Menu navigation and factory defaults on a GoPro HERO5 Black

- Let's explore the menu system a bit more in-depth. There are a few things you might want to change, and based on your personal preference, you can change how you access it. To start, let's tap the screen to wake up the device. You should see the basic status display view. Now, to access some of the menus, I'm going to start with the general camera preferences. So I'll tap the top of the screen, and drag down. While we're here, it's useful to mention that you can quickly lock the camera. Tapping the lock button will actually lock the screen.

Now, touching the screen will not accidentally make changes. You notice that I can't switch the camera settings. This could be important. As you're shooting, you might want to avoid accidentally switching to a different mode, or bumping the screen and making an unwanted change. The lock can be quite useful 'cause it prevents you from accidentally making a change. But it's important that you know how to unlock the camera, too. You can tap at the top of the screen and drag down, and now tap to unlock.

And this will unlock everything. Let's bring that menu back up. We'll talk about voice recording more later, as well as connecting to the GoPro app. For now, let's explore the preferences a little more. Now, you can check your GoPro version here, even invoking an update, see what version number you're on, learn a bit more about the GoPro. Set the date and time, these can also be set manually, or using the app. We'll talk about voice control more a little bit later, but let's go down to the general controls here.

Now, one of the options that I changed was the beep volume. This allows you to control what's happening with the camera, and you can set different volume levels so that the camera provides feedback. Personally, I don't like to hear a lot of beeps when it starts and stops, but if that's something important to you, let's say for example you can't see the camera, maybe you've mounted it on top of your head, and you want to hear when it records and stops, then you can adjust that volume there. Now, we'll talk more about some of these other settings, but what's important is that you know how to change the default mode.

In this case, you can decide how the camera starts up. So for example, I use my GoPro a lot for video. If I was doing nighttime video, though, or photos, I can choose that here. But I'm going to go to the standard video mode, and set that as the default. And you see here with the scrolling menu, you can decide what you want the default action to be when you turn the camera on.

You can also set the power off here, this is pretty important, because it will turn the camera off when you're not using it. The minimum is going to be five minutes, and I recommend setting it to that, that way that you can conserve battery power. Additionally, you can adjust the brightness of the screen. If you're shooting indoors, you might not need as bright of a screen. Lowering that down will reduce the power consumption. I can tap the back button to go back and see controls.

I let the camera auto-rotate so it can deal with the fact that it might be upside-down, and this will quickly orient things. And then you see other options here for things like GPS for tagging, the ability to set the language that you're operating, and other formats. We'll talk more about these a bit later. From the HDMI port, you can also decide what you're going to send out. So we have the ability to see a live feed, only look at the media for playback, or actually see monitoring. Let's take a look at that.

I'm going to take an HDMI cable, and plug it into the side of the camera. Before I do, though, I'm going to switch this to have a live feed. Let's tilt that up, and I'll plug in the HDMI cable, and just remove the lens cover I placed. Now you'll see that it sends out a live feed, and it's actually showing video in real time. But laid over the feed is the status information about the camera.

This is actually showing you things like the different modes that are in play. And you see here we can cycle through different modes for photography, making our changes, switching to different photo-style shooting modes, such as burst shooting, or there we are back to video. And that all works fine, but if you were to use this as a live feed, those menu overlays would be in place. That could be useful if you want to see what's happening. Don't worry, they're not going to record to the camera in the media card, but this does give you an overlay so you can see status updates.

So the HDMI port is pretty flexible on this camera, it gives you the ability to see a clean feed from the camera with no overlays, to see the overlays, or only use the camera as a playback device, for example, if you wanted to connect to a television and play back some clips or photos as a slideshow. Alright, let's finish those menus up. I'll disconnect the HDMI cable. Let's go back to preferences. We'll scroll down.

And you'll see a few additional options for formatting the menu card. You can go ahead and reformat the memory card, I'm not going to do that now, though, since I have footage here. You can also change the camera back to factory defaults. If for some reason you've got the camera in a state that's confusing to you or it's misbehaving or you just can't find a feature and you're quite certain that the camera has something turned on deep in the menus that you don't want, well, you can use this to reset the camera. Tapping it is going to then restore the camera back to the defaults, and it will restart the camera essentially.

(beeping) You hear that it beeps, and now everything is back to how it came out of the box. But this does mean options like connected remotes, or any of the settings that you changed would've been lost. So don't do this that often. Let's go ahead back to that menu there, we'll go to preferences. I'm going to go ahead and turn the beep volume off, 'cause I prefer that to be off, but you see when I reset it did restore it to the factory default of loud, or high.

I'm going to turn QuikCapture off. We'll talk more about that feature later. And everything else is about the same. Now, under the reset menu here, you have two different types of resets. One is camera default, what this will do is actually reset the camera and restore it to the defaults that it's shipped with. However, the options for date and time, if you've named the camera, as well as any passwords, are going to stay in place.

On the other hand, if you choose a factory reset, this is going to completely reset the camera all the way back to the default, and it's going to be like you just took it out of the box. This can be useful if the camera really starts to misbehave, or you're concerned about why something isn't working. One of the troubleshooting steps is going to be to reset the menus back to the default. Let's go ahead and just do a quick reset there, on the camera defaults so you see how that works. I'll tap the reset button, and the camera will go ahead and restart itself and reset the settings.

Alright, that's a pretty good overview of how the menu system works, let's talk a little bit more about the touch gestures and how you can use them to quickly control the camera and access important features.