Hi All,
I am having some issues with my new GoPro Hero2 camera, and I'm wondering if those of you who own one have found any solutions that might apply or have suggestions for same:
1) When used in the waterproof housing, there is little if any recording of outside sound (as expected; the sealed, boxlike housing prevents sounds from reaching the mic). This isn't so bad, and I figured I could just lay a music track over whatever low ambient sounds got recorded. Eh, no. Unfortunately, what gets recorded periodically are some really loud pops and creaks, all apparently being telegraphed through the case from the mount and attachment bolt. These things are really loud, and when I go into my sound editor, there is no way I can overlay them with a music track; I have to go through and edit out all the clicks and pops before I can lay down a clean track.
I have found if I insert the accidental-release-preventer (a little, white rubber piece that prevents the Fastex-like mount form coming undone under high g-loads), much of this telegraphed creaking disappears, so long as the case/housing is not itself in contact with anything. Unfortunately, the little rubber plug won't work with the j-hook I use to invert the camera and mount it to the chest harness (the camera allows recording to be inverted as well, so playback is rightside-up, even if the camera is not).
2) Closely related to the issues above, I find when the camera is rigidly mounted (say, using the tripod adapter and my Rowi camera clamp on a rack crossmember), a lot of sound is transmitted to the camera's mic by conduction. It sounds about the same as when I use my mechanic's stethoscopes to listen for dead fuel injectors...every freehub click, chain roller, ball-bearing, and brake release gets recorded at maximum volume. I am thinking of renaming Sherpa to "Harley", as the sound is almost like the distinctive, uneven potato-potato-potato sound of a Harley just coming off idle as it pulls away from a traffic light. I...didn't know Sherpa had it in him!
3) Both these sorts of sounds are muted to a degree by using the skeleton-back on the main housing, allowing much more ambient sound to reach the mic. The problem remains to some extent, and is compounded by a good deal of wind noise and of course the camera's vital parts (i.e. the unshielded HDMI and USB ports) are exposed to dust and rain with the skeleton back, so that's a no-go for foul weather and dirty conditions (windblown desert playa, for example).
I think the ultimate solution might be to drill and tap a hole in the case, gasket it, and insert the screw-plug for an external mic. This would get around the problem of case nose. While the case would no longer be submersible, I believe it could be made essentially water- and dust-tight and would result in audio input only from the external mic. Alternatively, I may make a little null plug of plastic to insert in the mic jack, interrupting it and resulting in a truly dead audio track. That would work, and also save me hours of hand-editing the audio, allowing me to lay down a narration track in the studio later.
4) I've found battery life under ideal conditions is about two hours, starting from fully charged. Turning off the mode-record confirmation beeps extends that, as does going to just a single LED indicator from four possible. The LCD back eats batteries like mad, but can be turned off immediately after checking aim, and then it becomes an non-issue except for playback.
5) I've got a number of real and virtual laptop computers on my network running a variety of operating systems. What I have is lots storage and lots of memory (fast RAM and lots of it). I have CPU processing speed. What I don't have is a lot of graphics memory or acceleration (speed). That means I really only get good, clear, artifact-free playback of 720p GoPro video on my Linux machines. Under Windows, I get stepped, stuttering playback to a greater or lesser degree. Unfortunately, this means 1080p -- the only mode that allows the choice of three fields of view (narrow, medium, and wide) -- is unplayable and unviewable for me unless I spring for a new and speedier computer (Yay and ouch at the same time...I had other plans for the money, and had hoped to get a takealong laptop for use while touring instead of another machine for video playback and editing at home; I don't have space for a desktop tower and monitor, which would be a cheaper and more versatile route to go).
I've tried (down-)converting from MPEG-4 to MPEG, AVI, and DIVx, and then the videos all play fine, but with a noticeable loss of quality that is really unacceptable after seeing what is possible before conversion. I've been playing with YouTube and looking at the down-conversion that takes place there. I have no issues playing-back You-Tube videos at even the highest resolution with the same machines that are stumbling with the GoPro native format here at home.
By the way, all videos play back smoothly on the camera's LCD back, and when I (try to) view them on the computer, they have already been ripped to the resident (and fastest) hard drive of each machine, rather than trying to play them off the camera via USB.
Part of my problem may be coodec-related. I upgraded my Windows VLC media player and got slightly better results, and an update to my K-Lite codec pack for Windows Media Player helped as well (in XP Pro, Vista, and 7 Ultimate), but not enough to get me where I need to be. totem movie player in Linux did the best, to my surprise, even better than SMPlayer, Banchee, and Kaffeine (on a KDE distro). VLC/VideoLAN did not do as well on any of my Linux distros.
Any suggestions for getting smoother playback at higher resolutions?
By the way, the higher resolutions also eat the GoPro camera batteries faster (probably due to greater processor conversion loads and the massive data files that result when written to SDHC). At 1080p, it doesn't take long to rack up gigabytes of video files, which limits storage (even on an 32GB SDHC card and on hard drives at home. The raw files are way too large to burn to DVD).
I've got a few more emerging issues related to using the camera on a bicycle, but I'll wait a bit to post them till I can get all the parameters nailed down and repeatable.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have.
Best,
Dan.
