11.12
I pre-ordered my Gopro HD Helmet Hero the first week of October, after yet another day of disappointment at the field with my Flycamone2.
Well, my unit turned up today on Fedex, and I regret that I pretty much trashed the box taking it apart. It’s got cool-looking packaging.
*More on the packaging later!
I’d been looking forward to this day for some time. Last week, I was in contact with the Support group at Gopro, and they are effective and nice. The company is located in Half Moon Bay, very close to where I live.
The instructions consist of a non-assuming large folded sheet of glossy paper. There is a surprising amount of information on this large form, and you can fold it up & fit it in your pocket without trashing it.
The instructions state that the battery comes with a storage charge of 50%, and that you can just go out and play if you like without hurting the battery, I like the fact that they thought of this. I was a good boy and charged the battery anyway.
I had a litle bit of a dilemma deciding where to mount the camera on my Aspire. The package came with a pair of nice sticky mounts for the camera, but I was nervous about just sticking this to the monokote. With the sun settling in the winter afternoon sky, I had an idea – use the ‘shoe’ for the camera that came with the packaging as a mount!
I quickly knocked the sides off with a hacksaw, drilled a couple of holes, backed the bolts up with some plywood to reinforce the weak balsa floor and called it good:
Now, in retrospect I realize that this mount could use some improvement. First of all, I need better foam dampening between the mount and the body of the airplane. Also, I think the packaging ‘shoe’ fits more loosely than the real thing, so this mount is definitely a 1.0 revision. In the video I hear something rattling, and I think it’s some combination of these problems causing the noise.
The camera has a number of modes, the nuances of which are discussed in the instructions. I wanted the glories of full-blown 1080p, though I ended up scaling that back down to 720p in Premiere later to reduce the size of the file I’d be uploading to Vimeo. When I got home and read the docs again I realized that I made an error – the camera has a nifty feature that allows you to tell it that it is inverted.
That way, it records the video on the SD in the correct orientation!
A note on noise: When inside the housing, this camera lives up to it’s claim of fending off wind noise. It has an amusing legend on the back of the unit, that advises the use of the waterproof case door if the wind encountered is expected to be faster than 100mph 
I decided to buy Adobe Premiere Elements as an editing tool – I’ve been using good old Windows Movie Maker for a long time. Most of my evening was spent purchasing, downloading, and getting to know the product. Overall, I’d rate the Adobe online fulfillment experience as ‘deeply annoying’, but we got the job done.
I need to experiment with some mount options to see what I can do about the noise of the motor resonating through the airplane, and I am planning to be very careful about where I fly until I get a larger glider. In it’s protective housing this camera weighs darn near 6.5oz, and the case is a blessing. It adds an ounce and a bit more to the overall weight, but it’s one tough cookie and you would be insane to use this camera for RC stuff without it.
The camera was easy to use, and I’m very happy with the results. Considering that I was flying in the poor light of a Winter sunset, had a quickly rigged mount plus lousy Premiere editing skills, this product is a miracle.
Update 11/19/2009 – I put the camera on my Ultra 25 in better light, better mount, and with the sub-100mph door. The results are much bettter.
.. Now it’s time to improve my skills at video editing, for a start!
