GoPro Hero3 Camera on a Motorcycle
I have a GoPro Hero3 digital
camera on my FJR1300 that I use for shooting video while I ride.
The camera is tiny, about 1x1x2 inches. It comes in a waterproof plastic box
which is also a wrist mount. It has fixed focus and zoom and records onto flash
memory, so it has no moving parts: perfect for a harsh environment.
This camera cost under $150 when I got it. It's almost identical to the
company's newer model (the Hero5) that lists at $140. Mine takes 3-megapixel
stills, not 5. There are a couple of other differences too.
My Bottom Line
This is a fun toy for the bike, and at the time I bought it there was no
competition anywhere near the price. But if I were spending the same money today
I'd look closely at an
Oregon Scientific ATC 3K, or for less money the older ATC 2K. (Shop around
for better prices.) They have more and better resolution, capacity, and
features.
If you are serious about shooting video from the bike, for a "real" video
project instead of as a toy or a keepsake or "look what I did!" sharing, then
you need to look at much more expensive gear. You want a bigger lens, better
optics, HD resolution, high-quality video compression, and probably on-bike
power and longer recording times. Plus a stabilized mount without vibration.
For other inexpensive camera ideas, see the "Competing Cameras" section
below.
Sample Movie
The sample movie is from a ride I took in March, 2009 along the Angeles
Crest Highway north of Pasadena, California. I was westbound, and it was midday so
the sun is generally to the south - that is, to my left. Sometimes you can see the haze
caused by the sun hitting the weatherproof box. At the end, notice how there is
a lot of glare from the sun being in front of the camera: the plastic has gotten
dirty and hazy from dried road spray. When I enter the
shade of the trees at the very end, it sharpens up considerably: this is because
that sun glare is gone.
The compressed WMV movie has lost a lot of detail (pine needles, leaves, rock
wall detail) but you can get the general idea. It was encoded at 1 megabit per
second to keep the file size small. The audio is also compressed: the
water-in-a-pipe sound is from the compression, not the original audio.
The audio in the
sample movie was recorded at the camera's "high-sensitivity" setting. I recently learned
there is a "low-sensitivity" setting which would probably be better for
capturing the engine noise without the annoying clicks and buzzing of the
overloaded microphone.
In both movies you can see that the playback is not perfectly smooth - it
jerks sometimes. That's because the camera drops frames. I find this very
annoying, and I talk more about it below.
Size, Weatherproofing, and Mounting
The Hero3 camera
without its housing is very small: as wide as a standard matchbox, and not much taller, and as thick as
about three matchboxes stacked up.
It comes with its own weatherproof housing and mounting strap. The housing is hard
plastic with a water-tight gasket. They don't guarantee it's waterproof but it
will do pretty well; you just have to keep the gasket clean and be careful with
it. The lens looks
through a crystal (or at least extra-clear plastic) window in the box, and there are
buttons that poke through to let you power on the camera and operate it.
With the plastic housing it's still quite small. The housing has a Velcro
strap attached which you can wrap around your wrist or something as a way to
carry the camera hands-free, ready to aim and shoot while you're skiing or
kayaking or whatever.
Below you can see the camera in its housing and mounted on the bike. I mount the camera by wrapping the strap around the left-side "Tip
Over Guard," which I have extended with spacers so it sticks out farther
than usual. The
company makes other camera and mounting combinations too.

Using the Camera
The camera uses SD card memory (2GB maximum size) and two AAA batteries. I use rechargeable NiMH batteries
rated at 900 mAh: they last for a little over an hour of shooting, and the 2GB memory card fills up in an hour, so it's a good match.
I can shoot for an hour,
then change both the batteries and the memory. I carry a 15-minute NiMH charger with
a 12V plug so I can charge several sets before going to bed for a night stop, or even
charge two sets (4 batteries)
during a meal stop. (I can even charge while moving, but I don't like to have
that much going on at once.) I try to carry 2-3 cards for each day of a
multi-day trip. The 2GB cards are super-cheap these days, cheaper than
regretting you don't have enough. If you carry a laptop and drain your cards
into it every day, you only need one day's worth of cards.
To set up for shooting, you take the camera out of its housing, insert memory
and batteries, replace the camera and clip the housing shut. (You have to stop
to do this:
there is no way you're going to accomplish this safely while moving.) Now you
are ready to start shooting when you want to. In a pinch, I can hit the "power
on" and then the "start recording" buttons while in motion. Normally I stop the
bike and start the camera when I know something "good" is coming up, and then
just let it run for an hour. The "good roads" that I like aren't short enough to
fit two of them into a single hour of video, so there's no point in turning the
camera off to save either memory or batteries.
Video Quality
The video quality is just passable. The camera shoots video at 512x384
pixels, which is less than full "standard definition" TV (generally 640x480). Unless you
show it on a big screen, you don't really notice the lack of resolution when
watching moving video. Fine detail is mostly lost anyway: the optics and
sensitivity are so bad that more pixels probably wouldn't help. As an example of
the quality, I find I can never read the words on a road sign as it goes by.
As you can see in the sample movie, the image wavers sometimes. This is
caused by vibration of the camera, because the image is not read off the sensor
all at once: it's "scanned" over a short period of time, and if the camera is
moving (vibrating) during that time, you can get the wavering effect. I haven't
tried any elaborate vibration-isolation mounting.
More seriously, the camera also drops frames sometimes. Really, it
drops frames very often. It makes the video subtly jerky instead of smooth, especially
when playing at
regular speed. (It's less noticeable when you speed up playback; see below.) Some people don't notice, or
they can tell it's not perfectly smooth
but can't explain why not. But I see it all the time and it really bothers me.
The camera drops frames when its video processing chip can't finish compressing
and writing a frame to the memory in time. This happens most when there are
lighting changes, like when you go in and out of shadows. It also happens with
frames that have a lot of detail in them, because they take longer to compress
to a given size. I asked the company about this specifically and they said the
newer Hero5 acts the same way.
The image quality also suffers from looking through the plastic housing all
the time. You
want to keep the little lens window clean. I had a whole hour's worth of video come out foggy
when I passed through some salt spray on the Pacific Coast Highway and it dried on the housing.
Since then, if I notice any spray I wet my finger or a cloth and
wipe off the lens window.
As you might expect, the camera works best in full daylight, with the sun behind you. When the sun
is beside the camera or anywhere in front of it, you can get haze and "dazzle" from
optical imperfections in the housing. And of course
if the sun is visible in the frame, you've got a bright thing in the sky and
you're looking at the shadow side of everything in the landscape. If you plan
ahead you can put the camera on the bike's "shady side" so there isn't as much
haze from the sun dazzling off the plastic.
This is not a night-shooting camera: you won't see anything if it's dark out.
Watching the Video
When you get home, you want to copy the movies from the SD memory cards to a
computer. I'm a PC, not a Mac, so I can't talk about Macs. The video is
compressed with "MJPG" (Motion-JPEG) compression, which is something the Media
Player in Microsoft Windows knows how to play without extra downloads. At least,
mine seems to.
The very good video processing program
VirtualDub doesn't like the way this
camera encodes audio, so I have to turn off audio processing to use it. I
haven't researched whether there is a plugin I need to make it work.
The VLC Media Player will play and
convert both
audio and video correctly. But it only plays at normal speed - at least the
version I have does.
I find that normal-speed playback seems sluggish: things aren't moving as
fast as I remember them from the ride. I think this is because the camera's
field of view is fairly narrow, so what you're seeing is still mostly well in
front of the bike when it passes out of view to the side.
In Windows Media Player you can select View > Enhancements > Play Speed
Settings and make it play back faster. It seems to me that 1.2x feels about like
it did live. Playing at 2x speed is fun, feels like fast-motion. Anything faster is just for
skimming through, not really for watching.
Converting and Uploading the Video
One thing people like to do with their video is share it on YouTube and
similar video-sharing sites. I haven't done this so I don't have details, but I
know you'd want to trim your movies down to the most interesting parts, and maybe
make them play back fast (see above), and maybe put some audio or titles on them. I
use Adobe Premiere Pro for this kind of thing, but that's overkill for a little
motorcycle movie that will be compressed to very low resolution and quality by YouTube.
At 2GB for an hour of video, the original AVI file has a data rate of
5mbits/sec. With MJPEG compression, that is not great. This makes for large files even
without especially high quality. By comparison, the WMV sample movie above is encoded at 1mbit/second:
you lose a lot of detail but you can still see what it was like. Flash and MP4
usually gives better quality at low bit rates, but not necessarily: when there
is a lot of motion and lighting changes, they're actually pretty bad. I don't know
what bit rates and quality you would get from YouTube's standard and HQ modes.
Other Camera Features
Besides shooting video, this camera shoots stills at three megapixels; its
newer replacement the Hero5 shoots at five megapixels. It has a self-timer, and
you can tell it to shoot a burst of three pictures.
The camera also has a continuous shooting mode where it shoots one still
picture every five seconds until you stop it. This mode should last longer than
an hour on a battery charge, and it will certainly hold more than an hour's
worth of shots on a memory card. If you want to capture documentation of a ride
or just take the chance that you might capture a few great views without
stopping, you could try this mode. (Imagine if you're snorkeling or kayaking or
something: you can set the camera in this mode when you start, and then when you
see something you just aim there for a few seconds to capture it - no need to
fiddle with buttons under water or even to use two hands.)
The still image quality is again just passable - better than nothing, but
this shouldn't be your vacation snapshot camera. It has no flash, no zoom, poor
color and light sensitivity... It wouldn't be good enough to talk about at all
except for the ruggedness that lets you use it in active outdoor settings.
There is no screen at all: you can not see the images you have shot using
just the camera.
The camera will display movies and stills on a TV, using the supplied custom
USB-to-TV cable. But mostly you'd want to transfer stuff to a computer for
post-processing.
Competing Cameras
There are a few other cameras in the sub-$150 price range to consider: the
various cameras from GoPro, the ATC-2K and ATC-3K from Oregon Scientific, and
the Tachyon XC from www.TachyonInc.com. See
the four-camera
shootout at www.helmetcamreview.com.
(Note the wide price variation among the cameras there.) Another good site with
reviews is
www.helmetcameracentral.com.
The GoPro camera people have a line of wide-angle cameras
which show more of the view, but the wide angle can also make things seem small
and far away. All higher-resolution (HD) cameras are way outside this price
range, as are cameras with high memory capacity for longer recording, MP4
compression, and other features.
Kodak has announced something that looks like a real step up:
the
Kodak Zx1 due for release in April 2009. It's a solid-state video camera (no
moving parts) that shoots at 720p resolution for $150 (list). They say it's
weather-resistant. It even has an optional remote control, so you can turn it on
and off from the saddle. Takes up to 32GB memory cards, so shooting time should
be easier to manage. Takes many types of batteries: AAs but also a Kodak
rechargeable lithium ion battery or external 5V. With external power and
recording at VGA resolution, I bet you could get 24+ hours continuous recording.
Mounting is the only challenge I see: the shape isn't a natural fit for a
helmet, handlebar, or frame mount.
This page was last edited
April 03, 2009. |