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Originally Posted by CP911
Great info. Thanks. How do you trigger the GoPro to start recording? While I'd love to spend less than half of what the SmartyCam goes for and get better resolution too, I am wondering if giving up the auto-on integration with the SOLO 2 DL would be a regret later on. Can you give some more detail on how you use the GoPro when starting a session, how charging/power supply works over an entire weekend, etc.? Sorry, not too familiar with the GoPro cameras...
I'm hoping to hold off on the video altogether for now in hopes that AiM is working on a 1080p unit at a lower price point. Wishful thinking probably!
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I use a GoPro Hero 2 model, and recording is initiated by pressing a button on the unit. You can (and should) look at the front of the unit to see if a largish red light is blinking, signifying that the unit is recording. Or, you can purchase an LCD back for the camera that will display the image that the camera is recording. This screen can be useful for ensuring that you're shooting the scene that you want the camera to capture; note that this back will run the battery down faster.
My solution to the charging/power supply of my unit was to buy a handful of batteries from Amazon. I have eight in total, and I charge them before heading to the track. Each of these batteries yields right around 2½ hours of 1080p/30fps video. I choose to shoot using the ‘Medium’ field of view. Note that the Hero 2 has a file size limit of 2GB; that’s ~26 minutes at my resolution/fps. Once the unit reaches that limit, it closes the current file and immediately begins recording another. This is seen as a momentary blip in the video stream after merging the video files together with video processing software.
For an SD card, I bought the fastest Class 10 cards I could find (back in ~2013) – these were SanDisk Extreme 45MB/sec. units. These units hold ~300 minutes of video at my resolution/fps. I carry two of these cards, along with a pair of lower-capacity Class 10 units in case I should need them.
My guess is that it’s still wise to put very high-performance cards in any video recording device that uses them. GoPro users with slower cards sometimes had issues with them. Also, formatting the SD card via the GoPro camera was more reliable than doing so with a computer.
FWIW, I don't know how much of this is still true for later models in the GoPro series of cameras. I’m guessing the basics I’ve outlined haven’t changed much.
Incorporating the capture, downloading, and analysis of video and/or data requires that the driver establish an efficient and workable routine. It can take a while to sort out what that routine is for the driver at a given track. For example, if you’ve got classroom sessions to attend (esp. when they don’t end on time), an instructor with whom you spend time before and/or after sessions, toilets that are 100 yards away and no bicycle to speed you over and back, a phone to which you must respond, the need to go into town for gasoline, etc., you’ll want your video/data routine to be as streamlined as you can make it.
In the case of the GoPro, I found early on that having plenty of batteries and SD cards handy made my life quite a bit easier. At the end of a session, I’d pop the camera out of its case, remove the SD card and the battery, insert the SD card into the laptop and begin transferring the video file(s), put a fresh battery and SD card in the camera, and put the camera back in its case (which was suction-cupped to the windshield (so the field of view shows exactly where the driver is placing the car on the track)). This routine took only a few minutes of my time.
When I was still time-trialing in my race car, the focus was much more on analyzing data than it was on reviewing video files. My interest almost always was improving what I was doing with the throttle and brakes, esp. the transition from the former to the latter. I was very consistent with the driving line, brake initiation, and throttle application, and would only occasionally overlay data onto video to share with other drivers in my club what I was doing. Typically, they had much different cars, and my driving line and/or the amount of trail-braking/steering I was doing was what they could pick up from watching a data-overlaid video of mine.
Note that if you use one system to capture data and another to record video, when it comes time to overlay the data onto the video you’ll need a method for synchronizing the two. I don’t recall which software I was using to overlay (Dash Ware, Race Render, or ???), but I always test my brakes in the hot pits on the way to pit-out. The braking pressure from that test shows up in the data, and the reduced sound coming from the car made the synchronization fairly easy to accomplish. Our cars are so quiet I don’t know if that approach would work. You can see and hear this at the eight-second mark in this video shot at Watkins Glen during aero testing:
BTW, if you ever make it over to the Glen (which I highly encourage you to do, as it’s especially well-suited to our cars), this video, and the driver’s use of every inch of the track, is an excellent place to see the fast line around the track. More importantly, it’s the
safe line around the track, esp. in T6.