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My H and DD are into drag racing. They want a gopro to video their runs and I am completely confused on the various models. One site says they are all the same just the mounts are different. Another site lists a bunch of differences. Thanks for any help you can give.

I got SO the GoPro Hero 3 Black edition for Christmas. He loves it.

The GoPro site lists the differences

http://gopro.com/hd-hero3-cameras

The main differences seem to be how many frames per second at 1080p as well as the megapixels. So, it's not just mounts.

They used to have the 960, the HD, and the HD2. They quit making the old body style, so to give some different pricing brackets, they modified the internals of the Hero 3. The more money you spend, the better the processing power.

I bought an HD2 last year about 6 months before the 3 came out. I don't even use half the features on it. Recording in full 1080p chews up hard drive space quickly, and it takes forever to render a huge video file. I stick to 720p @ 30fps mostly. A lot of reality shows are using GoPros, so GP wanted to give television shows more options for production quality video. If the drag races are mostly at night, you would get better quality video out of the more expensive models.

We have two of them...the Hero3 Black and the Hero3 White. My H got me the Black for Christmas and then decided we would get more awesome videos if he had one too.

The Black is $399 and the White is $199. The Black is considered to have a professional lense and features so $399 is not really a bad price and it comes with a remote and more mounts than the White or Silver edition. But the lense has higher resolution capabilities so that is the main reason it costs more.

I am very much into video editing and we mount these on our helmets for different activities. We just used them for white water rafting and ziplining! Not sure I enjoyed those two activities even one-tenth as much as it looks like I did on those videos, but for me the fun is editing and sharing these videos afterward.

To edit, you do need a modern fairly high powered computer with a lot of hard drive space. And if you have a 3 or 4 hour video, yes it needs to be edited down to "the best parts" if you really expect people to want to sit and watch it.

Thanks for all the info.

Bobbi-Sue are there noticable differences in video quality between the black and white version? Both my drag racers are in excess of 100mph so that would be an important consideration.

Hi Longtime,

I sent you a PM with a link to a video with both our cameras.

For most purposes, the differences would not be noticeable. The Black version is supposed to be better in low light, and it has more FOV options meaning you can set it to a narrower view or a super wide view.

But the white or silver versions are made for high speed sports (such as racing) too and if you really don't want or need the extra features and don't expect to do a lot of complex editing, you will likely be just as happy with the less expensive version. The least expensive one (the Hero 3 White) offers High definition, 1920 x 1080 resolution, at 30 fps which is what is tyipcally used for Blue ray hd video. Whichever one you get, you will likely be happy with the video quality. I would recommend practicing a lot with it first, getting videos of just about anything, that you will erase after getting used to the features of the camera, and how it operates, so you will be ready when you want to capture important video.

Thank you! And I hate to be stupid, but where are pm's?

Edit: I found it. Thanks!

[This message edited by longtimewife at 12:11 PM, June 2nd (Sunday)]