GoPro: Recommended Video Resolution?

[Jim Doak]

I recently bought a GoPro Hero camera and tried it out for the first time yesterday. I have a couple of issues/questions:

1. I mounted the camera on my roll bar and recorded using the highest resolution (r5); however, the video looks choppy at times on my PC. What resolution are you guys using? (I read on one of the GoPro forums that recommended using the r3 resolution setting for recording motion video.)

2. While recording, the video would stop after about 3.8 GB and then begin recording onto a new video file. (The camera kept recording, it's just that it wasn't all on one continuous file but comprised of several smaller files. My drive took around 80 minutes, so I had two 3.8 GB files and one 1.1 GB file.) Anyone know why it'd stop recording one file after ~4 GB and then begin recording onto another file? (Perhaps an issue with my 32 GB SD card?)

3. I was using the partially open case to record sound; however, that pretty much sucked as far as sound quality. I'll try using the standard sealed housing next time.

Let me know if you have any ideas/recommendations.

Thanks.

[DanMartin]

(Assuming you have an HD Hero)

For #1: What PC are you playing it back on? I have an old Macbook, and it will not play the 1080 vids due to it's slowness....it takes a bit to play these back. Suggest re-encoding the video to something like Divx...that should smooth things out. Or...just record at 720. Keep in mind that when recording directly, the speed/cpu use on the video is not as optimized is it could be by doing a post-recording re-encoding. I use a tool called TMPGEnc, but I'm old-school so there are likely better ones out there.

For #2 - This is normal. The SD Card is Fat32, so it cannot deal with a file larger than 3.8gb. Just stitch them together in post production. This is discussed in the manual/leaflet thingy. Get your your microscope to read it.

#3 - There's a good thread on this here: GoPro Video Camera. Read through this thread...there's some good comments in there on the audio issues. I use that same recording device for my audio.

Hope that helps...

Dan

[elmariachi]

R3 is what I have been using, anything more is overkill for web and just handing files around. The 1080 is super nice on a 52" Sony HD TV though.

You need some muscle to handle the files and resolution. I use a MacBook Pro 2.8GHZ with 8MB of RAM and it gobbles the files up during transferring and editing. Its nice to be able to just stick the SD card in to transfer. They bring my Dell XPS to its knees.


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[CoupedUp]

I have been using R4 (720p). My desktop PC is about three years old and was choppy at R5. R4 works fine...