GoPro video editing, and stuff.

I am seeing a lot of good videos coming out of the Rockies forum. Googling has turned up so much information that it makes my head explode, so I turn to you guys for some quick and easy answers. I bought a GoPro Hero 2 last month from costco and it came with a wifi backpack and a few mounts. I've got some footage from a few rides that I'd like to edit into a video, and don't even know where to begin.

What software are you using to chop up your footage and create these videos with music that I am seeing? Price?

Any tips for making the battery last longer? Does powering it on/off kill the battery faster than just leaving it on even if it's not being used for say 15 minutes or so?

I've been recording at 960, but do have the option to go 1080. 960 looks good on the TV and computer - will 1080 make much of a difference, does it kill the battery faster, etc...?

That's it for now, thanks for any input.

I bought into these guys, I'm on a PC:

http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Editor.aspx

I think I paid $60 which entitles you to download any of their products.

1080 will require more computer power to edit, fills the memory card faster. Don't know about battery life. If 960 looks fine, stick with it.

I use the free windows movie maker. It does a fine job but there are many others such as sony vega that are really good. If you are a windows user then start with windows movie maker. I film at 1080 and the camera seems to run a long time. Maybe the wifi and other peripherals are draining the battery?

PM me for a phone call when you are trying movie maker. I love the quality and simple wonders of the Go Pro.

If you have the money to spend on a "big boy" editing suite, I highly recommend the Adobe Production Premium suite. The school where I work had evaluated FCPX, and Avid Media Composer but ultimately wound up going with Adobe for a few reasons:

1) you get Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premier.
2) Premier is laid out in a very logical and user-friendly fashion. If you have any experience with using non-linear editors, the experience will be positive.
3) If you can get in on an educational discount, it's way worth it.
4) You can "activate" it on two different machines, which can come in handy.

I use Kdenlive.. free (open source) with a decent set of features.. but it only runs on real operating systems and OSX (which is almost qualifies).

I haven't done any real testing, but I feel like I get the best battery life by just letting it run. Typically around 2 hrs or so.

I do all my filming at the 960 wide setting. Seems to give the best field of view IMO.

Hope you bought an extra harddrive to go with it.

I use mp4box which is a windows command line program.

Basically just do:

that creates a clip from 0 seconds to 100 seconds from the source file filename.mp4 which in this case is in the same directory as the mp4box executable.

Quick, easy, and free.

1920x1080 30fps - need maximum quality at capture, wish I had 60fps.
Run long stretches of non-stop camera (edit later).
Carry extra 32GB chips and batteries due to previous 2 choices - cheap.

iMovie on the Mac (free).
I don't add music now, but may in the future.

I have just started using YouTube and it seems ok. Tedious to upload video.

I may look into Vimeo soon.

I have made DVDs over the years - more work but very high quality. Tedious to mail.

If you don't want to do any fancy effects, $60 for the basic Pinnacle Studio 16 is a fantastic bargain. I have slightly out-of-date version on my Mac's Windows partition. While I mostly use Final Cut Pro for Mac (which is definitely next-level stuff, but also 5x the price), Pinnacle is good enough that if I happen to be in Windows, I'll happily use that for basic stuff rather than re-booting the Mac OS.

I am on a MAC and use the iMovie software that came with it.

I used Sony Vegas for years when I was PC-based, but moved to Final Cut Express when I got my Macbook Pro. FCE isn't cheap, but I use it to create prof. vids as part of my biz, so I write it off. Both Sony Vegas and Final Cut have pretty steep learning curves and probably aren't recommended for the casual user.

I've never used it, but I hear iMovie is pretty easy video-editing tool for Mac users.

You might want to try out Windows Live Movie Maker...

http://download.cnet.com/Windows-Li...5753.html?tag=dropDownForm;productListing;pop

It's free and "aimed squarely at the casual consumer crowd..."

This is also the only tool I know of for quickly editing the MOOV atom. Nothing the YT or Vimeo crowd needs to worry about, but necessary if you want to use other players to stream videos from your own site (e.g. JW Player, etc).

Miro Video Converter is pretty fucking dope, lets you wrap in pretty much any container for easy html5 deployments on your site.

As far as editing I originally learned on FCP, but just use iMovie or WMM depending on what machine i'm working on, either are about equal for basic web edits.

I don't necessarily do this myself but many shorter action filled clips are better than a few long cuts, takes more time editing though so i try to strike a balance. Figure about 4-30 minutes of editing per finalized minute of video

Interesting.. I have the miro player on my desktop, but didn't know they have a converter as well. I've previously used WinFF or mencoder cli for that.

I've been using kdenlive for a few years. It used to crash a ton, but it seems pretty stable these days. Great free product.

A few months back I bought sony movie studio platinum. I like it better than kdenlive, and it uses the shit out of my dual quad core xeon when it's encoding, but there are a few things that could be improved.

For almost everything else, I use ffmpeg directly. ffmpeg runs on Windows\Mac\Linux and I've written a few perl scripts to automate stuff like creating timelapse from the gopro:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="225" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786"> <param name="flashvars" value="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=cfe54fc5e9&photo_id=4301644511"></param> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786"></param> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"></param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="intl_lang=en-us&photo_secret=cfe54fc5e9&photo_id=4301644511" height="225" width="400"></embed></object>

If you're interested in my timelapse script, you can find it here: http://www.roberttadlock.com/blog/2...ting-time-lapse-videos-from-a-gopro-hd-c.html

It also requires imagemagick, but there directions are there. Also, I think the new gopros dropped the MEDIA dirs, but I haven't done any timelapse with my new gopro yet. If that's the case, you just need to update the first line of the script.

EDIT: I shoot in 720/60fps. Shooting in 60fps seems the clearest to me, and you get nicer still from the video. The stills from the 720/120fps are even better, but 120fps uses too much storage on the SD card for most applications IMO. Also, I wrote some quick editing tips for ffmpeg if anyone is interested - http://www.roberttadlock.com/blog/2009/11/13/using-ffmpeg-to-manage-video.html

Kdenlive - http://www.kdenlive.org/
Imagemagick - http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php (installing this on Windows automatically installs ffmpeg).

ffmpeg - http://ffmpeg.org/

Or just:
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg imagemagic kdenlive

+1 for iMovie. Also upgrade Quicktime to Quicktime Pro.

My workflow is to take the files off the camera, then copy/paste the rough sections I want into a new video in Quicktime and save that clip.
Once I've gotten all the clips, I bring those into iMovie. This saves you from waiting for-freakin-ever for all the video to import, even the stuff you know you're just going to throw out anyways.

Once the clips are in iMovie, it's fairly straightforward... drop clips into the timeline, apply effects/transitions, save, export, then upload the exported video to youtube or video hosting service of your choice.

For the non debian based distros...

sudo yast -i ffmpeg imagemagic kdenlive
or sudo yum install ffmpeg imagemagic kdenlive
or up2date...
or....

emerge -v ffmpeg imagemagic kdenlive

but a couple years ago I finally converted to being an apt-get guy.

RPMs should go the way of the dodo.

Yeah, I've never been a fan of RPMs. I think I used emerge on Gentoo in college, but I may be wrong. Last I remember there's a new package manager for Gentoo....I can't keep up with them all.

I do my video editing with Adobe Premiere Creative Suite 6.

Made this video this morning with it in fact

Titled: How to be a bully in World of Tanks

<iframe width="1280" height="720" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BPGGgOAjj6c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>