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I know a couple of people here on the forum have VIO POV.1, just wondering what your thoughts were after using them. Quirks or issues you have come across. Tips for on using the camera. Do you have the newer wide angle lens? Anything else of interest.

Some thoughts:

- You definitely want the wide angle lens. The narrow angle makes it hard to get enough of the frame in there for reference, and it's tough to get a subject in there (like someone you're riding behind trying to film).

- It's waterproof, at least to a few feet


- Very durable, with no moving parts (all solid state). No complaints there.

- I typically get at least a few hours battery life from some rechargeable Nimh batteries.

- Screen built into the recording unit. Very useful for seeing if the lens is positioned properly!

- Video quality is not quite what I'd hoped. There are still some compression artifacts at the highest quality settings. Still probably better than most other helmetcams though.

- I have some weird issues which might be unique to my system (but for the $$$ I don't want to have to deal!). 1) There is a weird periodic clicking in the recorded audio. 2) Videos of snow have a bluish tint in the upper right corner of the recorded image. I need to get in touch with VIO to see if they can resolve these.

- It's expensive! But, you do end up with an all-inclusive system, i.e. not like the old analog helmetcams where you had to also have a separate camcorder.

- There is only one cord, which is nice.

- The wireless remote is cool, but it doesn't indicate if the thing is actually recording or not! You have to turn up the volume on the unit so that you can hear it beep when you click the record button on the remote - and hope that you can hear it when it's buried in your pack. The range of the remote is not great enough that I would always trust it whether or not I can hear the beep.

- Getting the video onto a Mac involves using a 3rd party shareware codec (Perian), which had some problems in the past. Seems to be pretty good now though. The VIO-specific software is currently PC-only. So you won't be able to use tag points on the Mac.

Some possibly useful links:
viewtopic.php?p=32872#p32872
viewtopic.php?p=31606#p31606
Helmet Camera Central review

Most decent audio editing software should be able to remove clicks. I'm pretty sure Adobe Auditioner can do it, but it's expensive. My understanding is that Macs come with pretty goodaudio/video software out of the box. anyone know if Apple's offering an easily do this?

If you have to do it manually, what you want to do is take the smallest snip you can find that contains the click, and check out the frequency-domain view. You should see a lot of high-frequency energy (the click). figure out what frequency you need to set a low-pass filter at to get rid of all the extra energy, and then apply it. The same filter settings ought to work for all clicks, since they are created by the same issue with the hardware. You don't want to just go over the whole audio track. If you do, you'll wipe out all of the definition from s's and k's in the speech of someone on the video, not too mention risk making the audio sound like an old radio.

(although that may be a cool effect. )

Hope this helps,
Shep

Thanks for the tip...

...but in my other life, I write audio software for the Mac, so I am all too familiar with this stuff. I work with it day in and day out, and the last thing I want to do in my free time is spend time screwing around with that to fix something that should work correctly in the first place. I guess maybe I'm a little biased, but for the price of the POV.1 I think that is a pretty serious flaw. Also, it significantly adds to the time it takes to edit clips if you go through that exercise on the audio for every clip. Which in my case means most of my clips are just sitting on my hard drive waiting for the day when I have enough time for the "extra" editing.