Lance's review of the Garmin VIRB camera

[SSLance]

I got the chance to borrow a Garmin VIRB Elite yesterday at our last autocross of the year. I couldn't adapt the Garmin Cam to my RAM mounts that I use with my GoPro so I picked up an extra GoPro accessories kit and cobbled together a mount to attach the Garmin to the inside of my windshield. With 3 different adapters used, the camera vibrated a bit more during runs than I would have liked, but that wasn't the cameras fault.

This camera has a couple of cool features that I like. First, it is super idiot proof. There is a big slide button on the side of it, slide it forward and the camera turns on and starts recording...slide it back, camera stops and shuts off. There is also a LCD screen on it that lets you preview and review shots right on the camera. The other cool feature is it uses GPS to embed data in the video file like speed, direction, altitude, and G-forces and lets you put different graphics on your videos showing the external data taken during your runs.

Mounting and operation of the camera during events is top notch and it takes very good video. The owner of the camera had it set to 780p and 30 fps I believe to save memory space as he road races with it and I didn't change those settings. We took 8 videos with it 3-5 minutes in length each and it still showed 5 hours of battery time left when done.

I downloaded and installed Garmin's free Video Edit software and used the cord to plug the camera into the USB port. The software found the camera and the files automatically and imported them to the PC. I then started to learn the software. It's pretty user friendly from scratch. Making the first few videos was easy. Then I started overlaying the GPS data onto them and it got a bit more complicated. Trying to sync the data to the video takes some practice. I got a few right on and a few were several seconds off. I think there is some tricks to this and I'll work on figuring those out. On to the good stuff. Here is my third and fastest run of the day as seen from the Garmin cam.



I'm going to work on a few of the other videos to clean up and show the different templates you can use to overlay the data in a bit. I'll update this thread as I get them uploaded. Might take me a few days though.

Here is the in car from my first run taken with the GoPro, you can see the Garmin cam attached to the windshield.



And here are the two cameras on their mounts I used yesterday side by side.





Any questions, just fire away. I think I'll be picking one of these up as well as a very versatile Ram Mount for it before next racing season. Not that it is really better than my GoPro Hero 3 Silver, but it offers a few features that I can't get with my GoPro. I consider it a nice compliment.