Go Pro Hero : Do we really need an action Camera?

My wife is a big photo fanatic. I never believed when she mentioned first, but I realized when I saw her 500+ photos in Instagram feed and lot more on Facebook. So the only kind of camera that was completely new to show her was an Action Camera like the Go Pro. The one I got was a Go Pro Hero, not the high end Hero 4, this is an entry level Go Pro.

Go Pro Hero – Base entry level version comes with a default mount with flat surface and a curved surface which can be used to stick to your car. But not with any other mounts. But the best part is , this comes in a waterproof casing and cannot be removed from the casing at all. You get an additional back door, which would help in having a slot open in the case that makes convenient to recharge.  No SD card included, in the base price of 129 USD. Pretty competitive pricing for an action camera,

that can go with you for deep sea diving to surfing to skiing and snow boarding.  So the first place I tried our Go Pro was at Bali during our trip in January.  I used that for shooting few videos and Time lapse photography while we went for Parasailing & Ocean walk. Ocean walk is to some extent similar to the deep sea diving experience, without the respirator and only a few feet down. I could not go for diving because of the diving, but will post my diving video next when I go for my deep sea dives.  You can check my deep sea diving photos from Phuket here in Google plus. This was my advanced Scuba certification dives which had 5 dives, including some wreck dives and peak performance buoyancy control.

Our first Time-lapse and video shoot during the 2 hours of water sports resulted in 5 GB of photos and videos in the SD Card. Yes Time-lapse – is photos every 5 seconds, and it definitely loaded with some 1000 odd photos. Not every photo or video was usable immediately.  I had to import all those videos and Time-lapse photo loads and make edits, and further altering for about an hour to get a short usable and nice looking video like the one I have shared here. The Go Pro Studio is a free video editing software from the makers of Go Pro. For a freeware, this gives quite a few video editing capabilities.

There are three steps in the editing process like the one shown below. View & Trim, Edit & Export. In Step 1 : View & Trim – is where you import all your raw Go Pro shots -  videos and time lapse into the tool. You basically mark “In” & “Out” of the videos using the in & out markers and clip the selective frames from the videos. Then you click convert to have those videos converted to the .avi video format. In step 2, where you edit is the place to add music, arrange the order of the videos, combine , add titles and edit further. You can simply choose a blank template and edit the way you want, or else you can choose some standard templates already given by Go Pro to just replace the placeholder with your video shots and leave the same music. This way Go Pro is hoping that there would be more user generated Go Pro videos posted quickly and that would be their next line of revenue generation - with a cloud based video editing, hosting and sharing. Something like an Adobe Creative cloud.

But overall, a Go Pro with the right mounts would help you to take some pretty nice shots which we usually would not be able to get in those sporting moments, like diving, surfing , biking etc. So I am still dabbling with various places to see what are the best ways in which I can use this shiny little gadget now, and it has definitely not yet replaced any of my existing cameras for sure. This is a good addition to the existing one to create some more cooler shots and videos.   Will write more as I continue to use the Go Pro Hero.