Introducing the Gnarbox—a clever, compact and rugged mobile device designed to view, back-up, edit and share HD footage from any POV or DSLR camera. This product allows you to leave your laptop and hard drive at home, yet still share your photos and videos in real time. You’ll be able to upload photos from your camera on the chairlift or edits in the lodge, no need to wait until you’re home on the computer. The Gnarbox is dust-proof, sand-proof and waterproof up to one meter, meaning you can drop this baby in the snow or bring it to the campsite, worry free. It’s super easy to use and even accommodates your 4K video and RAW photos. The device backs-up the footage and organizes it by date, time and GPS on an app on your smartphone—no more searching through mounds of footage.
While we have yet to get out hands on a sample to do any testing of our own, CEO and Co-Founder Tim Feess gave us the inside look at the creation of the Gnarbox, Tom Wallisch’s involvement and how it’ll integrate with various products on the market.
Why did you develop the Gnarbox?
We developed the GNARBOX to help us solve a huge problem in our own lives. We all had a desire to get more out of the content we shot on our GoPro’s and DSLR’s, but rarely had time to actually make an edit. It just took too much time and effort, and as a result, our videos often just wasted away and never saw the light of day. We wanted to make a product that would make editing and sharing as easy as capturing.
What was your background before the whole process? And how did that come into play when designing and building this device?
I worked for several years at a 9-5 desk job. I was a financial analyst and product manager, but my passion was skiing and capturing my moments with a GoPro. Because I had a full time job, I was always waiting for a chance to sneak away for a powder day or weekend with seriously limited time. This was really important—it helped me identify a pretty key problem that we are now solving—the latency period between when I shot something and was able to share it. When we started working on this project in 2013, I knew that I needed to learn to program in order to innovate, so I have a bit of a background in software engineering at this point, too.
The rest of the team is pretty engineer-intensive. Our CTO came up with the idea for a device that would accomplish our goals based on his background building a similar device for the military. Our app engineer is actually a pro film editor/engineer which is a cool combo—he built our video/photo editor.
You started working with Tom Wallisch. How did he become involved and how has his feedback been?
We reached out to Tom because of how he made a career for himself off of self-edits. It’s an ideal partnership—take a guy who made himself hot on the web and partner him with a product that makes it easier for anyone to do that and you’ve got a great combination.
Do you have any plans for collaboration with Wallisch going forward?
We’re filming with Tom later this week and will have some content coming out very soon. He also is going to help us test, improve, and refine our product as we move forward. All of these things are hugely helpful for our future.
How does this compare to the app the GoPro offers?
We get asked this a lot. The similarities stop at it being an app. We integrated our software directly with hardware on the box, which is a key difference. Loading files wirelessly with the GoPro app is pretty unreliable and slow, in my opinion—our device is about 40x faster for transfers. That’s just the beginning, I’ve found that GoPro’s software only works with a few file types that really limit what you can do with it. We intentionally built our product to work with all of the high resolution file types and high frame rates so you can get the most out of that amazing camera.
The GoPro app is just for controlling camera settings and transferring files to your phone, which can take up lots of space. We added space and processing power to the mix for a great result. As far as the app itself is concerned, you can actually edit videos with our app, it uses GPS to organize your files for you, and you can tag friends and share directly to all your social outlets without leaving. It’s designed to be the ultimate user experience for your GoPro, not just a mechanism to move a file or two.
- 1. Upload footage from any camera (USB3, Full SD, Micro SD)
2. Connect phone to GNARBOX hotspot
3. Open App
4. Touch up photos and create highlight reels
5. Share and relive your moments
6. Go back to doing what you love
There’s still time to get in on the Kickstarter and snatch one of these bad boys for only $149. Learn more and get the technical details here.