I am considering purchasing a GoPro for taking video while flying and was looking to get some feedback on the product. Which model is best for flying and what are the best attachments to get? Any tips on using a GoPro for flying are welcome as well.
Thanks for your time!
GoPro for flying
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thebigchize
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Re: GoPro for flying
You'll want a mount for it that holds it very rigidly to prevent as much vibration as possible. The GoPro (and most other small cameras like it) uses something called a "rolling shutter" on the CMOS sensor to capture each frame of video. That rolling shutter, coupled with the vibration inherent in mounting a camera on a vehicle with an engine, leads to strange video effects. "Jello" in which the whole image jiggles, and the annoying effect with the propellor that you see in some videos.thebigchize wrote:I am considering purchasing a GoPro for taking video while flying and was looking to get some feedback on the product. Which model is best for flying and what are the best attachments to get? Any tips on using a GoPro for flying are welcome as well.
The solution GoPro provides is to place a Neutral Density filter in front of the lens. This is like putting a pair of sunglasses on the camera. The darker image forces the camera to slow down the shutter speed, which averages out the jello and propellor effects and sort of makes them go away. The cost is that your image gets blurrier, because everything in the image gets averaged over a longer shutter speed. And you lose low-light performance, so on cloudy days you'll get worse videos.
The only real solution for this is to switch to a camera with a CCD sensor instead (they use a "focal plane" shutter), but that drives the cost up by a factor of about 10 for a camera with similar functionality as the GoPro.
