There is an old photographers' adage “the best camera for the job is the one you have with you.” The GoPro HD Hero may be just the best camera for a wide variety of situations. Its small size makes it easy to stash in a pocket or purse, but don't let that fool you. Thanks to the water-proof housing, this camera packs a punch. It's easy to use and comes with a variety of shooting options, including time-lapse and full 1080p video.
Our church supports a mission organization that's been working in Haiti for more than a decade. The GoPro HD Hero was purchased so we could get footage of the long, extreme, off-road trip from the town of Bainet, Haiti, to the tiny, remote village of Zorange.The road follows a riverbed, and the trip requires several river crossings. Many people from our church had told me that this part of the trip was an “experience,” and they were right.
All the guys on the trip with me said that there was no way the camera was going to stay on the hood of our vehicle during the trek to Zorange. But they were wrong. Despite all the bumpy trails, the GoPro's suction cup mount held tight. Even though the camera got rained on and splashed on, it worked great. The battery lasted about two and a half hours and the 16-gig card was half full by that point, shooting continuous video in full 1080p.
The only downside we discovered was that in this wet and muddy environment, sometimes you get water spots or mud on the lens—and it pretty much renders the footage useless. In total we had between four to six hours of footage; two to three hours of it was totally unusable due to mud or water spots. That isn't a knock on the camera, but more an FYI for users. A little RainX should help next time around.
Now there was no way I was going to put my precious Canon EOS 7D on the hood of that car to capture this experience, and to be honest you can't really compare the footage either. That said, use the right tool for the right job. I had the utmost confidence that the GoPro would survive this grueling experience unscathed. I did tie a string from the camera mount to the vehicle, just in case, which turned out to be a total waste of time. That camera wasn't going anywhere.
All in all, the camera performed beyond my expectations. The footage looks great, the color saturation is great, and at 1/5 the cost of the 7D, I felt ok putting it in harm's way. The GoPro HD Hero camera is built like a rock. My team and I are already trying to think of new and different ways we can utilize this powerful asset. Tomorrow we start looking for a remote controlled helicopter to carry it.
Despite its small size, the GoPro HD Hero has a reasonable spec list, including a five megapixel camera and 1920x1080p HD video recording that uses a H.264 MPEG4 codec which is easily editable on both Windows and Mac platforms. It will also do 720p at 60fps for some nice smooth slow motion shots. It records to an SD card that gets you a little over four hours of 1080p and eight hours of 720p on a 32GB card.
Unfortunately, the battery only lasts about two hours or so while recording continuously. You can probably stretch that battery life with time lapse stills recorded in intervals that you can set up to 60 seconds.
With a fixed-focus, wide-angle lens and a F/2.8 aperture, this little camera is good for action shots, landscapes and time-lapse photography, but not ideal for portraits or interviews or close up photography.
Audio is bare minimum—just a built-in mono microphone that records 48 kHz AAC audio.
Once you've recorded some magnificent footage of your camera almost getting destroyed, getting your footage into an editor takes a few steps. We use Final Cut on Mac platform, which doesn't play well with the MP4 codec, so I use a free converter app called MpegStreamclip (squared5.com) to convert the raw MP4 clips into something more Final Cut-friendly, such as Apple ProRes 422 or HDV. These codecs are less processor-intensive and speed up your edit workflow as opposed to using the Go Pro's raw MP4 codec.
On this specific project we had clips from the GoPro, a Canon XH-A1, and two Canon 7Ds, and with some color grading, the GoPro blended pretty well with the shots from the other cameras, with just a slight shutter drag on pans, probably because of the pulldown from 30 fps to 24 fps. I also took some 30-minute “on the hood” clips from the GoPro and sped them up to 2,000% in the NLE, and my Mac Pro chewed through them in real time with no problems. The footage looks spectacular, actually it looks better sped up because you don't notice the camera shake when it's sped up that much—even driving through rivers, up mountains and over rocky trails.
In conclusion, I think this is a tool that needs to be in every pro's toolbox. It definitely won't be replacing your primary camera any time soon, but you can't put your primary camera through what the GoPro can handle. The results are awesome and the ease of use makes this camera a real win. Not to mention, at the price point of $300, you almost can't afford to not have this versatile tool in your arsenal.
Editor's note: GoPro has introduced a new version, the HD Hero2 Professional, which offers a wide range of new features and capabilities. The HD Hero version reviewed here is still available for $199.
