Hey im looking to buy a go pro fairly soon and was wondering what are your views and past experiences i know you need plently light to have a good video , was thinking about hero 4 black

Thanks

I used my original GoPro underground and it was pretty good, but it did need a lot of light. That said headlamps have come on in leaps and bounds since the original GoPro.

Ive got a GoPro 3 black edition now and it is awesome in daylight. Never used it underground but I believe the light sensitivity is improved quite a lot so it should perform better than the original.

The only thing I would say about the 3 - which would be worth checking with the 4 - is that it is unbelievably wide angle. Which is great for middle and far distance but creates weird effects close up. I would check that out before buying since a lot of underground video/photography is quite close up.

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This camera is quite good for certain UG work, remote shaft/borehole checking sort of jobs etc.
Have not tested anywhere large though.

https://www.mobius-actioncam.com/ 

I've used a Hero 3 Silver, with mixed results. A few thoughts:

- Mounting the thing using their mounts can make it stick up a bit far. I think I first used the GoPro tripod mount and butchered an old tripod head to give me a threaded screw sticking out of the helmet but I've put the standard stick-on mount onto my new helmet as I didn't want to drill it.

- The wide angle has +s and -s for close-up stuff. You do get good coverage, but as Simon says it can distort somewhat.

- The lighting has to be *very* wide to avoid getting a hot spot, with everything else disappearing into darkness. You also need a lot of light, although the Black Editions should be better in low-light conditions.

- I think the new enclosures have solved the problem with bigger buttons, but on mine, the smaller buttons are still sticky after an encounter with ochre.

The GoPro is the best-selling head cam for many reasons and you probably won't go wrong - but the lighting might require a bit of thought to get enough spread.

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Here's an example of the barrel distortion on close up objects I was referring to...

GoPro Hero 3+ Black Edition - I don't know if the 4 is as wide angle

Apologies from the as subject matter - not exactly in a mine :lol:

Look at the 3 vertical metal bars - they are about 8 feet way and mostly straight at that distance:

[photo]105050[/photo]

Close up they look like a banana!

[photo]105051[/photo]

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I really like my GoPro, one day I'll get round to taking it underground; and expect it'll perform really well. But you can see from the above that if you did a close up of anything it would end up looking pretty weird.

But as I say maybe the 4 is less wide angle?

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May be of interest.

https://gopro.com/support/articles/curved-nature-pictures-videos 

FWIW I bought a Sport DV mini cam last year.

No good U/G as it needs about 300 GigaFellows of illumination, and also exhibits spherical distortion.

It is however a nice discreet little camera, I've used it on bike, motorbike and airplane to great effect.

Although not waterproof it did eventually recover from an unplanned dip in the pool (3 days in airing cupboard).

Mark

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My friend has taken their Gopro underground and it did really well. We where photographing some very large areas and the fish eye lens was superb at capturing the size of the chambers. Also it has a CMOS sensor, so it is really sensitive in low light levels and you did not really have to do mega long exposures on it - 5s for say an area 50m long, 30 wide, 6m high, however the resolution is much smaller than a proper camera so big blow ups are not possible without a lot of grain in them.

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I bought my GoPro secondhand, I think its an original one.

Examples of filming underground using my Roy Fellows Magnumstar for light.





And a bit of a go at underwater

I believe the GoPro software can correct for the fish-eye effect with some post-processing.

To be fair, it's a trivial problem so I imagine tons of software can do it.

Chris.