Hero7 Gopro

[Gauthier Zitnik]

Igot a good deal on a GoPro Hero 7 Black. For trail / woods riding, is 4k / 60fps overkill? I may sometimes stream the video to a large TV, so that's why I'm thinking I need to record at 4k. Anything less, even 1080p, I've read will not look good on a large TV but only on a computer monitor. At 4k, I have about 3 hours 14 minutes of recording space. This is more than enough for how much riding I'll do in a day. Thoughts on any better settings for watching on a TV?

If all you're going to use the footage for is streaming to the tv, you can save some battery life, card space and storage space on your PC. Plus, the camera itself gets hot enough to cause self shutdown when filming in 4k for very long.

Plus, streaming 4k to the tv takes hi speed wifi, router and a tv with hi speed wifi specs. If I want to watch a 4k video on my 4k tv, it has to be 30fps and I have to put it on a thumb drive and insert it into the tv.

Sounds like 1080p 60fps will be what I try, too. I'm going riding Sunday so I'll shoot a few minutes on 4k and then the rest at 1080p, both at 60fps. At 1080p, is the Superview field of vision the best to use?

For me, It depends on what kind of terrain I'm riding. Riding in dense forest with trees in Superview, as you pass the trees, the fisheye effect make them bend. I don't like that. For more open type terrain that I want to capture the shear scale of the landscape I'm in, I like Superview for. Otherwise I shoot in Wide.

I like 60 fps because you don't get blur with camera movement or as you pass things, like trees. I want the terrain in focus all the time and smooth. A lot of folks might say, well that's not cinematic. F that.

If you ride in bright sunlight or in and out of the trees, I like to set my exposure to -1. It's easy in post editing to bring out areas that may be a little dark but you can't fix video that's blown out. Riding under cloudy skies makes for great video, but it's easy to blow out the whiteness of them with your settings if you're not careful.

There are some good YT videos on what good settings are for different types of video you're shooting. Start with those and tweak them to better suit what you do. Yeah, it's a learning curve, but your videos will only get better. They need to if you're going to be watching them on a 4k big screen. I've learned how to set mine up so the video looks like I'm there when watching it back on the 4k big screen.

Loam Ranger video is pretty good. I tried those settings last year and the footage was great. really warm. When we move indoors for winter, everything was yellow. Really no good all around setting. I dont mind the stock gopro settings though on average.

I set it at 1080p / 60fps with superview and went around the neighborhood for an 8 minute drive. The filesize was 2.54GB!! Is there something I need to change to bring that filesize down for longer trail rides? Or is that just the way it is? I'm new to the GoPro world. In any case, the quality at those settings was awesome!

It automatically chops off the files at about that size. But the fundamentals are the high quality and fast FPS eat memory cards.

You need 128 GB drives to get much of anything. Long ago with my GoPro 3, I could use 32GB cards. No more.

That size bites you in the butt for all processing, editing, rendering, etc. And of course uploading to YouTube.

I use Handbrake (Free and open source) to recompress edited videos to H.265 using my GPU. it makes them much smaller than H.264. It can achieve a very impressive reduction of 85% or so, going from 20GB down to 3GB

It automatically chops off the files at about that size. But the fundamentals are the high quality and fast FPS eat memory cards.

You need 128 GB drives to get much of anything. Long ago with my GoPro 3, I could use 32GB cards. No more.

That size bites you in the butt for all processing, editing, rendering, etc. And of course uploading to YouTube.

I use Handbrake (Free and open source) to recompress edited videos to H.265 using my GPU. it makes them much smaller than H.264. It can achieve a very impressive reduction of 85% or so, going from 20GB down to 3GB

SD cards up to 32Gb in size use the Fat32 file system and it is limited to 4Gb files sizes. So if you film long enough to surpass that, the camera automatically starts another file, which is usually a seamless cut, as the new file picks up exactly in the video where the other cut off.

If you're going to be filming in 4k, you need to buy the fastest SD card you can find. The shear amount of data being written to a card at 4k is too much for lesser cards to keep up with and you get jittery video. The Gopro website has a list of recommended SD cards that you should adhere to.

Heads up....... Gopro has started making their cameras sensitive to non Gopro brand batteries. You will find aftermarket batteries on places like Amazon for cheaper than genuine Gopro batteries, but I know from experience with lots of lost footage, that the Gopro 7 will freeze footage in the middle of a video but continue to record audio, running on other batteries. Very frustrating.

3a8082e126