go pro

GoPro Video cameras are a lot easier to use than my DSLR, but there are a few bits and pieces relating to post processing which aren't covered by the manual or the user groups. Here's a quick summary of how I got this working. I'm using Adobe Premier Pro CS4; a few things will be different if you're on CS3 or 5.

The most useful source I found for this is a post by a chap called "Gonza" here. I'm repeating some of his data simply because I don't want to lose track of it, and it took me a while to find the information so more references should make it easier for others to find.

1 Getting the Video In

Google suggests that people were having problems in getting GoPro video into CS4 Premiere Pro. This doesn't seem to be an issue: just import it and it works fine. No conversion or pre-processing is required.

2 Creating a New Sequence

In CS5 you can just drag a GoPro video to the new sequence icon and it's done. With CS4 it's a little more complicated as below.

For R4, select "new sequence", and then in the "general" tab create a new preset with settings as below. The only odd thing is that you need 1280 for horizontal resolution even though it's 960 pixels square.

  Editing mode: Desktop
  Frame size: 1280 by 960
  Frame rate: 29.97 frames/second
  Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square Pixels (1.0)

Save the preset so you can use it again for other GoPro stuff.

There are useful presets for the other GoPro formats. See Gonza for more on these:

  • R2 : AVCHD 720p 30
  • R3 : AVCHD 720p 60
  • R5 : AVCHD 1080p 30

3 Exporting the Video

This is the tricky bit.

3.1 Vimeo/ You Tube

  • Format: H.264
  • Preset: YouTube SD (640x480 etc).

That works and produces borderless video for Vimeo without artefacts.

3.2 Desktop Use

This is more tricky. Using Windows media gives artefacts (clear blue skies are blocky). Using H.264 resulted in minor ghosting and more importantly some sort of keyframe issues which looked like jumps in the footage. I saved time and downloaded Gonza's profiles which I mirrored here. These work fine and for R4 dump what you'd expect from the sequence settings above. The output used is VBR 1 pass, target 12 and  max 16 Mb/s.

The profiles above go here: C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common\AME\5.0\Presets ... but that may vary system to system. Create a dummy one, then look for all files with the extension ".epr", and then you'll know where to put these.

4 Samples

These are both coded as per 3.1 above, although the chances are that Vimeo transcodes the video again.