Finally I can make some half decent car edits! Quite honestly, the GoPro in standard form is pretty much useless for recording on the outside of a car, unless of course you’re going to cover the edit with a song but then you don’t get the sweet sweet sound of your car. In standard form, even with a full case, completely sealed, you’ll get nothing but wind noise. Unfortunately the HD Hero doesn’t even offer any way around this but since getting the HD Hero 2 I’ve had the option for an external microphone.

An external microphone should be the way to solve the wind noise problem. It would let me place the camera anywhere on the car and run the microphone to whichever position I fancied (away from the wind!). Using an external mic does mean you need to buy a skeleton case or drill a hole in a spare one, so it’s not a good idea to use it in damp conditions. The Hero 2 uses a 3.5mm audio jack (apparently the new ones use a USB port?) so all I had to do was find a suitable microphone with that jack.

Google and YouTube have lots of suggestions. The first one to pop up was the Olympus ME15 and I was quite impressed. On the comparison video I saw it recorded the exhaust note really well with minimal wind noise and I was all set to buy it until I read it only had a meter long cable. These type of microphones are used my journalists and such to clip to their tie, or collar etc so a meter is plenty for that but I needed more.

I kept looking and found this video:

It had amazing sound quality and filmed purely with the GoPro I had a look into what microphone was used. It was a Hahnel MK100 which on Amazon has an RRP of £80 but can normally be picked up for a bit cheaper. I’d have loved to have bought this mic, but the price is well out of my range at the moment.

I kept looking, lots of videos posted with “GoPro HD Hero 2 External Microphone” don’t actually say what mic they’ve used which is a bit pointless but I eventually came across the Audio Technica ATR3350. It was the same price as the Olympus but with a super long cord. The sound quality appeared good too! A lot of comments seemed to pop up saying the major flaw was that the battery compartment didn’t have an LED to signal on or off. Those people were leaving the mic on (it is actually marked on and off by the switch), going out to film only to get back and have no audio. It’s not something I’m worried about. I’m quite competent at turning a switch from the on to the off position so that shouldn’t trouble me, but as a back up I’ll take my laptop to check footage on and a few spare batteries.

So that’s the mic I went for. It arrived yesterday but it was raining so I had to wait till this morning to test. It was still a bit damp, icy and misty but I got the footage and I’m really impressed. It takes a bit more work to set up than just clamping a GoPro to the car but the results are worth it. For a £25 microphone, I’m impressed!