A player’s view of 2014 Super Bowl – Seattle Seahawks Steven Hauschka

An amazing week captured on GoPro cut up to some music. Enjoy and Go Hawks!

By Nate Lavey

 

In this week’s New Yorker Magazine, Nick Paumgarten explains the rise of GoPro, the company that makes “the ubiquitous small digital point-of-view cameras” used by athletes to capture their daredevil feats. In this video, Aaron Chase, a professional mountain biker, explains the unorthodox setup he devised to take his filmmaking beyond the simple head-mounted camera.

 

In the midst of GoPro Mountain Games in Vail, Colorado, Product Education team member Christopher Farro stops to give us some insight on what it takes to make a broadcast-ready GoPro course preview. After choosing an epic location – Steep Creek in Colorado – the most important thing is to ensure that you have the proper license agreements and permits to shoot your course preview. In this case, we have appearances from GoPro Production Artist, Nate Lee and GoPro Athlete, Rush Sturges.

Nate clues us in on how to get the best shots and angles of our athlete. For any POV shots that we are taking, Nate recommends 1440p/48fps, which gives us an opportunity to slow down the shots in post-production. Nate also walks us through prepping our cameras for water usage – using Floaty BacPacs and Camera Tethers for added security, and licking the lens prior to usage to help the water bead off of the lens.

After sending the selected athlete out on the course and capturing epic footage, it’s time to gather all of your footage and start editing! Make sure you have all of the licenses for your music, and then your Course Preview is finished!

For more insight on capturing the best footage out on the course, dig deeper into this Tips and Tricks series on YouTube to learn how to maximize your GoPro cameras and products.

As always, happy capturing!

You might see examples of extreme use in this video. Please take appropriate precautions to ensure your own safety, the safety of those around you, and to protect your GoPro camera.

 

In the second episode of the GoPro Field Guide, we meet up mountainside with Media Team members Abe Kislevitz and Caleb Farro to hear their take on Resolutions, Frame rates, and Fields of View. Abe walks us through the different resolutions, from 4K all the way down to WVGA and their respective frame rates. He clues us in about the best uses for each of the modes, from POV, follow cam, slo-motion and gear mounted shots, to the best modes for YouTube and Instagram videos. Abe points out that there is a trade off between high frame rate and high resolution.

Another option that GoPro users have to customize their footage is Field of View. Changing the Field of View between Wide, Medium, and Narrow is essentially the same thing as zooming in, but it does this by cropping in on the sensor instead of digitally zooming, which means higher quality footage. For the best results, Abe suggests having an end goal in mind and experimenting with different resolutions, frame rates, and fields of views to achieve this.

Don’t forget to watch Episodes 1 and 3 of the GoPro Field Guide to get you capturing like the pros!

Episode 1: GoPro Field Guide: Understanding Protune
Episode 3: GoPro Field Guide: On Location

As always, happy capturing!

You might see examples of extreme use in this video. Please take appropriate precautions to ensure your own safety, the safety of those around you, and to protect your GoPro camera.

Sportsman Mount

Mount your GoPro to guns, fishing rods and bows. This versatile mount is compatible with most shotguns1, rifles, revolvers, airsoft, paintball and pellet guns, and fits bow components and fishing rod grips with a diameter of 0.3” to 0.9” (10mm to 25mm). You can mount one or two cameras front-facing and/or rear-facing to capture immersive footage from a variety of angles and perspectives. A non-reflective, matte black finish ensures low visibility.

• Fits 0.3″ to 0.9″ (10mm to 25mm) diameter gun barrels, fishing rod grips and bow components
• Compatible with most shotguns1, rifles, revolvers, airsoft, paintball and pellet guns
• Mount one or two cameras to capture footage looking forward, backwards or both directions simultaneously
• When used with a gun or fishing rod, camera(s) can be mounted below or to the side of the barrel or rod
• Non-reflective, matte black finish ensures low visibility

 

Hope you had a great 4th of July!

Fly into a spectacular firework display over West Palm Beach, Florida.

 

There’s big news from GoPro for filmmakers and cinematographers and anyone who creating content with the GoPro HERO3+ for professional productions and who need to make sure they’re adhering to industry standards with their pipelines. We’re proud to announce that the GoPro CineForm Codec has been standardized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers® (SMPTE®) as the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 video compression standard – the new open codec standard for video acquisition and post production.

So what does all this mean? To start, SMPTE is THE organization that determines the digital cinema standards across the entire production and post-production ecosystem. When the pros want to know which technologies are going to work flawlessly for their multi-million dollar productions, they turn to SMPTE to see which ones fit the bill. It’s kind of like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

And why is quality compression important? Well if you’re shooting GoPro, you know that those stunning images out of the camera are huge files. They need to be compressed – quickly, without comprising image quality, and in the right file formats so editors and VFX artists can bring those files into their workflow and start creating – right away. For these guys, when they see that a technology is a SMPTE standard, they know it’s going to work. And when your feature film is on the line, you need that peace of mind.

If you’re a filmmaker or cinematographer, you already know that the GoPro CineForm Codec is a high-performance video codec widely valued in video post-production as the industry’s highest quality compression format. It is well established in the professional filmmaking marketplace and has been extensively used in Hollywood feature films, including Slumdog Millionaire and Need for Speed.

 

SMPTE standardization of the GoPro CineForm codec as the VC-5 standard now means the professional production and post production community can access SMPTE-standardized codec technology for presenting high resolution imagery with a high speed, low-compute intensive workflow. The new VC-5 standard will provide a more efficient, cost effective and higher-performance workflow, delivering an 8x performance boost over the current JPEG 2000 format with higher resolution.

“SMPTE standardization of the GoPro CineForm codec as the new VC-5 standard is big news for the entire production and post production industry, as well as for GoPro and its customers,” said David Newman, senior director of software engineering for GoPro. “By further developing the VC-5 standard, we are building a new ecosystem for the industry in which we’re enabling cinema-level acquisition quality, while also providing cinematographers the workflow technology to finish their films. We are standardizing core codec technologies, and making them extensible to even support future camera formats and future post production workflows. This is a major milestone and a huge accomplishment for GoPro!”

The GoPro CineForm Codec supports RAW camera formats such as CFA Bayer pattern images as well as RGB and YCrCb with an optional alpha channel and sub-sampled color difference components.

Participation by the broader video community in the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 standard process will enhance the GoPro CineForm Codec to make it more suitable for a wider range of applications. Interested parties are also encouraged to join the SMPTE Standards Committee and participate in the ongoing development of the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 specification. The group is particularly interested in feedback from video-editing professionals regarding their experience with video compression technologies and their requirements for use of a VC-5 codec in their video workflows.

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