Never Buy Another GoPro:- Use THIS Camera Instead!

GoPro May well be the world's leading action camera brand but I personally seriously doubt that I will ever buy another one [Music] I've been using GoPros for about 10 years now and over that time I've developed quite a love-hate relationship for them on the one hand they are fantastic little action cameras they're small they're compact they're robust they're very easy and spontaneous to use and they have excellent image and sound quality but then on the downside they are just dreadfully unreliable there's no point having a camera unless you can count on it 100 when you hit that record button the first GoPro I bought was back in 2014 and it was a GoPro Hero 3 and essentially it just revolutionized my YouTube channel up until then I was doing pieces to camera like this and then really struggling to get the b-roll to cover these pieces to camera and when I got the GoPro it just amazed me how easy it was to just stick the camera pretty much anywhere on the bike and get those b-roll shots the next GoPro I bought was a few years later and that was the hero 6. and I got that because I heard that it had some excellent image stabilization and I was not disappointed the first time I took it out I put it on the handlebars and the shots that came back were just silky smooth it was absolutely amazing I then went on to buy the Hero 7 the hero 8 and the hero 9. and in fact the hero 9 is the camera that I'm using to this day to record my pieces to camera on the bike and to get all of the b-roll shots I haven't felt the need to go out and upgrade to the hero 10 or even to the hero 11 and that's because the hero 9 is doing pretty much everything that I need it to as great as these cameras are every single one of them has had their own individual little faults so for instance the Hero 3 that I initially bought suffered from one form of the classic GoPro freeze so about a year after I started using it I would stick it on the bike hit record it would record for about 30 seconds and then stop working and I could only restart it again by taking the battery out and putting it back in and that's been the same story for every single GoPro that I've had the freeze might be different it might run for a little bit and not stop recording or it might not start recording at all or it might not record to the card properly again in which case all you have to do is take the battery out and push it back in just to reset the camera the Hero 6 had a specific fault with the audio recording I'd get the camera back and particularly for the pieces to camera I would find that the audio would be about three seconds behind the visuals so it would look like I was in some kind of uh Kung Fu film that had been dubbed and the only thing I could do to rectify it was to disconnect the audio in the edit Suite slip it back about three or four frames and then it would look like I was talking in sync the Hero 7 well that never worked from the get-go I literally the first time I ever took that camera out it recorded an image the very first clip and it had some kind of weird split screen thing going on I thought it was a problem with the card so I replaced that and it seemed to work for a little while but every now and again it would still do that it also wouldn't record audio from time to time so it would record the picture's okay but it would just not record any audio whatsoever and again that was particularly bad if I was doing a piece to camera I remember taking it out on a 100 kilometer ride doing all my pieces to camera with it I got back and of course there was no sound so I just could not do that Vlog at all the other problem that I had with the Hero 7 was the live streaming one of the reasons why I bought it was because I understood that it could do a live stream function and that never worked so in the end because of all of those faults I got in touch with GoPro and after a very long protracted kind of conversation with them over several months they finally agreed that the fault was the camera and not me and they sent me out a replacement and then surprise surprise the replacement didn't work fully either it did the uh the the the live streaming but it still had that weird kind of split screen artifact thing going on because the Hero 7 was just so unreliable I went out and bought the hero8 and to be fair that's worked pretty well it still does the the GoPro freeze thing but it doesn't do the silly artifacts or the split screen or anything like that and then I went out and bought the GoPro Hero 9 mainly because I heard that it had this very good Horizon leveling feature and I could put things like my anamorphic lens adapter on there and the GoPro Max lens mod now that hasn't been quite as successful as I would have hoped either again that camera does this really weird split screen artifact thing so much so that I got in touch with GoPro again and they sent out a replacement so the camera I'm using right now is is that replacement and the The Horizon leveling feature does not work as well as I would like either I can get camera out and in theory it doesn't matter which way up I hold it it should keep the Horizon perfectly level with this Max lens mod and I've had shots come back and it's just not been level at all if I'm that disenchanted with GoPro what's the alternative well for me I think it has to be insta 360. over the last year or so I've been trying out a couple of their cameras and the thing that I really like about them is what they call the invisible selfie stick you can put the camera on the selfie stick and then the clever little algorithm in the camera will magically erase that and it looks like the camera is just sort of floating in mid-air and this is particularly useful to get those kind of third person on the bike shots that look like I have a little drone in front of the bike or I'm following somebody who's got a camera on the back of their bike it's absolutely fantastic the other fantastic thing about the insta 360 cameras is that you can change the shot in post so all you need to do is point the camera vaguely in the direction of the thing that you want to capture and then not worry too much about you know if you've done it correctly because you can come back and change it all in post now I've had limited success with this with the GoPros particularly with the the hero 9 and the front-facing screen I've been able to see more or less what I've been shooting with them but that hasn't always been successful and if I've messed it up on the GoPro I can change it a little bit in post in my edit Suite but if I've really messed it up there's not really much I can do and that's not the story at all with the insta 360 cameras the other absolutely essential feature on the insta 360 cameras is the image stabilization they call it Flow State and it is absolutely silky smoothie it's really really good and combine that with the Horizon leveling feature where it doesn't really matter which way up the camera is that Horizon is always going to be perfectly level and those two together are just absolutely brilliant one of the things that I'm really excited about with the X3 is the ability to record good quality audio for my pieces to camera while I'm actually cycling along and this is possible thanks to the invisible mic setup so with this I can attach my little rode go to Radio mic chat away and keep both my hands on the handlebars and I felt I was on some kind of hamster wheel to nowhere I started out using the insta360 1x2 camera about 18 months ago and that has all of those features that I've just mentioned but I'll be honest and say that I didn't think that the image quality was quite up there insta360 have recently launched the X3 and that's got a one inch sensor and I've been very very impressed with the image quality of that camera and I think that it easily compares to the image quality of the GoPro Hero 9 and as soon as that happened that's when I started thinking Hmm do I really need the GoPros there are a couple of other features that make the X3 a fantastic camera for me to use on my ride Vlogs firstly the battery life is absolutely fantastic so I'll only really need to take one battery for the X3 out on a ride and compare that to the two or even three batteries that I take with me when I'm using the GoPro the other thing is that there are some really good dedicated cycling accessories for the X3 and I'm thinking particularly of the out front mount and their new rear facing Mount both of them just clip on very quickly and easily to the bike you can put the selfie stick in there and then you can get all of these really interesting shots from the X3 the other Factor might seem very very minor but the X3 has a little quarter 20 mounting screw underneath it which makes it very very Universal for all kinds of other photographic accessories so things like tripods for instance and compare that to the GoPro which has its dedicated kind of finger Mount and then you're into the Realms of adapters and basically the more things that you attach to tripods and selfie sticks and things like that the less stable it's going to be and stability is pretty important when you're putting cameras on bikes because the vibration of the rides can easily Shake cameras off mounts and they can fall and get damaged and stuff but of course the big deciding factor for me has to be the reliability of the camera as I've just pointed out the GoPros are notoriously unreliable and compare that with the X3 which has been super reliable not once has it Frozen not once have I had to remove the battery to reset the camera not once has it recorded some weird video artifacts it's never not turned on it's never not turned off it's just been super super reliable the X3 does have a couple of little downsides to it the first one is that it's nowhere near as robust as the GoPros so for instance I've been on rides with the GoPro where it has actually fallen off the bike and it's been fine I've just put it back on and it started working again and filming the ride I'm not sure I could say quite the same for the X3 the the weak spot on the X3 has to be the lenses and there are two of them uh I'm forever putting the the lens covers on there when I'm not using it because I'm just so scared of damaging the lenses and once you've damaged them you can't replace them and and that essentially is the camera kind of written off and because it isn't quite so robust as the GoPros that means that it's it's not quite as spontaneous to use so you really have to think about what shots you want to capture with the X3 and for me that usually means sticking it on the front or the back of the bike with the selfie stick and that obviously takes a little bit more time and a little bit more thought for me the other downside of using the X3 is that you do have to edit the footage using the insta 360 app before you can import it into your normal edit software and that does take time depending on how much you've shot you can be there editing that footage for almost as long if not longer than you would edit the actual video itself so that that is rather time consuming and although you can get some amazing angles from the X3 and get some shots that basically look impossible I think from time to time this is also a bit of a disadvantage because it can make the footage look a little bit too wacky and a little bit too kind of wide angled fisheye type Distortion now yes you do get that with the GoPro as well but I think if I were to compare the two I would say the GoPro looks just that little bit more natural the X3 is hands down and absolutely fantastic camera and perfect to take out with me on my rides however there is room for improvement which is why I will still be taking a GoPro Hero 9 with me as well hopefully between the two I'll be able to create some interesting and engaging ride vlogs thanks for watching

Channel: leonardmlee

Views: 1,980,689

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Id: fVliMdW5NC4

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022