade me not to get one, as they are looking fairly attractive to me at the moment!!

1) Are they easy to use? I've been suckered in by the amazing looking videos all over YouTube and want to have a go myself. Are the standard, in car/external mounted car shots, for example, hard to do? I don't want to buy one and then find out it's incredibly hard to use and not be able to do anything with it.

2) Editing... I don't have any specialist software and have never really done much editing before. Is bog standard old iMovie on a MacBook Pro going to be sufficient, or am I dreaming?

3) The lack of an LCD screen worries me. I know you can buy the external one, but that it also sucks battery life and is £70 more. Has anyone had trouble lining up shots etc without having a screen? I'd rather not do an hours worth of recording and find out I have a brilliant shot of my knees and not much else.

4) Stills wise, are they any good? I'd be getting one with a view of replacing my knackered old point-shoot jobbie.

Cheers guys!

Doodles19

Edited by Doodles19 on Sunday 26th August 01:37

[mrmr96]

Not a stills camera! lol!

[Doodles19]

mrmr96 said:

Not a stills camera! lol!

Pretty sure it is capable of taking stills...

[mrmr96]

Doodles19 said:

mrmr96 said:

Not a stills camera! lol!

Pretty sure it is capable of taking stills...

Well yeah, but it's not very easy to use for that purpose and the focal lenght will usually be totally innapropriate. It's an action sports camera and does not replace a P&S IMO.

[Dave 500]

Pictures taken with a GoPro 2







One of the biggest let downs with the GoPro cameras is the sound its truly rubbish, you will need an external mic.

Editing wise you can use a MacPro with IMovie but it could take along time to render depending on the spec.

The motor sport mounts work ok however you can get these which imo are much better

http://www.b-hague.co.uk/hague_car_suction_mount_s...

[andy-xr]

They're very easy to use, dont require any specialist editing software (you can if you want just use it how it's spat out) . Quality is very very good, as you'd hope. The lens is pretty wide, which you can adjust in the menus

The one thing that got me about it was the holder thing, I assumed that the plastic holder it sits in was just for those ary surfer chick things on their advert, but thats how you use it with the mounts. I bought the car suction cup and I think it came with the body holster thing that you tie around yourself.

I've been stunned by the quality, I took a video getting tattooed and I've cropped and cropped in on it with no massive problems. Obviously I wouldnt want to print it, but for facebook/instagram etc it's perfectly fine for stills

[otolith]

If you are only going to stick them on the internet, you can grab reasonable stills from the video output:



Or just set it going on time lapse and see what you get:



No viewfinder is the main issue with using them as a stills camera.

[mrmr96]

Thanks for adding the photos chaps, that probably adds some balance against what I've said - because to be fair some of those photos look very good. I still maintain that it's not a P&S replacement though, because more often than not I'll not want my still photos to be very wide angle 'fish eye' jobs, but yes that is ok in some circumstances.

[Rogue86]

We bought around 14 of these at work, and I hate to tell you this but they're fantastic.

Doodles19 said:

1) Are they easy to use? I've been suckered in by the amazing looking videos all over YouTube and want to have a go myself. Are the standard, in car/external mounted car shots, for example, hard to do? I don't want to buy one and then find out it's incredibly hard to use and not be able to do anything with it.

For me, their biggest advantage is that they're particularly easy to use. There are only two buttons, so it's a bit like setting up a watch in terms of functions. Once set-up, they're essentially one-button-record, meaning you can take them out of your bag, sucker them on and press the button.

You can use any basic editing software. We use Adobe Premier and I'm sure there is some tachno-babble reason we only ever use 720 instead of 1080, but I'm not a qualified videographer so couldn't tell you why.

Ours have the LCD screens and they do make things much easier. If your plan is just to get some footage of you mucking around, then you can probably cope without one. If you planned on getting serious though, I'd save for one. They do eat the battery though.

I wouldn't say necessarily they're a replacement for a P&S, but then I also wouldn't go to the expense of buying a seperate P&S if I'd bought a GoPro. In fairness, you'll find most phone cameras are better than both these days. You can set the angle of view so that it's not fish-eye, and on a seperate note I'd disagree that the sound is terrible. When they're inside the cases, the sound can be incredibly accurate.

Here are some Youtube links from where we've mounted them over the past few months. You'll have to excuse the quality, these are compressed massively and we have very little choice where to mount these; most Youtube critics seem to forget that they're mounted inside a live-fighter jet cockpit. These are the 'rushes'; raw footage sent straight to the media once they've been compressed.

Typhoon (ignore the 'expert' 25fps comment, the jerkiness of the video is down to compression afterwards as our FTP server was throwing a hissy fit at the time over file size):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtLRExJoKBQ

Granted, the sound on this one is terrible. Strangely, the camera we had onboard another Red came back with crystal clear audio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-1ZtS6MBIk&lis...

Lancaster poppy drop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgqksI8WMuk&lis...

Lancaster jubilee:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqiVTLBl3FQ&fea...

Now we've got the hang of the basics of these, we'll be using them a lot more extensively and for other products.

Edited by Rogue86 on Monday 27th August 13:07

[Magic919]

Buy it. The lens is very wide, so the lack of a screen isn't such a handicap. I bought the screen as I thought I knew better. You can quickly remove it. I bought the wifi back, so had to remove the LCD in the end.

[Doodles19]

Cheers for the comments!

... I'm now very tempted!

[TobyLaRohne]

I'm going to get one in september for my birthday, I want to make some short videos of hooning about in my car. Can't wait to get involved with it. How long does the battery last on time lapse?

[Big E 118]

I got one a couple of weeks ago and have only had a few hours to mess around with it. It spends most of it's time attached to my sons skateboard!

I'm no photographer and a complete novice at any video editing.

I'm very impressed with the build, picture and sound quality. I have literally spent 10 mins messing with a bit of video footage on imovie (ipad) and seems very easy.

This is my first attempt which took 10 mins and just a test to see what I could do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7eECDRG8Eo&fea...

[otolith]

TobyLaRohne said:

How long does the battery last on time lapse?

About three hours on one shot per five seconds. You may run out of memory before you run out of battery if you use a higher frequency and a modest memory card - at 1 shot per second, a 16GB card was full before the battery was dead.

[MagicalTrevor]

Doodles19 said:

Someone persuade me not to get one...

No! Buy one... in fact, buy the Motorsports pack

[TomN94]

MagicalTrevor said:

Doodles19 said:

Someone persuade me not to get one...

No! Buy one... in fact, buy the Motorsports pack

Don't. Well do, but take my advice, as someone who did.


If you attach to a car, do not be fooled how safe it is. I attached mine to the back of a friends R8, it was damn near clean, it had a slight bit of dirt on it from a 5 mile jaunt down the M1. Thats it. I put it on, fastened it secure, gave it a little tug to make sure and it didn't budge. It felt like if I seriously wanted to pull it off, the bumper would come with it. I was confident.

We set off down the M1, 30 supercars in tow, hence the use of the GoPro, with it being such a large convoy, we never really exceeded 70mph, as, thats illegal....40 minutes later we get a phone call, from one of the guys further back in the convoy asking if we had a GoPro attached to the car, not knowing of course, we said "yeah, we do"..."not any more you don't, Me, Peter and a few others have just run over it"


Cue me headbutting the dashboard on the R8...until my friend said "He's always pulling pranks on me, I bet he's lying"

He wasn't. Bye bye £150. Bye bye.



So the moral of the story is, no matter how confident you are that your GoPro is secure, don't trust it, and make sure, even if there is the slightest bit of dirt underneath the suction pad, get rid of it, it needs to be perfectly clean.

[Craikeybaby]

I was thinking of getting one, however I decided not to, as I know I wouldn't be bothered setting up shots and then reviewing/editing all the footage. The problem with video is that it is easy to capture, but takes a lot of work to get a good finished result, it's fine if you want to show say catching one wave surfing/a trick on a BMX, but who would want to sit through even a whole hour of surfing/cycling/driving?

[MagicalTrevor]

I made a lanyard out of para-cord plus a carabiner. I make sure it's tethered when on the outside of the car... however, I'm not sure what's worse, losing £200 GoPro or the damage caused by a dangling GoPro!

[Big E 118]

TomN94 said:

R8 and squashed GoPro story

Hmm, may have to re-think as I bought mine to attach to a Corvette for a 1,200 mile US road trip!

[otolith]

I've got fairly confident about sticking mine on the outside of the car, though in most of the videos I can see a lot of nervous glances in the mirrors... You can get alternative mounting kits, though, if you don't trust the one that comes with it.