GoPro HD Hero Camera

Let me Google that for you

Looking forward to more rear camera slow mo action from you.

Sounds pretty interesting, biggest thing I see is they enabled 35MB/s which is double the cap bandwidth, it's supposed to eliminate allot of artifacts created during the capture stream. It applies to the Hero II also.

ProTune

The Hero 3 Black edition arrived today, the USB/Micro SD and HDMI ports are protected by a little removable plastic cover, easy to loose trailside but it should help reduce introduction of dust into the cam. The multipin battery backup connector is still open, I'll probably tape over that. The cam and case is noticable smaller front to back. Batteries now have a little grab tab

I need to buy some memory to try it out.

We have a hero HD that is probably going to become a roost cam

It's worth noting that ProTune requires fast cards. I was given a 16 gig Class 4 card when I bought my Hero II and when ProTune was enabled, it regularly stopped recording on its own at about 90 seconds.

FWIW, I got my hero3 black yesterday and needed to get a micro SD card. Radioshack has 32gb high speed ones on sale. Seemed like a good deal so thought I'd share. Expires saturday I think.

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=13239509

Playing with the 720p/120fps today:

<iframe width="853" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/aXp6sdfPdfo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

What is cap bandwidth?

Speaking of ProTune, does anyone use the free version of CineForm Studio that GoPro offers on there website?

http://gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-how-it-works/

Jon...

So how fast of a card do you think it will require?

Jon...

Class 10 at least.

There's no shortage of people who found out the way I did, when my camera kept stopping the recording.

Sorry, I meant capture bandwidth, if I'm reading (and understanding it) corectly they've doubled the speed at which the cam processes (samples) the captured video stream.

The black edition get a 3x increase in the capture bandwidth, the rest haxe 2x.

Def get a class 10 card. I've been using them ever since the Hero HD. Back then I had a class 4 that worked ok for the slower modes but as soon as you tried 60FPS or 1080P it'd just stop.

I did some reading and watched some videos. So, it's definitely a higher bitrate encoding that produces higher quality output.

The next question is, they talk a lot about processing it in Cineform Studio, which, apparently, substantially improves the color quality when you view it. But, can you just pull the video straight off the camera and watch it with no post-processing at all, exactly the same as if you recorded it with ProTune off? I realize the color might not look as good as the color would if you recorded with ProTune off, or if you did the Cineform processing. But, sometimes I would think you'd want to just go straight from recording on camera to watching without spending that additional time jacking around on your computer. If you like what you recorded enough, you could go back later and do the processing to sort the color quality.

Yes you could watch it without Cineform. The whole logic behind ProTune is that the camera tries to capture as much brightness information as possible. Normally when the camera exposes an image it compromises a lot by either making the dark parts of the image a little too black or the bright parts a little too white. It does this so that something like a persons face looks good but the sky might just look solid white and you would loose the details of the clouds. If you look at footage shot for tv shows, on very expensive digital cameras, it has a very bland, flat unsaturated look.The camera person is really just trying to capture all the image information possible without loosing any at the extremes of light and dark (clipping). Later the editor (really the colorist) will adjust that and make the image look great. Obviously for consumer cameras people want it to look good right away so most of them try expose for human faces and give bright saturated colors right out of the box. The problem is that when you try to adjust that to get a better looking sky for instance the information just isn't there.
As far as data rate goes, a higher rate allows the camera to compress the image less. In low motion situations you won't see a lot of difference between 18 and 35mbs but when there is a lot of quick movement it is very challenging for the camera to throw out 90% of the image information and still have a nice looking picture. Give the camera twice the amount of data and it doesn't have to throw away so much picture information in order to make the data rate limit.
I've over simplified a bit and there are other factors but this is how I usually explain it to people.

Motoriley, I went back and watched a vid on the Protune, I think you explained it very well. A GP's color can definately get a little freaked out, I see it allot in Utah where the Red Rock seems to overwelm the cam sometimes, I have no problem with doing a little color tweaking at processing time, hopefully the PT will help there.

I've been playing with me Hero3 a little just shooting some video inside and although I've tried many different settings teh videos always end being very choppy (a pause in capture every second or so) whether viewed straight from the SD card or downloaded to my pc first. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I am doing wrong? I've tried different resolution, fps, protune off/on, etc...
Thanks. Probably stating the obvious but this is my first gopro.

rtadlock, that looks nice! the 120fps really catches the slomo. Cool dog too

I've been doing alot of reading on some GP forums on the Hero3, seems battery life is a bit short. Apparently the MAH rating is the same as the Hero II battery but now the wifi is fully powered by the units battery which shortens it's life. I'm thinking I might use the cam without the wireless function to get max battery time. Wireless wasn't the main selling point, slomo and clairity like the clip above did it for me.

Sounds like your computer is too slow. Playing back mpeg4 needs a lot of horsepower in HD. You won't be able to watch it on a crappy netbook (like the one I'm typing on now). What are your computers specs? It is unlikely that the footage is recorded that way. If the memory card is defective or not fast enough the camera usually just stops recording. Try setting the GoPro to the lowest resolution WVGA 848x480 and copy that to your 'puter. that would be the easiest to playback.