View Quicktime Video – 11mb

This weekend I had my first chance to test out my new helmet cam, the GoPro Helmet Hero. It’s a tiny little digital camera with a 170º fisheye lens enclosed in a waterproof casing, which mounts on top of my snowboard helmet.

The video I’ve posted here is just a mellow cruiser run that we lapped a few times… nothing too spectacular but heaps of fun nonetheless. It was mellow enough that we opted for the “Chinese Downhill” strategy of going all at once, and I went last hoping to get some of my friends on camera in front of me. I’m looking forward to filming some of the more intense lines we normally do around here.

More initial thoughts about this helmet cam below.

As you can probably tell by watching the video, I’m a total rookie at working with video files. The camera outputs AVI files, which I imported into iMovie, trimmed the beginning and end, added fade in/out transitions, and exported as a MPEG-4 Quicktime video. If anybody out there is well versed in processing and outputting video for the web, I’d love to hear any tips you can offer.

Since I’ve never used this helmet cam before, and there’s no playback screen on the camera itself, I just had to guess the angle to set it at. Considering the 170º fisheye view, I decided to point it at roughly a 45º angle, thinking that it would capture the tip of my board, to the horizon. I think I guessed pretty good, and that is basically the result I got.

As for the video results, there are obviously a few issues. The biggest problem I see is the random flickering of brightness. I think this is because the camera has a feature that tries to constantly adjust exposure on the fly, and it’s going a little haywire. I may try turning that off, if I can. Secondly, the video seems a bit underexposed generally. I tried brightening it up in iMovie, but that caused some wacky color artifacts, so I just left it as is. Finally, the sound is too quiet, due to the fact that the camera is completely enclosed in the waterproof casing. I tried pumping the sound up 150% in iMovie, but it’s not enough.

Anyhow, although the video quality is not the best ever, it does the job fine. I’m a photographer, not a cinematographer, and unlike still photos where image quality is paramount, these videos are simply good enough to post on my blog, which is just about all I intend to do with these anyways.

I hope to post more videos soon. Again, if anybody has tips or suggestions on how to process the videos better, or post the videos on my site better, please let me know!