Contour HD, with battle damage

The Contour HD snuck up on me.  I was an early adopter of the Gopro Hero HD, and I was busy flying and making movies, not reading gadget sites.

I have been hoping for some time that we’d see a light, flash based HD camera with a slimmer form factor.  The Gopro HD Hero is great, but it presents a lot of frontal area.

The Contour lays flat, and it also has an innovative three position lens that allows you to shoot right side up from the get-go.  The Gopro handles this in software, but the firmware that supported that feature was painfully slow to emerge.

The Contour is also easier to use, in my opinion.  There is one power button on the back (it takes surprisingly long to boot up), and then a huge slide switch to start or stop recording.

The camera records to microSD (up to 32g, which is good for 8 hours), and connects to the computer via a mini USB cable.  The camera presents itself to Windows as a disk drive, no specialized drivers to install.  I really like devices that are set up this way, as a matter of fact I’ve never installed the software that comes with the camera.

I’m not as excited about the slide rail mounting system.  It does not feel as positive or high-quality as the Gopro setup.    The profile mount accessory is probably the most useful for R/C, but at $20 a pair, Contour mounts are a lot more expensive per airplane than Gopro’s mount.  *Note – Sometimes, various shopping sites will list the left vs. right side profile mount as cheap as $13/pair.

We had no problems in operation.  The dual laser pointers are useful for aiming, we basically just strapped it on and went.  On the second flight, I decided to mount it on the belly of a Great Planes Siren.

I really like the narrower 135 degree viewing angle vs. the Gopro’s 170 degrees. The color is slightly better than my new Gopro, and miles ahead of the first, early production Gopro we purchased.

In what was designed to be a much more relaxing video, here’s a fim taken from my 3.1m Topmodels.cz Grafas. I say ‘supposed to be’ because in this film, the radio system had a failure, and the airplane ended up spiraling in on failsafe, and hitting the ground HARD.

The camera shows some physical scars from this incident, but tested just fine after this crash.  If that was not bad enough, we dumped the Contour _again_, the following weekend – Mike was flying an MPX Easy Glider Pro and had an elevator servo foul.  He chopped the throttle late, the prop folded exactly 2 frames before impact!

We are _not_ a crash club, but if we were, the Coutour would still serve us well.

We shot all of those videos back in June.  I was in Southern Oregon mid July, and I took a flight around Crater Lake with an MPX Cularis, sporting the Contour up top.

The camera did a wonderful job, and even conveyed the unique blue you see at Crater Lake.   On a sailplane the size of the Cularis, you don’t even notice that the camera is there.

I weighed my contour at 4.3 ounces with the battery and SD card installed.  The waterproof case for the Contour adds about 4.7 ounces to the overall weight, which would have it coming in around 9 ounces with the case on.  This is a couple more than the Gopro, but remember that the Gopro has no natural protection unless the case is installed, so it always weighs 6.3 ounces no matter what.

I’ve interacted with Contour as a company twice, and Gopro a few times.   I can say that Contour is a heckuva lot more accessible, and they also provide telephone technical support.  Gopro support is email only, which can be limiting.

In summary, I think the Contour is a great camera for R/C use, and has some distinct advantages over the older Gopro.  In specific, I’m very excited by the rapid development of new products and accessories for the camera.

Firstoff, Gopro:  We really need the proposed upcoming firmware patch that will flip the video right side up in the camera without needing to use editing software.  I end up flipping it in Premiere Elements, which is time consuming.

The non-waterproof door is ideal for RC use.  You can hear plenty of detail when the motor is not running, and also wonderful wind and servo noises if that’s the kind of thing you like.  Everybody I talk to says they prefer music, but I can see some utility for having accurate sound reproduction, especially from a glider.

Here is my latest attempt at a short (~7 minute) film.  I took it from the same brushless Aspire as I did the last video, and I really tried to use only the sections of footage that I thought were interesting.  There are plenty of air/air shots of the other planes at the field, and what I think is some of the best bits from ~25 minutes of footage.

We also had a chance to play with the still camera mode, and this turned out very nice.  I will comment that it looks a little grainy under certain circumstances, but I also didn’t take any pains to adjust the camera for the ambient settings.  First time.

5MP still image from Gopro HD Hero

 The wide angle is extreme, and it does look cool for a lot of stuff.  At this price point, I’d love to see a camera of this quality that had interchangeable lenses. 

It handles difficult conditions well – the sun is a nightmare in this shot:

5MP still image from Gopro HD Hero

Next I’ll try some more exotic locations.

I’ll continue to experiment as my time and hardware permits. 

Also worth checking out – a gent named Mario Schimanko wrote me last week, he’s got a Hero and has been doing some FABULOUS work on Vimeo.  Check it out!

- Eli

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!