BMW's and tunnels equals music!

So this past wet and rainy Saturday our local BMW guys got together for a Breakfast Run through the Du Toitskloof Pass and Tunnel (new and old sections), so grabbed my GoPro's to capture as much of the fun as possible.

This was the view from inside the car:


And from an external wet perspective:


Enjoy!

Puh-Leeze do it again, but on a dry day with higher quality sound. You got much better audio of the cars far ahead than of yours! I know GoPro can record much better, I've done it myself. Nice effort though, and it looks like a great tunnel for getting good aural.

Originally Posted by DSXMachina

Puh-Leeze do it again, but on a dry day with higher quality sound. You got much better audio of the cars far ahead than of yours! I know GoPro can record much better, I've done it myself. Nice effort though, and it looks like a great tunnel for getting good aural.

Yep, need a proper wind shield for the GoPro - used a make-shift foam shield since this was my first proper attempt at outside recording, my trial run with the skeleton door was worse, so at least this foam trick helped a bit.

Both are GoPro Hero 2 Motorsport cams, but the one mounted outside is the newer of the two and has the later firmware which annoyingly has stepped the sound encoding quality down from 48 khz sampling rate to 32 khz.

To be fair, my car is still totally stock so does not have the same shout from the tail pipes as the others there, at least not enough to overcome the other noises and the ability of the GoPro's mic.

And yep, weather was a let down actually - the day and weeks before it was clear, warm and sunny, so typical...

Have you tried recording with the solid (waterproof) case? It goes against common sense which says that you'd be blocking sound. In actuality low frequencies pass right on thru with none of the wind noise and other annoyances. Give it a go. You might find some other good tips on GP's website. Some people seem to be able to get great sound to go along with the video. Pity that there's no jack for a remote mic... I'd slap one of those on a boom five feet behind the trunk and get some really good sound. Hmmmm. Why not just rig the whole camera on a boom? Or get someone on an electric motorcycle to tailgate you down the road.

Originally Posted by DSXMachina

Have you tried recording with the solid (waterproof) case? It goes against common sense which says that you'd be blocking sound. In actuality low frequencies pass right on thru with none of the wind noise and other annoyances. Give it a go. You might find some other good tips on GP's website. Some people seem to be able to get great sound to go along with the video. Pity that there's no jack for a remote mic... I'd slap one of those on a boom five feet behind the trunk and get some really good sound. Hmmmm. Why not just rig the whole camera on a boom? Or get someone on an electric motorcycle to tailgate you down the road.

Well, will definitely give the waterproof door a try. The problem is that the built-in mic is very basic and more worryingly, the sound encoding is a bit iffy, so even a proper external mic, which these GoPro's can accommodate, might not improve matters all that much. Also, most mics are either directional or "designed" to filter out ambient noise which in this case is exactly what you are trying to capture.

Back to this newer GoPro Hero 2 that I have, I am seriously thinking about downgrading the firmware (that's if I can) to the same firmware as my older GoPro Hero 2 - both sound and picture is better on it which is strange! Although the external sound is not great of this vid, it is still loads better than my test the day before with just the skeleton door - the foam that I fitted to the skeleton door did make a noticeable difference. But even things like the rain hitting the GoPro case is heard and adding to the noise, so ideally one should use this purely for video and then a proper dedicated mic that can handling these elements and conditions.