Gopro HD hero

Yesterday it was the first time I did a small test with the Gopro Hero HD.
And because the unit really surprised me I think it could be interesting to write a small review.

What’s the Gopro ?
The Gopro is a so called POV camera, or in other words Point Of View.
It’s a camera that is placed on a location that gives an interesting view and gives you as a film/video maker some unique videomaterial. Think about the cameras on racecars, motocross bikes etc. The Gopro does this but does it in full HD.

The Gopro for us ?
The first time I saw the Gopro was when I did the filming for Kelbytraining in Florida. We were shooting a BMX-er and our camera man Adam had a Gopro with him that was connected to the BMX bike, the results were stunning (soon to be seen on kelbytraining). Immediately I was thinking about situations were we could use a POV camera ourselves and before we knew it there were too many.
Think about using it on your holiday ?
How about all those beautiful drives which are impossible to capture with your handycam simply because you can’t hold it still enough or the angle is just not interesting from the car, the Gopro to the rescue. We bought the Gopro motorsports HD which comes with a suction cup which you can connect to your car or other areas where you have a flat surface. As you can see in the videos in a moment we did a small test by mounting the Gopro on the hood of our car and we drove a few miles to test and made a small video.

Were you mount the Gopro is up to you of course.
In the case of the test videos we mounted it on the hood of the car but I guess for holiday drives we will probably mount it on the roof. But you can also place it inside the car of course, where ever you think the view is best, it’s an incredibly flexible system. You also don’t have to be afraid for rain, the Gopro is placed inside a waterproof housing, the only “problem” can be water on the lens which is visable in the image (as you can see in the demo video).

Quality
To be honest we did not expect much.
The pricing of the Gopro in the Netherlands is app 350.00 euros and although that’s not cheap we expected a little better quality than youtube, or in other words lots of compression artifacts and soft details….. well to be honest I was surprised. The 1080 setting gives you a wonderful quality for such a small camera, and I was planning on using that setting for all our filming, until I experimented with the 720P60 setting. My jaw almost dropped to the ground. First the angle of view is much larger than the 1080 setting, and of course the quality of pans is much smoother due to the double frame rate, but the Gopro really shines here, I did not expect it to be that smooth, this opens a lot of possibilities with slowmotions and to be honest the 1080 quality is nice but the 720P does not appear to be much worse (probably 1080 is a bit too much for the small sensor). We did all comparisons on a 2.90mtr width screen with a JVC D-Ila HD990 projector. So quality wise the Gopro impressed us a lot. There will be better solutions without a doubt, but let’s put it this way, compared to filming with our Canon HF11 with a wideangle from the car this is a 100% improvement, add the 60 frames per second for ultra smooth movement and in my book we have a winner.

Controls
This is were the Gopro goes bad in my opinion.
The menus are very cryptic and for a card format I need the manual (maybe I get used to it).
The menu is displays on a very small LCD display and navigating it is more a feeling than that it works, but surprisingly it does work. A real negative is the way it plays back on the TV, maybe I’m missing something but I can’t fastforward, I can’t skip to the next video etc. it’s play or pauze or back to the beginning (don’t know how I did that by the way). All controls are operated with the shutter and powerbutton, I would have wished the Gopro would have some more controls to make navigation a bit smoother. But hey, officially we will copy everything to the Mac and work from there, but connecting the Gopro to a TV set with the supplied Component cables can be fun also 😀

Controls 2
When you get used to the menu, operation is very simple.
Power on the Gopro, press the powerbutton to go the the mode you want (ranging from 1 foto to a series of photos or a times series of photos or video) and you’re off. You can go silent by powering down the led on the Gopro (for spycam mode) or you can just leave it on to know you’re recording.

The suction cup
Because I don’t want to loose our new camera, the first testdrives were done with the suction cup on the hood and secured with a small failsafe to the grill of the car, but to be honest I don’t think it will fall off, I could move the car with the Gopro once it was stuck to the car. But better safe than sorry. I did not test the adhesive material that is also delivered with the Gopro and probably never will because for us the Gopro will not be mounted to one car/vehicle so the suction cup and gaffers tape will be solutions we use the most.

The videos
Here are two small videos we did very quickly on the 1080 setting and the 720P60 setting.
Youtube does destroy a lot of detail and smoothness, I know vimeo is better but I want to keep all our videos in one spot 😀

make sure you select the highest resolution, and again it gives a nice view of what the view is from the Gopro, quality wise it’s much better on our files.

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