Category: Rant

Yeah, I know you’re getting bored about my GoPro issues

So I found a new waterproof external battery pack for the GoPro. This one used a waterproof case and a gland nut on the GoPro, and a separate battery pack with another gland nut. I’ve been starting to come to the conclusion that the problem with the GoPros shutting down is one of heat. So I was hoping that keeping the battery outside the camera case would reduce the heat build up.

I charged the new battery and attached it to the GoPro with no internal battery in it. I tried setting the GoPro to 4K/60fps and took it out while walking Gizmo, and then just letting it run. It make a strange chime and then shut down after just over an hour. I let it cool down a bit and reset the camera back to 1080p/60fps and (without recharging the battery) got over 3 hours on it.

What I’d really like to do is try it at 1080p/60fps in a more realistic scenario, where things are moving and the image stabilization has to work like it does in a real scenario. Maybe I’ll put it on the oscillating fan and just let it rip.

More on the damn GoPro battery issue

Ok, so I kicked both cameras down to 1080p instead of 4K, figuring it would reduce the heat build-up. And I managed to get the expected 4+ hours out of camera #1. Great!

However, camera #2 is still having problems – it would shut down as soon as I hit record. I tried doing a factory reset, I tried swapping SD cards, but the problem appears to be that it just doesn’t like the sidecar battery. It doesn’t matter which sidecar battery I use – as soon as I turn it on, it turns off. Take off the sidecar battery, and it’s quite happy recording for 100 minutes.

I think for this weekend I’m going to try using the sidecar battery on camera #1, but just going bareback on #2. I’ll probably put #2 on the bow facing back, because that view is usually only important in the first part of the race. When I get home, I’ll see if GoPro will admit there is a problem with their camera, although since it only happens with a third party battery I don’t have high hopes.

GoPro battery problems (again)

I use a “sidecar” battery for my GoPros to get some extra battery life. And when I was using them with GoPro Hero 5s, I was frequently getting 3.5-4 hours of video recording. But at the Round The Mountain race, one of them shut down after less than an hour (I’d turned them both on really early hoping to capture some of the flavor of the start area, and it ended up shutting down when I was warming up). I took them out for another test and I got 99 minutes out of the first and 120 minutes out of the other. In both cases, the sidecar battery appears empty or nearly empty, but there’s plenty of life left in the “built-in” battery. I’m able to turn them on and record another 80-90 minutes after I finished.

I don’t know if it’s an overheating problem, or what. Unfortunately the sidecar requires both it and the camera to be in a clear plastic case, which can’t help with the heat problem. I wonder if I should cover the whole thing in tin foil except the lens area?

Video Updates

I’m excited about the 2019 kayak racing (and video) season. I’ve made some changes to my video production, and I think they’re going to be great.

  • I bought two new GoPro Hero 7 Black cameras. I’m really excited about these, because the stabilization is amazing. Also, they shoot in 4K/60. In the past, I’ve sort of vacillated between shooting in 1080p at 60 frames per second and shooting in 4K at 30 frames per second. I love the extra detail in 4K (even though I don’t know how many of my loyal watchers actually watch in 4K, I do and I love it) but I also like how much better the action looks at 60 frames per second. Now I don’t have to choose. I was lucky that GoPro had a trade-in deal where you could trade in any digital video camera in any condition and get $100 off, so I took advantage of that to get rid of some old cameras that don’t work any more, my old Kodak Playsport and my broken Polaroid XS100. I was also able to sell my Hero 5 Black for $150. I’ve hung on to my Hero 5 Session, but I have a couple of ideas on how to use that that I’ll talk about down below.
  • I also bought a new Final Cut Pro X plugin that will allow me to (hopefully) put labels on moving objects (ie other paddlers). I have some ideas on how to use that, I hope they look at good as I think they will.
  • In order to get more battery life out of the Hero 7s, I’m going to be using two of the same combination waterproof case + sidecar battery that I’ve been using on my bow in 2018. I’m not looking forward to having that on my head as it’s 120 grams heavier than the former setup with the Hero 5 Session and the external battery. But those are the sacrifices I make for my art.
  • Unfortunately the waterproof case means the cameras won’t pick up any of the sounds of the race. I’m going to miss having the dialog – one of the cool things about racing is the way people talk to each other in the middle of a race, and I always tried to capture that in my videos. I’ve been looking through various sites with Creative Commons licensed music and I’m thinking about going back to having music instead of the sounds of the race. Hope you all like Celtic music.
  • Another possibility is to use my Hero 5 Session behind me facing backwards to provide a view behind me when people are riding my wake (which happens distressingly often) and also to pick up some sound.
  • If I don’t do that, another thought I had was to use the Session to try to capture some of ambiance of the pre and post race activities. Maybe that’s just because last weekend was the Banff Mountain Film Festival at RIT, and I’m inspired by their story telling.
  • Ok, now for the hard part. Obviously I’ve spent a bunch of money on my video equipment this year, and there are a few other things I would like, including a SSD (solid state drive) to make my video production faster. So this year, I’m going to try to put a link on every video where people can buy me a virtual coffee. Maybe if some of the people who tell me how much they love my videos put their money where their mouths are, I can get that SSD this year.

More griping about GoPros

I have two cameras that I use for making my kayaking videos. A GoPro Hero 5 Black (which is the chunkier camera with the touch screen on the back) is mounted on the front of my boat pointing backwards, and a GoPro Hero 5 Session (which is the little cube) which I wear on my head pointing forward. I like the head mount because it stabilizes the camera nicely and also it means the video gets to show what I’m seeing.

This year I decided to start shooting everything in 4K. I’d sort of gone back and forth last year between 1080p/60fps and 4K/30fps, but this year I decided to do 4K exclusively. The only problem with that is that the Session camera only had a 64GB SD card (technically a micro-SDHD card, I guess) which meant it would stop recording after about an hour and a half or two hours. Sometimes it would shut down much earlier, but I’d spare a stroke and hit the button on top and it would start again. Often times this only happened in the warm up rather than in the heat of the race, so it wasn’t terrible.

But I missed the end of a couple of races, so I ordered a 128 GB card. Unfortunately I didn’t want to order the same Lexar Pro 1000x card I had in the Black because it had gone up for around $75 to $130 since I bought the last one. Amazon had a SanDisk Ultra that had all the right specs (UHS-I, Class 10, 80mb/s) that meant it should work for 4K video. Except it didn’t – my camera would shut down after 10-20 minutes and if I started it right back up, it would shut down down. Being up on my head, I couldn’t see if it displayed a message, but I sent it back and got a SanDisk Extreme that had even more of the right specs (UHS-III, U3, mentioned 4K video numerous times in the description). But it had the same problem – it would shut down after 30-40 minutes and not start up again. This time I was using it mounted on my bike handlebars rather than on my head so I could see the message, and it was complaining about a corrupted file on the SD card, and said I’d have to format the card to use it.

Since I was convinced this card should work, I did a swap – I put the Lexar Pro card in the Session, and the SanDisk Extreme in the Black. And both cameras shut down after a 30-40 minutes. The Black was complaining about a bad or corrupted SD card. The Session was just acting weird. I did a factory reset on the Session and it’s acting a bit less weird but it’s still not 100% right.

I don’t know if I got water in the Session and wrecked it, or if I’ve just reached the limits of this camera. If you look at materials from GoPro or from the kind of people who use GoPros, it’s obvious that the standard user that they’re designing these things for is for somebody who turns it on, records a 5 minute stunt, then turns it off again, and my desire to record for hours at a time is just an edge case that they don’t really care about.

I don’t know where to go next. I’m going to test my Session again with the 64 GB card to see if it goes back to “normal” with it. Maybe I’ll just go back to recording 1080p/60fps again, where 64 GB is good for more than 4 hours.