Last week I had a project up in the mountains where one shoot was folloowing some people on a helicopter flight, to produce a teaser of their activities.
Since I had access to 6 GoPro Hero Black, I thought I give them a try and bring them with me and write a short GoPro Hero 3 Black review.
The plan was to use one on the ground to capture the start, three on the heli rails (left, right and right facing backwards), one inside the heli on the front window facing the people and one clamped to my Canon C300 to give me a additional wide angle shot.
This would allow me to use a 17-55mm/f2.8 with IS on my C300 to get some better out of the windows shots, but still be able to get some footage from the people sitting inside the helicopter.
Since the new GoPro Hero 3 Black offers a wide range of image size and frame rates, I decided to set every cam outside on the heli rails to a different size and frame rate.
The idea was to get at least one decent recording if there would be a problem with one of the modes.
The outside GoPro cameras were fixed to the heli using their official rollbar mounts. Additionaly they were wire secured and some partswere slightly secured with additional tape.
The front window camera was fixed with their suction cup (new model/2013) and the static one on the floor was on a tripod.
Outside Helicopter:
Left front 2.7k/25fps
Right front 1080P/50fps
Right rear 720P/100fps
Inside Helicopter:
Front window 2.7k/25fps
On top of C300 2.7k/25fps
Ground:
720P/100fps
So what was the best mode?
It really depends on what you want to achive.
2.7k/25fps and 1080p/50fps had a lot of rolling shutter problems producing some prettty strong “Jello” Effect.
720P/100fps seemed to be the best option.
The drawback is higher image compression on the 720P/100fps mode. But if you want to get the best possible image, on a vibrating object that moves in three dimensions the I really would suggest to go with the 100fps option.
On the other hand 2.7k allowed me to reframe, which allowed taking me out of the picture from the inside heli shot.
Let me know if you want to see different or bigger footage in its native format.
PS:
Currently there’s a error in the GoPro manual. Forget Step one in the RC Remote manual if you want to sync multiple GoPro to a single remote.
Don’t turn it on to sync !!! Took me a while to figure it out LOL.
Diese Website benutzt Cookies. Wenn du die Website weiter nutzt, gehen wir von deinem Einverständnis aus. 
This website uses cookies. If you continue to use the website, we will assume your consent.
Hi!
Awesome setup!!
I was a bit curious about your roll-bar mounts. On the picture of the heli, it looks like there are additional metal fixes to the official rollbar mount you mentioned. I’m interested to know what is the actual setup on a technical/mechanical point of view, since I’d like to propose this to one of our heli-owners to get more materials for the company. If it is indeed as light as using the rollmount plus a wire-cable security, I think all out flights will be embarked with an outside Hero 3 as of now !
Thanks in advance for your insights, and keep up the good work!
Hello Boris
For this quick setup I just used the stock GoPro rollbar mounts and added some wire safety to make sure nothing gets lost.
Since the plastic mount and its attaching arms can’t be fixed really strong, there was a lot of vibration beeing multiplied up to the GoPro. So you might also want to consider a mounting place that gots less vibration then the skids.
The next time I would probably use something like a Genustech cage. This would allow for better and almost unlimited mounting options.
A metal solution would also be less prone to temperature differences and would be stronger in a long term usage. Plastic with thumbscrews isn’t the optimal solution.
Here’s a link to the Genustech cage. http://www.genustech.tv/products/gopro-cage
Let me know and see what you come up with 🙂