On board camera suggestions

[Hal]

Jim,
I just checked mine and see it does have springs instead of tabs. If you have an email or website to them I could contact them and see what they say. Could only get a lap or so when I first started using it, but with extra padding it worked pretty good for awhile. Just odd it would not be consistent as it is afixed to the car the same everytime.

Hal

[elston36]

Hal,

I hear it will do that sometimes if your manifold is too big...

Maybe you should get rid of it...

Our Hero is working well, so we might be willing to take it off your hands for a small fee...


Donald

[Hal]

I just want to weap uncontrolably when I realize I have friends like this......sniffle.....

[SR Racing]

Jim,
If you have an email or website to them I could contact them and see what they say.

support@goprocamera.com

Website is : http://www.goprocamera.com/
Support info is : http://www.goprocamera.com/Contact_Us.htm

Let me know if they don't take care of you.

Jim

[Samiam]

Just an update regarding the Go Pro. Recently I have been having major reliability problems. I have missed two great races because the Go Pro has decided not to work properly. I have decided to upgrade to a DVR and a lipstick camera. Does anyone have any suggestions on a DVR? There seems to be several inexpensive models out there.

Scott

[FV80]

Scott,
After giving up on my GoPro (at least for racing), I decided to do the same as you. An F5 buddy pointed me towards the RCA Lyra DVR and a guy on ebay that was selling them. I have only used mine once so far - it worked perfectly ... EXCEPT that I ran out of memory on the CF card because I forgot to delete a big file - my fault. The audio is also offset from the video by about 2 or 3 seconds - I hope they'll fix that with an update soon. The DVR is quite small ( 1.5 times a cigarette pack) and has a built in LCD color screen - it comes with everything you need to put it in the car. The video is not quite as good as the Hero - no digital stablization, and the video seemed 'distant' (depth of field is not very good), but it did work and I did have video to look at .

As soon as I win the lottery, I will order up one of those F1 network cams .. they seem to work pretty well on Speed

The one I bought can be seen at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0048712711
under $300 including shipping... The seller runs an online store, so you should be able to get one, even if you can't find it on ebay at the moment.
Steve

[Lynn]

Chase Cam has a variety of cameras and dvr's. The owner of the company is Randy Chase, who is an ative autocrosser. One of his Formula 1 customers, first refused to look at his products insisting that they couldn't be anything but a toy at the price.

[Hal]

Looked at the Chase Cam website. Pretty pricey to me.

Hal
FV 88

[Lynn]

Yes, the Chase Cam is a little pricey, but it is optimized for racing use. For possibly the cheapest solution check out the Aiptek A-HD. It's available at Best But, Circuit City, and Wal-Mart for as little as $140 and you can shoot your race in 720p, 16:9 High Definition video.

[FVartist]

Steve,

Here is the frame adj for the RCA Lyra http://www.kadath.com.ar/frateadj/

Bruce

[FV80]

Steve,

Here is the frame adj for the RCA Lyra http://www.kadath.com.ar/frateadj/

Bruce

Can't see how to use that - I have just a single AVI file - no 'OGG' file to go with it. ??
Steve

[go-vee-or-go-home]

My hero 3 seems to be working good now staying on and not killing the battery. I have miss placed the a/v usb cable so I e-mailed goprocamera to see about purchasing a new one . They told me they are not selling them at this point but they would be glad to send me one free of charge, thats what I call great customer support. Looking forward to finally getting some great video
Colin

[Mystique Racing]

Well after reading some of the information on this thread I did some research and decided to purchase an Aiptek HD DVR at Best Buy. It cost about $150.00 out the door. I then purchased a 520 lipstick camera on Ebay for $200.00 The camera came with the mic, cables, and battery holder. I decided to hard wire the camera to the car battery instead of using the battery pack. The DVR records onto a SD flash card and will record for about an hour, which is plenty of time. The video came out great and it has been far more reliable than the Gopro. The only problem that I have had is with the video editing program, it seems to have trouble dealing with the .MOV format that the camera records in. It seems to slow down the playback when editing is done to the video, which makes it hard to complete the editing process. Does anyone have any experience with this problem?

Overall, for $350.00 it has exceeded my expectations.

[SR Racing]

Here is another sample of the Go-Pro.

http://sracing.com/images/One_lap.wmv

I know some of you guys have had some problems, but since the new version camera came out (6 mons) or so. We have filmed many times up to 52 minutes with no problem. (Sound kinda sucks on the race car, but everything else is fine.)

[SR Racing]

Scott,

There are several free converters on the web you might try. (AVI, MOV, MPEG etc.) You might download one of those and convert first before editing.

Jim

[VDF1]

I've been struggling to get my GoPro camera to work. My symptoms are exactly the same as Steve except I haven't managed to get a single lap--I've tried two different cameras, two different memory cards, several different kinds of batteries, and different mounting points on the car. The camera works fine everwhere, even on my car--except when the motor is running--then when I stop, the camera has frozen up.

Look what my son found last night: http://www.auroraelectronics.com/Unders ... 0Wires.htm

I use Accel solid core plug wires and they are about 15" below where the camera is mounted--are you, Steve, using solid core plug wires? If you are, my son may have found a simple answer for why the camera won't work on our cars. Leroy

[Mystique Racing]

Jim, I actually did down load a program called Prism for free last week. It seems to work OK. I converted my .MOV file to a .AVI and still had the same problem regarding the editing. Then I converted the .MOV to .WMA and found the picture and sound quality to be a lot lower then the original .MOV file, although, the video program seemed to like it better. I guess I will keep experimenting.

[FVartist]

Steve,

You can ignore the sound part of the frame adjust. Open the program, put in your avi. file and plug in 25.06 at the fps. This should get you close. I got this from a competitor friend and it seems to work fine. You may have to adjust more or less depending if the sound or video ends first. Basically you are syncing the video to the sound.

Bruce

[FV80]

Thanks for the suggestions Bruce - but it's about 100 times WORSE using that setup.. The file SIZE is much smaller (that would be good), but the audio is some 20 seconds off after that change. I guess it's specific to the model of the Lyra unit. Mine is a X2400A and your's might be the prior X1200A. If I was REALLY industrious, I could experiment with the infinite possiblities of frame rate ... but I've better things to do... I downloaded the latest firmware update from RCA, but it didn't do any good either. Oh well.. It's decent VIDEO - I just have to IMAGINE where I let off the gas and started the turn in . That's substantially better than NO VIDEO at all...

Steve

[cendiv37]

Scott,

What video editing program are you using to translate the video to a final edited form. I use Sony's Movie Studio Platinum. At version 6, it won't import the .mov file from my Aiptek HD DVR. First converting it to .wmv using Windows Media Encoder 9 (download from MSoft) brings it in OK. It's a pretty long process using the highest settings, but I didn't notice a loss in quality. However, the .wmv file is HUGE. I need to play with the settings, especially the sound since it isn't exactly high quality to start with. It is properly synched and thus useful however .

I also have used an Aiptek MPVR. The HD DVR definitely provides a higher quality image but the MPVR is useable. I had to process the MPVR video through the wmv file just to get rid of interlace jaggies. It was slow, but worth it.

The important thing is that both of these little camcorders accept an analog (NTSC) input which almost no mini DV camcorders do anymore. The other benefit is that they are very light and record to SD cards. Both require that you have the monitor open to power them on and only then can you close it. I think my latest procedure works pretty well: leave it off until on the false grid (or just heading there), then pull it out of the small padded digital camera bag, turn it on and press the record button (which is external on both), then put it back in the bag and zip it closed up to the wires coming out.

Overall, either of these relatively cheap little guys is quite an improvement compared to the old battery powered video 8 recorder I used years ago. That unit finally absorbed one too many curbs and wouldn't record anymore. The 8mm video quality was probably comparable to the Aipteks, but the weight and durability was much worse. I'm sure the video quality of a mini-DV unit is superior and the editing would be more straight forward. However, even the smallest of these are 2-3 times the weight of the Aipteks and have a delicate tape mechanism in them. I actually have one. Its a nice, small mini-DV camcorder old enough to have analog inputs, but I have never had the heart to put it in the car.

[VDF1]

Since no-one has responded to my post about solid-core plug wires potentially causing a problem for the GoPro I assume everyone uses solid-core plug wires OR no-one made the EMF interference connection that Samiam talked about.

I used an Aiptek MPVR with a Twenty20 bullet camera for a couple of years and got plenty of good video. When I first bought the Aiptek, however, I mounted it in the car a few inches below the main wire bundle from the battery to the rear of the car/starter and it wouldn't work. I moved it to the same position on the other side of the car and it worked OK. I induced it was probably EMF interference from the wiring bundle since all else in the mounting was the same.

Other people with problems might try mounting their cameras/recorders away from the motor and other wires and see what happens.