GoPro Impressions and Time Lapse tests

With all the good buzz for it, I have been knocking around the idea of picking up a GoPro Hero wearable HD camera. While browsing Amazon.com a few weeks ago I saw that they had the GoPro HD Motorsports bundle for a very cheap price(sub $250). Being a cheap bastard, I jumped at it. Good thing too, considering the price jumped back up to close to MSRP a few days later.

Well so far, I've just been playing it. Seeing how well the suction cup mount holds and where it's best mounted in the Element. Being the low-level OCD person I am, I really can't stand mounting any of the adhesive mounts permanently on the dash. Luckily the suction cup holds fine just above the center vents and gives the GoPro a good angle over the hood.

Tried other locations in the interior but having such a wide field of view makes it challenging to find good points to mount the camera. Found attaching it from the inside of the moon roof gives a neat fisheye  look at the inside of the Element but the exposure inside blows out the view outside the windows. Also I can see getting the GoPro LCD bacpac later just to help skip much of the trial and error that goes into finding the right placement.

The first thing I wanted to try was the time lapse shooting of the GoPro. This was one of the main features that drew me to it. I've been wanting to do more time lapse shooting but have been hesitant to wear out my DSLR doing it. The setup is easy once you figure out the menus and gives you nice flexibility in the shooting. You can pick from 2/5/10/30/60 second shooting increments. From there it will go till either the card is full or battery dies. To test it, I set it up to shoot my commute to and from work.

I set the GoPro to shoot every 2 seconds. At this setting, the first trip took over 900 shots. The second took over 3k shots since my commute generally sucks. I used Time Lapse Assembler for Mac to convert all the shots into a h.264 video @24fps. Then did a quick edit in iMovie '11 to add some audio.

Overall, I'm fairly pleased with how the GoPro performs. The low light performance isn't the best but that is to be expected for such a small sensor. The video recording is good. I plan on doing more shooting with it when I travel down to Anime Central in a few weeks. I'm going to try to do a time lapse of the road trip from the Cities down to Chicago. Will have to play with the mounting more though.