unbent

Excuse the messy garage.

I've had all my cameras out the last few days, mostly to drain and recharge the batteries.  With the GoPro Hero3 in hand I decided to experiment with the GoPro Studio, a very simple editing program for GoPro produced media.

GoPro's are great and, in many senses, revolutionary cameras. (How can they build wifi connectivity into a $300 camera when major camera manufacturers want $700 or more to add connectivity to their cameras???  I've got to wonder if I will ever buy another camera that doesn't have built in wifi.)  The only thing I don't like about camera is what has become known as the GoPro "look," which is really the fish eye appearance that comes from shooting with an extraordinarily wide lens.  It's great for surfing videos, but curved masts and horizons don't seem to work for me.

GoPro studio, in the advance settings of the "view and trim" section, offers the opportunity to correct for the wide angle lens.  The screen shot at the top and the one below from the same GoPro video clip.  The bent lines of the top image is the standard way GoPro images appear.  Below is the same shot with the "Remove Fisheye" box checked.  Notice the bent lines are now straight.  Pretty cool.  There is some slight cropping involved to make this work, but not too much.

Below are two more examples, first the raw video image, then the processed image with the fisheye removed.  

Unfortunately this can be done only with video images, not stills.  But it is progress and hopefully we'll be able to "unbend" still images in the future.  In the meantime GoPro customer service has suggested I experiment with the field of view in the camera settings for still images.

I can see buds forming on the trees.  Rehab is coming along steadily.  Maybe a little light sanding and epoxy work in the next couple of weeks.