Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Contour GPS HD helmet cam

I've been after a helmet camera for a while and last week I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Contour GPS HD. It records in 1080p @ 30fps or 720p @ 60fps. It's small, it's pretty easy to use, but what about the quality?
I had a go with it yesterday out riding with Roo, and I was a bit disappointed with the colours, exposure and white balance. The raw footage from camera is the bottom video here — the colours to my eye are way oversaturated, and that's with the contrast reduced from the stock setting by about 20 per cent (you can do this in the software bundled with the camera). Check the vid at 4.08: purple gloves, orange frame and red grips, all way overstaurated.
The video at the top is my colour corrected version. I'm no expert with Premiere Pro — I'm still on the steep bit of the learning curve — but by dropping the saturation, altering the white balance, adding a bit of sharpness and contrast (with high radius unsharp mask) I think it looks a bit more natural.


You'll notice I come really close to crashing at the end of the video. Roo's a monster and had been beasting me around Surrey for 50km and nearly 3hrs by the time we got here. I was in pieces. Details of the ride on Garmin Connect.

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