Den (dewhitton) wrote,
Den
dewhitton

Watching the clouds

My biggest problem with the GoPro4 is the limited battery life. I get about 2.5 hours of recording before it goes flat. On Wednesday I bought a AU$40 Comsol 30Wh battery pack. It is designed to charge a mobile phone, but I figured that any thing you can charge by USB would charge from this - a thing such as a GoPro4, for example. Yesterday there was some nice high level cirrus clouds - not the rolling clouds of cumulus but still worth filming - so I gaffa taped the battery pack to the tripod, and mounted the camera in my new skeleton case so I could connect the two. After 4 hours of filming at 1 frame per 2 seconds pointing NNW, I had this:



With bonus sun halo. I planned to film to sunset but the clouds went away and left a boring clear blue sky. I stopped the time lapse at 6pm, about 60 minutes before sunset. You didn't want to see that; it was boring.

The final video took a shade over 2.5GB of the 64GB SD card. At that time lapse rate I could film from sunrise to sunset and still use less than 9GB, and now I know the battery pack will easily power the camera for that long. The downside is, the skeleton case is not waterproof. If a storm rolls in, the video would be really interesting but my camera would get water into it. I need to make some sort weatherproof enclosure with a clear window, which would contain and protect the battery pack, camera, and tripod head.

I think I'll move my film location to the roof of my house. That would clear the surrounding bushes and houses. Note to self: ladder.
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