Best HD POV Cam for Ice Skater

[Chip Gallo]

I frequently shoot in ice rinks, where I set up in an access door or on the ice with a tripod. I'd like to add some skater POV shots to edit into the videos. Usually the skater is on the ice less than an hour, so really long battery time isn't a requirement. The other cameras are a Canon HV40 and a XA-10 (soon) and the edit is done with Sony Vegas Pro 10 on a quad core Q6600 motherboard with Win 7 64 bit.

From what I have watched, the GoPro Hero shots are a bit wide for what we are doing. Are any of these adjustable for degrees of coverage? I am trying to keep this in the $250-$350 range at least for the initial acquisition, not including memory.

Thanks in advance,
Chip

[Robert Turchick]

Check out the Replay XD. Got a pair of them and they're not as wide at 1080p. Hdmi out and a bunch of other neat features. They're smaller than the Contour too. About $300. The different video dimensions all vary the width of the lens. No true adjustment.
If you do get one, know that you need to adjust some settings to get best quality from them. It's a piece of cake as it's done through a text file that resides on the micro SD card. Battery life is about 90 min.
Getting good results and even better with Magic bullet denoiser applied. (I use that on Gopro and contour footage too, these cameras are all noisy!)

[Chip Gallo]

Thanks, Robert. I added the VIO POV.hd even though it is outside my initial budget. I like the flexibility of use. With the included monitoring, one could put it on a pole as well. Might be tricky to rig on certain ice skating costumes tho ...

[Wondering if indoor rink lighting is enough for this kind of camera? I guess a real world test will tell all.]