Category: Video

Videos of kayaking adventures.

Lighthouse to Lighthouse 2017 Video

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a GoPro for the camera on the front of the boat, so I had to go back to my old Contour Roam 3. The Contour has good battery life, but unfortunately, it doesn’t do 1080p at 60fps and it doesn’t have image stabilization. As I found out in this race, it also doesn’t have a good strong mount so it wobbled around a bunch and then flopped over.

On the plus side, I have a new GoPro for the front for next weekend’s race – it arrived at home about the same time I was arriving in Norwalk.

The video is a little on the long side. What can I say? It was a long race and there were a lot of other paddlers to interact with.

By popular demand, I went back to using music. Hopefully, since Great Big Sea is basically broken up they won’t be siccing the YouTube police after me.

I’d appreciate any feedback anybody would like to offer. Are the videos too long? Should I show fewer incidents out on the course? Fewer jump cuts? Keep the cuts, but make each one shorter? And what about the music/no music question?

More camera woes

One of the things I’ve struggled with over the years is that a typical waterproof action camera has a battery life of around 80 minutes, and most of my races and training paddles are longer than that, especially if you want to start the camera when you leave the shore for your warm up and not have to faff around on the start line trying to get it started when you really should be concentrating on the race. I’ve experimented with various ways of providing power from a USB battery pack to various cameras with varying success but they either haven’t worked or they’ve succumbed to water damage.

My newest camera is a GoPro Hero Black 5, which is waterproof without an extra case. It has two openings with waterproof covers, one for the battery and memory card, and one with a USB port and an HDMI port. The USB port can be used for charging or for downloading video. I was assured by people on the GoPro forum that it would be perfectly safe to remove the cover over the ports, plug in a USB cable, and seal around it with one of those silicon putty earplugs they sell to swimmers. I’ve been using it like that all year and it’s been great. With a small USB battery also sealed with silicon putty I’ve had record times over 3 hours with no problems.

However last Thursday was the first time I actually let the camera get fully immersed, rather than just splashed – I was landing in a big surf and the boat flipped over after I jumped out. I didn’t think much of it – the camera seemed fine, although the touch screen was acting a little wonky. I didn’t think much of it – I just figured it didn’t like the water on it and I’d have to remember to disable it next time. I took it home and plugged it into my computer to charge and download the pictures, and then forgot about it.

Until the middle of the night last night, three nights later, when I heard the distinctive sounds a GoPro makes when it’s powering off. That’s odd, I thought, maybe it took this long to fully charge and now it’s shutting off. And then some time later, it happened again. Shit! I got up and stumbled into my office, and discovered it was powered up again. Not wanting to be kept awake all night by this stupid beeping, I took it into another room and removed the battery. That’s when I saw green corrosion on the battery terminals. A very bad sign – that means that water had gotten into the case and into the electrical parts. I’m afraid to power it back in this morning and see if it’s still working. I’ll have to see if it’s too late to properly dry it out and hope it survives.

Thanks, Final Cut Pro

So my new computer has a 2TB “hybrid” drive instead of the 512GB SSD I had in my laptop, so I thought I’d see if doing my video editing on the main drive instead of an external drive would be faster. The last video I did, from last weekend’s Electric City race, worked fine, although I didn’t really see any speed improvements. So yesterday when I went to start a new project the first thing I did was move the Electric City event/project from the Final Cut Pro (FCP) library on the main drive to the one on the external drive, and then start importing clips and editing on the new project. I did some editing and left it in the “transcoding and analysis” state overnight – editing is a lot smoother if you let it just finish those “background” tasks overnight, I’ve found.

But I wake up this morning to dire warnings about how I’ve run out of room on my main drive! So I did a “du” in the Movies folder, and discover that when I told Final Cut Pro to move the project, it did but it left a copy of the full project, including all the transcoded “optimized” files, in ~/Movies/FCP_Library.fcpbundle/__Trash/Electric\ City\ 2017-9B3Flz/. There doesn’t appear to be a menu item to empty that pseudo-trash, so I just did an rm -rf on it and now I’m down to 70% used.

After I did that, I discovered that Final Cut Pro will automatically empty __Trash when it exits, but it seems to me that cleaning up your old projects is a natural thing to do when starting a new one, so that’s just bad UX. Especially since when you tell it to move the project it returns a success immediately, but then it’s in the background tasks queue. So it was actually still going on when I was importing my clips last night, and so if I’d said to move the project then exited FCP it wouldn’t have had any trash to empty because it wouldn’t have finished moving.

Possible breakthrough on the camera front

I went for a paddle today with my GoPro Hero 5 Black, and in spite of carefully attaching my Novabeam USB battery, I only got 95 minutes from it, just as if I hadn’t used the battery. Meanwhile, I had the GoPro Hero 5 Session at home doing an experiment where I’d hooked up another Novabeam USB battery, and when I came home I discovered it had recorded 4 hours and only stopped because it had filled up the SD card.

But then I tried just unplugging and re-plugging the Novabeam on the Hero 5 Black, and it happily started recording. I suddenly realized that a light comes on in the Novabeam when you first plug it in. And it struck me that one significant difference between my “bench tests” on my desk and my tests on the water is that in both cases I plug the USB battery in and arrange the silicon putty here at my desk in both cases, but in the “bench test” I hit the Record button almost immediately, while for the water tests I first drive 20 minutes. I bet the battery is turning itself off in that time.

So next time I go paddling I’m going to have to try plugging the battery in and waterproofing it just before I hit record. If I can get 4+ hours of the battery, I can do that early in the pre-paddle preparation and still get the whole paddle or race. I’m so happy that I have probably figured this out before my first race.