Okay, either I'm a complete idiot, or these cameras are totally flakey. I get it set up, before the session I push the button on the front to select Video, then I press the button on top to Select/Start. The display shows the time counting up and the red light is blinking at me. After the session I push the Select/Stop button on top to finish the recording.

Repeat this throughout the day. At Laguna Seca a couple weeks ago I got the first two sessions, but only got 12s of the third, and 1m32s of the fourth. This past weekend at Infineon, I got the last 15s of the session as I rolled in to pit lane and then the time in the paddock before I turned the camera off. But absolutely none of the track time -- clearly I wasn't pressing buttons out on track so I've no idea why I only got the very very end of the session.

I've tried importing off the camera directly in to iMovie, which often fails. And I've tried copying the files off the camera to the Desktop and then importing from there which usually succeeds.

So... what am I doing wrong? Or is this camera just a POS?

For short test recordings it always seems to work outside of the car...

 

mine is being doing fine, i bought the skeleton housing to be able to use external mic since internal mic sucks.

 

Maybe your camera is broken. GoPro has a one year warranty, which I'd suggest using. I've used GoPros since the company's first generation, non-wide angle camera, and now I use the latest Hero2, and they've all worked as advertised.

Assuming the camera is fine, the only thing I can think of is your memory card doesn't have a fast enough transfer rate and the camera is struggling to write the data to it. But my guess is you just happened to get a bum camera. It happens. That's what warranties are for.

 

The answer is I'm a complete idiot. I rummaged through the SD card itself and the videos are there -- but iMovie won't import them off the camera. I'll futz with it now that I have the videos on my desktop and see if I can get iMovie working.

 

Only time my GoProHD stops working is when the card gets full or the battery dies....

And at 1080 the cards fill up quick, even the 32Gig...