Using the GoPro 4k. Black / Hero-4
I spent so much time jawing about Dave, I may have left some of you behind on the Cameras Dave is using on the bike, and the technologies behind it. So you have seen some of the videos that I compiled for each of the blogs to date. The field cameras that shoot all the incredible footage are Sony DSLR cameras. I was turned on these cameras by lad Daniel who was shooting on the Sony A6000 DSLR with the sony G lens. As we got further into shooting, the A6300 DSLR was added, and I am soon to have the Sony A7s2 DSLR in inventory also.
I was never really a DSLR guy, but man these cameras are light, compact, easy to setup after about a year of messing with the Sony menus. Frankly Sony menus are in my opinion one of the worse menu designs of any camera I've worked with. Pardon my French but I don't speak Japanese, and that's how their menus are setup, in a foreign language. That's the only draw back to the camera I found. We had some over heating issues, but new firmware and using Lexmark SD cards stopped that problem.
All these cameras shoot 4k media. Once you have used the 4k format, you will may not go back to anything below 1080p. What you can do with 4k in editing makeS so much more sense. I edit in Premier C/C and color grade with the DaVinci color grade system. Although I did cheat a little and used Premier's color system on a few clips after this last upgrade. So here we go...
Today I am talking about the GoPro 4k/Black, and the new release has just happened in the past month. I will be talking about the Hero 4, not the new Hero 5. The Hero 4 does everything GoPro says it will do for a consumer small action motion camera. The camera itself required additional professional grip hardware to mount to Dave's bike, and putting it together took a bit of thinking between us, and Schiller's Photo Supply in Saint Louis, Missouri.
I can't say enough about the guys at Schiller's. We both worked through a couple of small bumps in the road in the beginning, but planned ahead with additional hardware in case we had something break on the road. I believe we had a brain fart on setup of a remote control of the camera, and that was just about it for the whole adventure.
Looking a the spec sheet I like the wide to medium wide lens. With 4k, you can always change the framing in post. I also like the some of the desaturation that the camera can do for post color grading. The Hero 4 required a water proof shell that the Hero 5 has but that was minor in cost. The remote App that you down load to your phone, worked great to set remote framing, and the remote on an off recording system work as GoPro says it does.
You will have a little bit of time programing the devises, and as I say if your a first timer, and don't have a lot of technical background your camera store can help you out with that, or find someone that's under 11 and they should be able to get you on your way. Never less, the footage was easily digested by Premier, and all the raw files were easy to get on your external hard drive. If you never used 4k footage, solid state drives are time savers on transfer times. If your using a lot of footage at least a 1 terabyte external drive is recommended to start with also.
After you set up your system, The GoPro camera is really very simple to use. You can take that little guy in places that most camera would not venture in, and the over all quality is not bad. After you get the hang of it. It's actually is a cool little camera that can take a lot of beating, not with a hammer of course, but does a good job with it's built in stabilizing options, and of course using the warp stabilizer effect in premier within reason takes almost all if not all of the shake out of the clips.
If I had to rate the whole system we used, I would rate it, at strong 7-8. I would have rated it higher but finding what GoPro says it does and what it actually does had me searching for answers in different places other than GoPro. I think in most applications of consumer use it would be more like a strong 8-9. We put more stress on our filming and equipment that the usual consumer. Well let me think about that, and I will get back to you on that one...
What I have done below in our video is letting you see what we saw on a few test strips, and me running around with the remote focus in one hand and the camera in the other at Geo's in Belleville. It wasn't the first time I was a mad man with a camera but some of it not using the camera before puts me back in video 1000 at Webster College in Saint Louis, Missouri were I graduated from.
I am going to show the raw footage and then the color graded. I am not using a Lut on any of the looks, and to keep it simple I am just adjusting a few setting to get what I am looking for. I think I will just go ahead and make the simple adjustments in Premier just to save a little time on conversions to DaVinci. Let take a look...
Clip_001 This what Dave see's with the first mount. The GroPro is not set to anything but raw. You see some of the vibration in the camera but not bad. The second is with a little saturation, and exposure adjustments with the same camera straight out of the box.
Clip_002 This was me running around with the camera. I made some adjustments, including the warp stabilizer in Premier. The only thing about the lens wide setting you can see the the telephone pole bend slightly as Dave's bike goes by.
If I was to exactly set this camera to spec. You would still need some color correction. By no means did I take any time in doing so in any of these videos. The stabilization took most out in the beginning but at the end it still has some roll in it. You would have to play a little to get most of the hard shakes down to a minimum. All the JPEGs above are snapped off the GoPro in Premier.
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