The Tiny Action Cam That Made Us All DIYers
Popular Mechanics South Africa|November/December 2020
This changed everything
Joe Lindsey
The Tiny Action Cam That Made Us All DIYers

BEFORE YOUTUBE, if you wanted to replace a balky starter motor in your Hyundai Elantra, you had to find a copy of a Haynes manual and puzzle out the repair yourself from instructions and exploded diagrams. If you needed to run an electrical circuit in your home, you turned to Renovation. Now we consult the omnipresent video-sharing platform, where home-made bits of footage show us how to tackle almost any project. Often those videos were possibly shot with or made by a little camera called the GoPro.

Before its creation, there was no easy way to shoot, edit and share videos. To do that, you’d need a major production studio.

YouTuber Scotty Kilmer remembers the change clearly. The celebrity mechanic went from hosting the Crank It Up car-repair show on CBS, with $150 000 cameras, pro lighting, and ‘all that horsesh*t’, to starting his own YouTube channel in 2007. He’s since racked up 3.6 million subscribers. To do it, all he needed was a laptop with some editing software and a small selection of affordable consumer digital cameras. Among them: a GoPro, with its remarkable (for the time) wide-angle lens, which was especially useful for getting shots inside tight spaces.

This story is from the November/December 2020 edition of Popular Mechanics South Africa.

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This story is from the November/December 2020 edition of Popular Mechanics South Africa.

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