HD hero

[dino g]

since i am not on here as much as i used to be did i miss you guys talking about this already?

http://www.goprocamera.com/products

i know it is not even 1/100th of red quality but it is still pretty freaken cool.

dino

 

[Steve Sherrick]

I know my friend Ken has one, and I think it was used to shoot some behind the scenes stuff on one of our recent shoots. Zac C. might be able to jump in and provide details. Knowing Ken, he'll find a way to make that little camera work wonders.

All of these mountable little cameras are pretty cool. Amazing what they can pack into such a small device.

 

[Alexis Hanawalt]

David Thies has one we used on an olympic ice skating promo mounted to a skater's helmet. If I remember correctly, they also attached it to a hockey puck. Pretty cool!

 

[Nick Gardner]

I have one, they are so cheap they are practically disposable, come in an underwater housing/crash housing, and make pretty damn good pictures.

Nick

 

[Anson Fogel]

Mediocre

Mediocre

I have one as well, have tested it against a 5Dmk2 for POV work on action sports. Still pretty disappointing, the 5d trounces it - but as the other posters say, its nearly disposable and does what it is meant to do quite well. The footage it generates, even after heavy processing, still can look quite poor when cut against better stuff, but it is quite a bit better than prior SD POV cams.

One note, it performs far better in a lot of light - as you would expect.

If you can put a 7d on the platform, you will still get materially better results, although rolling shutter issues are more noticeable on the canon.

 

[Curtis Stanton]

Has anyone here had the opportunity to compare the image quality of the Hero HD to that of the ContourHD 1080p http://www.vholdr.com/contourhd/helmetcam

 

[Craig Parkes]

My experience with Go Pro's in post is that they are pretty great for what they but they have a poor refresh and you will experience SIGNIFICANT skew.

I wouldn't recommend them for mounting on anything that is going to shake a lot, or undergo high G's, if the footage is at all mission critical, because they WILL exhibit skew, and it WILL be problematic.

 

[Nick Gardner]

Seemed to do alright here -

http://www.goprocamera.com/hdheropreview/

Click on the mountain bike down hill clip

Nick

 

[Craig Parkes]

Seemed to do alright here -

http://www.goprocamera.com/hdheropreview/

Click on the mountain bike down hill clip

Nick

One of the differences here is that they camera is attached to a natural stabilization device - the human body. As a helmet cam they are excellent i'd imagine, although even then if you were to look at the propeller of a plane it would exhibit skew.

Attached to anything that might achieve resonance in vibration or something like that (i.e a metal part of a vehicle) then you will get very bad CMOS skew.

this isn't a strike against the camera as such - but if people are looking for something to mount on vehicles then this is definitely an issue they need to be aware of (also the significant wide angle on those helmets and the first person POV limits the rate at which scenery actually changes, so the skew effect would be less noticeable then in other circumstances.)

Which I guess really just proves they are great value for money for their intended use - but as they saying goes there is no free lunch.

 

[Jon Howe]

David Thies has one we used on an olympic ice skating promo mounted to a skater's helmet. If I remember correctly, they also attached it to a hockey puck. Pretty cool!

Puck-cam. That sounds sick! You wouldn't have a link to that clip would you?

 

[Zac C]

Oh, just found this thread,

I played with one on set as Steve said, only had it in Timelapse mode, barely did any video.

From what I saw, it is a cheap fisheye camera, the quality is what you pay for it, and it seems the majority of the R&D went into the form factor, and not the Sensor, or quality