GoPro edumacation....

[Bodhisattva05X]

Yes I misspelled that on purpose....

But please enlighten me when it comes to GoPros. I'm look at the Hero4 Silver. Is it really worth the extra money for the Black. What is a good size memory card to shoot a good amount of footage? 64gb?

I'm on the fence when it comes to getting one for our trip out west. I want to be able to capture good footage and images between this and my Canon. But don't want to be spending too much time trying to get said footage and images to the point I don't remember the places we went.

On top of that I have no experience editing video and minimal for images. I do t want to obtain the footage and the. Have it be useless because it's a pain to edit it into something usable.

Thanks for any input you provide

 

[Dean]

The black is good if you want the higher resolution (4k) and the higher frame-rate for those epic slow-mo shots. Truth-be-told, outside of professional videography you should be fine with the silver. Most of what I do with a GoPro ends up downsized to 720 HD so I rarely - if ever - shoot at the highest resolution.

As far as memory cards, I subscribe to the "more is more" philosophy because if you have all your footage on one card and it craps out you're screwed. I think we the GoPro my bro has uses a pair of 16 GB cards, but it's an older one. I think you'd be good with 32's or even a 64 so long as you have a backup card and copy footage to a computer for a backup copy.

 

[WUZombies]

I'm still using the old GoPro 960s (cheaper version of the original Hero) for shooting since the video is used only for Youtube videos. I edit it down, color correct and make some other adjustments in Premiere, but I'll say the free GoPro editing software is decent and reasonably easy to use.

 

[Gear]

A couple of thoughts. First I would take a look at the video's and still images provided on the GoPro site. The one thing that I notice over and over again is the cool shots are of up close action. I do not see this as releavant on a cross country trip. Just this alone wound swing me to just using the Canon. If you do decide that a GoPro would be relevant, I believe the Silver is a better buy because it has a screen on the back. This allows you to see what you are filming at the present moment. A very nice feature when you are trying to get the right image. Hope this helps!

 

[Dean]

I like using live view via the GoPro app on my phone. Chews through battery quicker, but makes record/stop and shot alignment a lot easier.

 

[WUZombies]

A couple of thoughts. First I would take a look at the video's and still images provided on the GoPro site. The one thing that I notice over and over again is the cool shots are of up close action. I do not see this as releavant on a cross country trip. Just this alone wound swing me to just using the Canon. If you do decide that a GoPro would be relevant, I believe the Silver is a better buy because it has a screen on the back. This allows you to see what you are filming at the present moment. A very nice feature when you are trying to get the right image. Hope this helps!

That's a good point and very true, with the ultra-wide lens if there isn't something or someone in the frame to give reference then things just don't look very exciting. Not only that but the sense of speed is hard to capture on video, it's even harder with an ultra-wide lens.

If you look at the professionally shot and edited videos (Ken Brock's videos are a good example), the GoPro footage is used for shooting perspective shots from the cabin and for b-reel shots for cut transitions (like the tires spinning and such).

 

[Herbie]

Part of the reason that GoPro as a company has hit some financial hurdles lately is that they're getting less turnover on their cameras than they estimated. The reason for this is that their old gear is still really damned useful. I have a Hero2 that I still use all the time, and aside from having to work around some of the feature shortcomings like using an external screen backpack and using a wired-trigger, I love the video it produces.

If I were buying again, higher frame-rate for super-slow-mo would be a "neat" thing, but I doubt I'd use it enough to justify the cost. About 60% of the time I just put it in the default video mode and go. About 30% of the time I use it for time-lapse flying from my kite, and the remaining 10% is random stills and other experiments.

 

[Robert]

I'm still using a Hero 2 as well but I may buy a 4 Silver this summer- supposedly they are coming out with a new model soon so that should drive the price of the 4s down. I don’t need the super slow motion and I like the touchscreen back on the silver. One of the things that I do not like about my current Hero 2 is that I have to choose between backs- I have all of them- I use the video or wifi back to align the camera then put the battery pack on to extend the life. Occasionally I’ll run the wifi back and use the tablet in the cab of the truck. The video and wifi backs use up your battery a lot faster and the video back, if not shut off, generates more heat in the case.

Buy the largest, fastest card that the camera will support; buy two more of them. On HD you can eat up a card faster than you’d think. Buy Wasabi batteries, they have a higher mAmp than the GoPro batteries and last longer. They also come with a handy charger that you can plug into your cigarette lighter outlet so you can recharge while driving. You can also buy cables to perform various functions and there are some hacks out there to add other features.

The free GoPro software is fine for simple editing, I’ve been using Sony Vegas software (not the pro version) and it’s got more features than I’ll ever use for my simple playing around.

Side note, one thing to be acutely aware of is condensation and fogging within the sealed case. I’ve lost footage because of changes in temp or because I was in a hurry and didn’t let the case come to the ambient air temp. Some people claim good luck with rolled up toilet paper, some don’t. If you buy the absorbent strips carry extras with you.