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GoPro for Sport Fishing

I had the pleasure to spend some time aboard the Priority Yacht during the Islamorada SailFly Invitational Tournament. As always, I brought an assortment of GoPro's and my Sony HDR-CX160 to capture the excitement. I learned a ton and the following article shares these findings. First check out the result from this tournament.

The purpose of this article is to give Captains, Fishing Guides, and Fishermen an introduction on how to capture great footage with a GoPro HD. It will teach you the fundamentals, how to setup the cameras, where they should be mounted, and various tips that will make your life easier and more profitable.

Fundamentals

There are some fundamentals that you should understand before filming your first fishing trip. All of these topics can be Googled to expand your knowledge but here are the basics. Skip this if you already know a bunch about video cameras.

Resolution / fps

You've hear people say 1080p and 30fps what does this mean? 1080P means there are 1080 pixels that vertically make up this image. Likewise 720p means the image is 720 pixels tall. This boils down to the more pixels per image the better the quality. The main trade off is with more pixels, each minute of footage takes more space on your memory card.

The 30fps is how many images make up the video each second, in this case its 30 frames (or images) per second. Why is this important? It's important because with more frames per second, the more images that are shot and therefore the more you can spread the image to make it look smooth. Wowwa, what? With more frames per second, you can make things go in really slow motion. For example , when a Tarpon bites a fly, if you record at 120fps, you could now see the fish jump out of the water, catch the fly, and dive back into the water. Instead of just a splash. As you can see, this would be very cool for fishing. The issue is the GoPro HD and the GoPro HD 2 can both trade frames per second (fps) for resolution.

FOV

The FOV is the Field of View. This is how wide the camera sees. The GoPro has the ability to record with a 170 degree field of view. This means it will see just shy of 180 degrees from the face of the camera.

As the FOV increases the distance objects appear is greater. The above screen grab was shot with the GoPro at 170degrees FOV. See how the boat's cabin appears to curve in and the image has that fishbowl appearance?

Editing and Delivery

Shooting a lot of High-def footage is easy. Dealing with it is difficult. At the end of the day, the question arises, "how are you going to edit and share this footage?" No one wants to watch 4 hours of you waiting for one fish (not even your mom). If you leave these cameras recording the whole time, you're going to have to deal with one giant blob of nothingness. Even if you are good about when you start and stop recording, you're going to still want to “trim” the video a bit before publishing. If you are on a fishing charter you may just opt to give the customer the blob and have them deal with it. This is a viable solution, but does nothing for your social networking. Another option is to find a local “editor” that can make your videos into a nice end product. This can be costly, but it can be a cost you pass on to your customer. By the way, the attention span of most people is less than 3 minutes. A lot less people want to watch a 15 minute video of you fishing.

This is where iMovie, Microsoft Movie Maker, Sony Vegas, etc. and your computer come into play. If you have a slow computer, it's probably time to upgrade to edit any of this HD footage. If your computer is on the borderline, you probably want to shoot in a lower resolution on your camera (720p @ 30fps) to make it possible to edit.

The Camera

GoPro recently introduced the GoPro HERO 2 to replace the existing GoPro HERO HD. The GoPro HERO 2 will shoot at 1080p at 170 degrees FOV and has a better lens than the GoPro HERO HD. It will also shoot 11Megapixel photos once every half a second vs. 5Megapixel stills every second. The menu system is a ton easier to use on the GoPro HD 2 vs. the GoPro HERO HD. The major plus though is the ability to stream footage out of the GoPro HERO 2 with the new WiFi BacPac add-on. This BacPac also allows the user to control up to 50 GoPro's simultaneously from up to 900' away. This is a must for boat Captains that are also controlling their cameras.

With that said, before using the GoPro on your fishing tour, make sure you have a good understanding of the menu system and limitations of the camera. Spend some time going through the options and understand what each of the icons on the screen mean (GoPro Instruction Manual / GoPro 2 Instruction Manual). If you have a Go Pro HD Hero, make sure you update it before going out on the ship. There are some great new features that will make your life easier in the latest firmware.

As far as memory cards are concerned. Go with a well known brand up to 32GB class 4 or above. Class 10 is only necessary for the GoPro HD 2 when you are bursting 2 photos a second. In my opinion, this is overkill for fishing.

Once you have learned how to operate your camera, here are the various settings that I would use and the application of each:

Application	GoPro 2	GoPro HERO HD
Primary Camera Mounted	1080P / 30fps / 170degree FOV	720P / 30fps = 170 FOV = R2 mode if enough distance 1080P / 30fps = 120 FOV = R5
Handheld Action Camera	720P / 60fps / 120 FOV(use LCD BacPac)	720P / 60fps / 170 FOV = R3(use LCD BacPac)
Underwater	1080P / 30fps / 170degree FOV	720P / 30fps = 170 FOV = R2
Stills	11MP / 1 every 2 seconds	1 every 2 seconds
Auxillary	1080P / 30fps / 170degree FOV	720P / 30fps = 170 FOV = R2

All the above settings have center meter exposure set. On the stills setup have it power on in PES mode (GoPro HD) or Camera on the GoPro Hero 2.

Once you have that set, I would turn on 1 button mode. This allows you to turn on the GoPro and have it immediately start recording.

Mounting

For the above video I mounted the primary camera underneath the bridge with a flat adhesive mount. I checked the angle with the LCD BacPac to ensure the cabin was framed correctly. I then tightened the thumb screw with a phillips to ensure it didn't move during operation. Next to it I mounted a second GoPro using the same method and had it set to Photo Every Second mode to capture some stills for the fishermen. In this particular application I used my GoPro 2 for the primary camera and a GoPro Hero HD for the stills.

GoPro mounted on a yacht bridge

Below is a still taken from the GoPro HERO HD during the fishing trip.

180degrees

To capture shots pulling out the fish, I mounted two GoPro's on the suction cup mount. I had one pointed up and one pointed back away from the boat. Both of these gopros had rain-x applied to the lens and I placed anti-fog packets in each case. I eye-balled the positioning of these and got them fairly close. I then ran some test shots to ensure they were properly positioned. It is very important to clean off these lens with a towel or lens cloth when the water is rough. Water spots make your video look very unprofessional.

Underwater shots can be done by hand or by mounting the camera underneath the boat. I have not worked on these shots much yet, but do know that a flat lens made by “eye-of-mine” or soon directly from GoPro is necessary to make these shots sharp. If you dry dock the boat, I would mount an GoPro Surf Mount somewhere towards the back of the boat. Mount the camera and attach a tether made out of heavy test line in case this mount fails. We manufacturer an aluminum mount that allows you to “bolt on” the camera to your bolt if you wish. This may be an option for some.

With the camera underwater, the WiFi BacPac can then be used as a fish finder and to turn the camera on and off when needed. I will be exploring various underwater solutions in a future article.

The final camera that I would choose is a hand-held camera with a LCD BacPac. This camera is used to get up-close and personal footage of when someone pulls a fish out onto the boat. If you don't have a camera man, simply mount the camera on a boom and extend it out from the bridge fishing pole mount or on an out rigger with a roll-bar mount. This will give a more from-the-top view of all the action.

Hints

Use rain-x on all the GoPro Lenses to keep off water spots
Constantly clean off water spots with a rag
Dump cards every night to keep them empty
Record only when there is action
Use Anti-fog packets on all cameras. Keep the cameras outdoors and not in the AC to prevent fog.
Use the GoPro Battery BacPac to keep a spare battery charged
Use a flat lens for underwater shots
RTFM (read the f'n manual) and totally understand it before getting out on the water. Get fast when using and adjusting the settings on the GoPro
Use a dedicated GoPro set in “photo every second” mode. Watermark each photo with your ship's contact information before giving to your clients.
Using Eye-Fi cards to automatically send the footage to your laptop for endless space.
Buy the WiFi BacPac when it comes out for better control of the cameras.

The power of the GoPro is the ease of mounting the camera. Play around with mounting the camera in various positions on the boat. Lend a camera out to the fisherman or mate and mount it on a headband or chest strap. Put the camera in the ice box before throwing the fresh catch in.

I hope this article gave you a starting point for using the GoPro for fishing applications. It was the point to teach you enough to get started using the cameras. Youtube has many great videos on how to use the GoPro and edit with the footage. Please check these out. Help support HYPOXIC by taking a look at our Fishing GoPro Package Deal and start videoing your next fishing adventure.

Future How-Tos

Setup the GoPro to automatically download, watermark and then burn photos taken by the GoPro
How to make an underwater GoPro mount for fishing
Video on how to mount GoPro's for fishing
Video on how to use the WiFi BacPac on your boat

Now GO FISH!
-Trunk

Sony HDR-CX100/ HDR-CX105/CX110/CX150 for Action Sports

Purpose

To create a synopsis of all the posts found on dropzone.com's photography forum on the Sony HDR-CX100/ Sony HDR-CX105 post. There are tons of photos and videoon that post, mainly starting at page 20 and going up. If you are looking at mounting ideas, please scroll through those pages!

This document will also be helpful for people with the Sony HDR-CX110, HDR-CX150 and most likely the new HDR-CX130 once it comes out.

Link to Full review of camera by DSE

Camera

CX100 - NTSC version / CX105 or CX100E PAL version
Current price BH Photo video: $599-$410
Solid State AVCHD based camera with 8GB internal memory and slot for memory stick Pro Duo 2.
30mm lens adapter
Connectors: 1 x Composite video/audio output , 1 x S-Video output , 1 x Component video output , 1 x HDMI output , 1 x USB , 1 x Remote control
No infrared remote control nor port for one
No Firewire (no AVCHD camera has Firewire or iLink)
No external Mic input
Recommended use with HYPEYE D PRO since you are unable to turn on/off camera without opening up the LCD and it provides feedback.

Settings

Set to manual focus daily. Looses setting after 12 hrs
Auto Exposure, auto scene. Be careful not to use the spot focus/spot exposure method!
Power on by LCD - OFF
X.V. Color turn - ON
Turn off face and smile detection
Preference: Keep steady shot on, change to wide angle lens
Preference: Turn auto shutoff to never
Turn on HD to lowest compression mode to fit your requirements
US Competition flyers, switch to SD mode 4:3

Fitting Side or Top

Used a box such as Cookies or TonFlys
Use an L-Bracket with a clip or gaffers tape to tape down LCD screen. Screen will fly open and break if you do not tape it down.
Use a goldmember , Schumacher Quickshoe , a Manfrotto or a Flat Lock
Use a ¼" mounting screw and bolt the camera to the top of the helmet. Add some sort of strap and rubber or cork foot to prevent it from spinning off.

Note: Try to mount the lens against the helmet with rubber and/or some sort of restraint. This will reduce shake. Again check out this post for photos of various helmet mounting examples.

Lenses

For most of these you'll need an adapter from 37mm to 30mm. The Century lenses come with metal adapters. The Raynox come with plastic adapters that should be replaced with metal ones at the discretion of the skydiver.

Lens	Pro	Con	Personal Notes
.2 Royal / Liquid / Waycool	Small profile and very wide angle	Low resolution SD lens, non-zoomable	Only use if filming in SD mode really close. Try the Baby death lens as a substitution.
Opteka Platinum Series 37mm 0.3X HD Ultra Fisheye Lens	Awesome quality, high resolution	Wide lens and heavy, non-zoomable	Inexpensive alternative to the baby death. Highly recommend for close footage.
Century .3x 37mm MK II "Baby Death"	Awesome quality, high resolution	Wide lens and heavy, non-zoomable	Great lens for doing really high quality close footage
Raynox HD-3032PRO	Good HD quality, light weight, zoomable	Longer than traditional single element lenses	Good general purpose lens
Century .55x 37mm	Great HD lens, low profile	Only .5x, non-zoomable	My personal choice
Raynox HD-5050PRO	Good HD lens, light weight. Zoomable	long profile multi element lens	Decent lens, but prefer the century
Royal / Liquid / Waycool .3/.5	Low Profile lens	SD resolution, non-zoomable	If you have one, hold on to it but think about upgrading. Good for 4:3 setups and for those wanting a .3 low profiles lens

Note: Multi-element lenses allow for zoom through the lens. This is good for grabbing landing footage, scenes from the airplane, and footage while under canopy. I personally set my zoom and focus once and never touch it but your situation may vary.

Archiving

Use the software provided with the camera and connect the camera up via USB to the PC
Manually: Using a card adapter and card reader copy the following files into your own archiving scheme:
- HD footage MTS extension (AVCHD footage)
- SD footage MPG extension (MPEG 2 footage)
- Pictures JPG extension

Playing

Note: AVCHD is meant as a transport therefore on most machines it does not play very fluidly. You may want to get in the habit of rendering to a more computer friendly format before viewing.

To view download a Codec such as FFDShow or CoreAVC for PC
Use utility that came with the camera
Use a utility such as upshift to automatically convert the footage.

Non Linear Editing (NLE)

As found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD. I personally use Sony Vegas 8.0c

The following video-editing software features support for the AVCHD format:

Adobe Premiere Pro (from version CS4 onward; support not included in the trial version - activation must occur to gain AVCHD support)
Adobe Premiere Elements (from version 7 onward)
Apple's Final Cut Express 4, Final Cut Pro 6.0.1, and iMovie '08-'09 (iMovie is bundled with all new Apple computers; Final Cut Express and Pro are sold separately) do not support editing of AVCHD clips directly. Imported AVCHD clips are automatically converted into the Apple Intermediate Codec format, which requires more hard disk space (40GB per hour as opposed to 13.5GB per hour for Standard Definition DV), a more powerful machine (an Intel-based Mac), and a more recent OS (Mac OS X 10.5). Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 "logs and transfers" the footage from AVCHD to AppleProRes by default and also gives the option of converting to the Apple Intermediate Codec. It does not allow native transferring of the *.m2ts clips nor directly editing them. iMovie does not currently support AVCHD Lite used by some later model Panasonic still cameras.^[31]
^{Cyberlink Power Director 7, which also supports GPU offloading for both ATI and NVidia graphics cards in the latest patch.}
^{Avid Xpress Pro, Avid Media Composer}
^{Grass Valley's Edius 5.0}
^{Dayang's Montage Extreme [ME] 1.2}
^{Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced and Nero 8 Ultra Edition are software suites which contains the AVCHD editor, found in Nero Vision. Also included in this suite is Nero Showtime, which plays AVCHD files natively. Edited video can also be burned to DVD discs in AVCHD format for playback on hardware players or in Blu-ray format.}
^{Pinnacle Studio Plus 11, 12 and 12.1}
^{Sony Vegas 7.0e}
^{Vegas Pro 8}
^{Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8}
^{Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9}
^{Kdenlive for Linux and BSD platforms}

Linear Editing

Shoot for the edit. But luckily if you mess up, play the footage back, press divide and split the footage in two. Then delete the half that is bad.
No longer use fades but tricks like pan to the sky at the end of the shot then pan from the sky to the next shot.
Slow motion: It stalls for a tad so you may not want to use this camera on Cessna Dropzones where you try to elongate the jump by replaying the exit and slow motioning it. Plus there is no remote control so you'll need the display open. Look at upgrading to an NLE workflow.
You can no longer firewire to the master tape for evening website uploads. Work with your webmaster for an easier workflow.

Workflow

See Tandem Videos Made Easy and Sony Production Assistant

Photos

With the HYPEYE D PRO expansion kit or photo kit and a bite switch you can get around 6 stills while recording during a typical jump.
The photos are 4.3MPixel
Typical latency from when you press the button to the shot is around 1.5seconds and up to 3 seconds.
Test by recording and pressing the Photo button on your camera, this is how the photo kit will work.

How to Install your GoPro Permanently

This video shows you how to use a GoPro Low Profile Mount to permanently affix your GoPro to your helmet. This is generally recommened for skydiving helmets where you can drill into them, but can be used for other sports. Please use caution.

For a limited time get one for free with a purchase of a GoPro HD HERO2.

Below is how the mount looks once installed.

Close up of a solid mount for a gopro

Sony CX160 Tests

HYPOXIC takes the Sony HDR CX160 out skydiving and sees how the new camera works in freefall. The Optical Stabilization OIS causes flutter in head up positions. Headdown seems ok. Belly has a possible slight flutter. The integrated permanent USB cable will make it difficult to design a protective enclosure. The quality is awesome and the MIC input is a nice feature. The CX160 is bigger than the CX150.

Overall the Sony CX160 is not recommended for Skydiving, but is a nice camera for ground footage.

Freefall footage taken by Brandon Atwood with Stabilization turned off.

How to Really Fix a Mini Cooper Harman Kardon Amp

My girlfriend's mini cooper amp recently died after being stored for a while. Basically the head unit would power on and act normal, but nothing would come out of the speakers. I heard people also having the amp cut in and out everyonce in awhile. After some research I found this hardon-kardon amp costs $1050usd new and $500usd used. Obviously replacing the whole head unit and bypassing the amp would cost less than either solution. Being the hacker type I figured I would try to fix it myself. After fighting it for a few days I finally found the issue. It was in the 1.2v switch mode power supply. The switcher had died and it was not supplying power to the SHARC DSP's core. The part was ST's L5973D, digikey part number 497-4566-1-ND. This is what died in her amp, your's may be different.

Replacing this part should be done with someone will a lot of surface mount experience. The die pad is connected to the ground rail and requires a smd heat gun to remove and replace.

Here are some specifics:

After reading forums I found that her amp of her 2006 Mini Cooper Convertable was located under the passenger seat. With the car off, remove the seat with a Torx socket. Then remove the 4 screws holding the amp case into the cavity. From there pull out the amp case, then remove the torx screws holding the top to the basin. Next remove the amp from the case by unbolting the 3 10mm nuts. At this point I would put all the screws back into the basin, and the car since you will probably need a bit to properly diagnois and repair the amp. Also, keep the amp cable out but put the seat back in and re-attach all the cables (BEFORE YOU TURN THE CAR ON!) If you do not do this you will need someone with an OBD connector to reset the airbag warning.

Now that you have the amp out you can remove the electronics by taking unscrewing the connector side, and the amp circuit should slide out. You should see the the two 470uh inductors. 1 is a 3.3v and the other is 1.2v. If the 3.3 volt is bad it will make the 1.2 volt bad since it feeds it. You should be able to hook up the amp in the car and test that this switching is working properly. You also can attach 12v to either side of the diode on the connector board in your lab. If you don't see 1.2v and or 3.3 volts you know where your problem lies. On my circuit I was not seeing the 1.2 switcher pulsing.

Hope this helps out the engineers out there locate their problems with this troublesome amps.

-Trunk

Also, if you want to connect your ipod to your mini-cooper stereo, this thread has all the correct info. You need to add caps to decouple the audio signal and a resistor to load down the amp a bit so it senses there is an aux connection available. An audio isolation transformer is not necessary.

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