The button controls on a GoPro HERO5 Black

- Your GoPro Hero 5 Black only has two physical buttons, but the behavior of those buttons will change depending upon the task at hand. Let's explore how things work. First up, the button on the side here, is the mode button, but it will also power the camera on. So if your camera is not currently powered, press and hold that button, (camera beeps) and you'll hear a beep and the camera will turn on. Once it's powered on, you should see things on the front display turned on and telling you things like the mode of the camera.

We'll talk more about this screen in a moment. If you press the mode button, you'll notice that the camera changes through different shooting modes, for example, photo mode, (camera beeps) burst mode, (camera beeps) time lapse mode, (camera beeps) and video mode. This allows you to quickly cycle through. By default you'll hear a beep as you switch through different modes. The other button is up here on top, this button is the record button, and pressing it will start the camera recording or take a picture.

Now in this case with taking a photo, it just takes a single photo and the counter advances. You might notice a small red pulse in the corner, now that small red pulse is indicating that it's writing to the memory card, if we switch modes into a mode like video, (camera beeps) you'll see that when we press the record button, that red light is going to turn on and stay on, the blinking indicates that recording is happening and that gives you that piece of feedback.

Now, depending upon how you configure the camera, there are multiple record lights giving you indication. You also may notice on the back of the camera, that you'll see some sort of record indicator and we also have a physical record light that's built in to the camera itself, indicating that it's rolling. When I press that button again to stop recording, it does a quick blink indicating that it's writing to the memory card and it now stops the record. Now those controls are pretty straight forward, but depending upon what you're doing, things will change.

For example, let's press the mode button here, and you'll see that it cycles through the different modes. (camera beeps) Pressing the top button will trigger the record. Now, with previous versions of the GoPro, you did actually have a settings mode, and you had the ability to cycle through that with the mode button and you would use the shutter release button in order to toggle options.

Now, rather than using the mode button to cycle modes and then toggling through with the shutter release, everything is going to be driven by the touch screen on the back. You'll find, for example, the ability to simply tap and bring up additional choices. You'll see here that this now accesses the menu system. This really changes things, so now the buttons are much simpler, the button on the side, for mode here, is going to be used, really for three purposes, it's going to allow you to power on the camera, if it's asleep, it will also allow you to cycle through different modes changing what's shown on the front of the camera.

While recording however, if you use that mode button, it does have a special purpose. For example, if I start the video record here, and I tap the mode button, it's going to add a marker and that tag indicates that that was a good part of the clip, those could come in handy, rather than pressing that marker button while in the middle of a good shot, wait until the critical action is over, because pressing the side of the camera could add a little bit of shake or vibration, you wouldn't want to ruin the shot.

But you could tap that right afterwards, and then later when using the GoPro software for your desktop, it's a lot easier to quickly queue up and find the best shots. So, to summarize, most of the control's going to happen right here on the side, this will allow you to cycle the different camera modes, as well as tag video while you're recording. Additionally, if the camera is not recording, (camera beeps) you can press and hold this button to power the camera on or off, pressing and holding for a few seconds, (camera beeps) will start the shut down process and you see the camera's turned off.

With the blank screen, you'll know that the camera is currently not consuming any power. To turn it back on, just press and hold for a few seconds, until you hear a beep and the screen turns itself on. Now the changes with the buttons compared to past versions of GoPro are welcome, it's actually a lot easier to get things done. You're going to find yourself doing less physical button presses and more relying upon either the GoPro app or the built in menu, but you can still quickly change the mode of your camera.

Maybe you want to shoot stills or you want to take advantage of quickly switching into time lapse mode, well you can do that with the physical press of the button. And remember, the new GoPro operating system also supports voice commands, we'll talk more about those later. Rather than having to press a button to change mode, you can actually just tell your GoPro to start recording a video or to start a time lapse shot, and it will actually switch modes and do everything off of the power of your voice.