A Week With The Go Pro

I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friends GoPro (tm) camera for an extended period of time. Each day I would try and figure out something else to do with the pictures or videos from it to see what was possible. Here is a summary of each day and what I tried to do with the camera.


Sunday: Security Camera Casing
I wanted to place the camera out on a ledge on my back porch, but I didn't want the camera to be exposed to thieves. I decided to look through my recycle bin to see what I could come up with. In about 20 minutes I had my self a fully disclosed GoPro Camera inside a old tin can. Luckly no slices to the skin occured in the making of this nifty encasing. While it wasen’t perfect, it was much more disguiesed then the heavily advertised clear plastic of a go pro encasing.

This casing can easily be reproduced if your looking for a hidden GoPro camera to be mounted somewhere for a bit.

Simply follow the steps below to make your own Security camera casing for a GoPro:

1. Find a normal 16 oz tin can.
2. Empty contents
3. Take off the lids from both ends. Also you may want to trim the length of the can by cutting off 2-4 cm from one end.
4. Warp container to become ecliptical to allow Go Pro camera to slid in
5. Find where the best location for a hole to be for the camera to see out of
6. Create a square hole at this location (one of the easier cuts done for this project)
7. Slid camera in, recording before sliding in, and mount in location

So there you have it, a Go Pro turned into a disguied tin can that’s ready for mounting.

Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for someone taking your camera because it was hidden in this 100% disguised security casing. This is a complete ad-hoc attempt to hide the camera, so don't take it too seriously to put your camera somewhere for a few weeks and expect it not to be discovered.


Monday: Time lapse All day (Attempt #1)
The whole point of Sundays tin can encapsulation, was to mount the camera outside for a day and capture a picture periodically to then speed up and watch in fast forward. I decided to look up the GoPro manual online and change the settings to make sure the project would be a success. I decided to snap a picture every 5 seconds at r5 (highest resolution).

I set the camera on the ledge outside in the morning before 6am and had it record. When I headed out for the day, it seamed all was going well and I would have a bunch of pictures to turn into a movie when I got back. It turned out that the capture only lasted for 4 hours before running out of memory. Here is a video of that:

This video uses a command line to generate a list of images and compile them into a movie. More information about that can be seen here at this blog talking about the command line code to make the video.

I decided to make some modifications to the image size and try again the next day!


Tuesday: Time lapse All day (Attempt #2)
I guessed the 16GB memory card wasen’t enough to hold so many high resolution pictures. I decided to cut back the resolution but increase the frequency at which the pictures were taken. Setting it to the lowest resolution and a 2 second interval I set up the camera in the morning again and went back to bed. When I headed out for the day the red light was still blinking on the camera snapping pictures every 2 seconds!

At the end of the day, when I checked up on the Go Pro it was still on, but said it only took about 6,000 pictures. For some reason it stopped snapping pictures right around the time I left in the morning. I guess I pressed on something and made it stop. Regardless, here is the video from that capture.

Wednesday: Slow Motion
I decided to give up on trying to get a all day time lapse, and instead try to mess with slow motion. I saw some GoPro promotional videos that used a slowed down effect when the subject was in mid air. Doing some reasearch on the GoPro camera, I found that it takes 60 frames per second video. What does this mean? Typically for a series of pictures to be considered “moving” they need to flicker at 24 frames per second. This is just a minimum however. So capture 30 frames per second gives a nice seamless moving video. If we jump this up a notch we can get into slow motion cameras, by taking a few thousand frames each second. So, 60 frames per second allows us to slow the video down at half the speed without any noticeable frame difference. We can slow it down even more if we don’t mind losing some quality in the frame rate.

I tried this slow motion effect on the best video I could make in doors, cracking an egg. Here is the slowed down video.

While this is not the best example of slowing down a video, it’s a start. Editor Note: The audio from the crack of the egg was a bit loud, so I swapped it).

Thursday: Slow Motion (again)

I wasn't done with the slow motion effect just yet. I wanted to try and make a video that seamed normal and then went into slow motion. Again, all I had was an indoor setting, so I had to make do with what I had.

Here’s a quick video of a slow down segment within the video that is at normal speed.

Friday: Fast Forward Video
Instead of using fast flipping of pictures from the GoPro, I decided to try and film a video and give it a fast forward effect to make a few hours go by in seconds. My attempt was a failure. While this can easily be done with some modern video editing software, all I am using is a command line on a Ubuntu setup. I thought the slow motion effect could be used to speed up the film as well, but it appears that that gives errors. I ended up splitting the film into a picture every second and then compiling all the images into a movie file as I did on Monday and Tuesday. The result was a low quality, choppy fast forward of a typical morning sequence.

Saturday: Time Lapse while Shopping

Who said the Go-pro had to be used in "extreme" activity's only. I figured I would have fun with it by wearing it on my head when running some errands with some friends. It mainly considered of gathering ideas together for an art project at Joann's Fabric. It also had some driving and grocery store shopping. A few people found the camera disturbing and asked that they were not filmed. Others thought it was very cool and did not mind being filmed (like the guy in sprouts who was buying some bananas and a bottle of wine).

End Of Week Conclusions
These little experiments were an attempt to learn more about the GoPro camera and to try and think of shots, angles, activities that can use these features to improve future Go Pro action videos! Hope this helps with your future videos!