Adjusting a clip with GoPro Studio

- GoPro Studio is a free piece of software. You saw it earlier when we took a look at assembling a time-lapse clip. Well, it also gives you the ability to import video clips. One of the challenges with GoPro media out of the camera is that it often has a lot of extra parts that you don't need. Maybe there were part of the clips that you were shooting with that you decided, well I don't actually need that, this is only the good part that I want to keep, and remember, that highlight-tagging feature on the side of the camera is great for that. other times you might have clips that are perfect, but out of the camera, the mp4 format doesn't always work with all video editing tools, particularly older types of video editing tools which have a hard time with this newer file format.

Fortunately, GoPro Studio can easily convert the files into a standard QuickTime movie or Windows AVI file and make them readily available to use on other platforms. It also includes the GoPro cineform codec which is highly optimized and very compatible with just about every professional and nonprofessional editing tool on the planet. About the only thing you might need to do is install GoPro Studio on those computers so that it has the proper codec the compressor-decompressor loaded.

All right let's jump into GoPro studio. I already showed you where to get it in the previous movie. And we'll walk you through a couple of the cool things you can do. Remember there is a full-length course available here in the online library that will take you into much greater depth. Once you've launched GoPro studio you'll notice that it offers three steps, the first is view & trim, and in order to do this we need to import some files. In the left-hand column you can click the + symbol and it will bring up a file navigation dialog.

Choose your hard-drive and navigate to some footage. Once you open that you'll see a folder filled with content. You may notice that there's lots of different types of files here. Now, some of those files are greyed out and others are not. You'll see JPEGS for stills, which works if you want to assemble a time-lapse sequence. You'll also see the ability to grab other footage such as movies.

Now personally, I recommend navigating and putting all the stills in a sub-folder before you import to make it a bit easier for the time-lapse movie. Let me quickly do that. I'll press the ESC key, switch to the drive, and let's quickly organize. You'll notice in this case there's a large number of images. Let's scroll to the top, and I have a time-lapse sequence.

I'll make a new folder, call it, _TL1, press Return and then grab the time-lapse sequence. By moving it into its own folder it's easier to keep organized. All right, let's take those and put them in a sub-folder. All right, let's import. There's that time-lapse folder, and I'll select the first image and choose Open, and it builds a reference movie out of those JPEGS, and imports the image sequence as a time-lapse movie.

Once that finishes I'll also grab a few standard video clips. There it is. And let's click the + button again, and I'll sort by kind, navigate down to the mp4 movies, and I can grab all of those. Now chances are, not every clip you shoot is going to be useful, but you can bring in all the footage and decide which ones you want to work with. It's not looking through some of the related metadata, and bringing in the clips.

If you select only a few clips this process is near instantaneous, but if you grab a couple of days of shooting it may take a few moments to load the footage. You'll now see that all the selected footage is loaded. Let's choose the clip here and take a quick look. When I click on a clip it loads. You'll notice you can also see related metadata about the clip, such as its duration as well as the size of the footage. In this case if I press play I can see and hear the clip.

If I want I can mark a new endpoint to define the beginning of that clip, and drag a little bit and mark an outpoint, making that clip significantly shorter. You'll notice that you have the name here as well as the ability to assign where you want the footage to go. By default it's going to create a folder called GoPro media, and it will store the converted files there, but you can click change directory if needed. When ready add that clip to the conversion list, and it will queue it up.

You can then go back and proceed to work with the original clip and look to see if there's more shots within that longer clip that you want to keep. For example here, let's grab this part with the diving ascent. I'll click play to preview, and pause and mark an out, and I can add that to the conversion list.

You notice that it automatically enumerates the clip and makes a new one. You can continue to work your way through a longer clip, finding just the parts that you want to keep. Additionally, if you find another clip that you'd like to review, simply grab that clip and double-click to load it. Let's grab one here from our drive to the dive, mark an endpoint and an outpoint, and then add to the conversion list.

You'll notice that if the shot is upside down you can do things like reverse it, and under advanced settings you can even take advantage of converting the frame rate or the frame size or apply speed up effects. You'll also notice the ability to remove the fisheye distortion. Let's try that here on the time-lapse. Here's the time-lapse clip that we assembled. This is a panning time-lapse shot directly on the GoPro. I'd like to speed that up a little bit, so I'll click advanced settings, I'll assign a new image size such as 1080p for video, and tell the frame rate to be 2398 for my delivery.

Let's speed it up just a little bit. We'll go with a 2x. I can also choose to remove the fisheye distortion. And when I click OK the new clip will have the distortion removed. Let's add that to the conversion list, and you see that things are now queued up. Now, there's a lot more footage here that I can work with, but remember this is just a quick overview of GoPro Studio. When you're ready and the clips are loaded for conversion, remember you can select each clip as needed, and if necessary click on advanced settings to access any conversions.

So if I want that to be 1080p I can click OK and it updates with the new settings for the targeted conversion. All right, when you're set you click the convert button, and the files will batch-process. If you don't have enough space you may need to target a new drive. In this case I'm using an external drive, and I'll make a new folder and call it gopro_media and click create. I'll target that destination, and now the conversion is underway.

You can track the status of conversion as you see it's running here. While the conversions are running you can still navigate through your loaded clips, and even load a clip and continue to review. This will allow you to pick out additional shots from your footage while the conversion is running in the background. Do keep in mind, if you have a slower computer, trying to view media and convert media at the same time may drastically slow your computer down or make it unresponsive. Once a conversion is completed it will hand it off to the edit stage.

You'll notice that all these of these clips are processing, and once this first one is done others start to queue up. Now if you have a multi-processor computer you might even notice that multiple clips can be running at the same time. This is the benefit of modern operating systems and multi-processor machines. And if I jump over to step 2, edit you're presented with the ability to edit the content together into a timeline. GoPro offers useful templates to choose from for premade videos that you just replace your footage into a template or a blank template, and you can click create.

Now your footage can be selected and you'll find a variety of effects in the right-hand panel. This allows you to do things like, select something to white balance on such as that sand there or to adjust the content. If I twirl this down you'll notice that the temperature and tint can be manually adjusted just to refine a proper white balance of this underwater shooting. Under the image category I can tweak things like the saturation and the exposure slightly to get the best looking shot.

Each of these clips can be independently adjusted giving you a lot of flexibility. Maybe you want to lift up the exposure a bit to see inside the car and since we brightened it, I'll bring out the saturation a little. If you need to using the framing category, you can also zoom the shot a bit and adjust the panning to frame up the shot to focus on the action that you want. Just be mindful if you go too far you might start to see black bars. Now this kind of experience allows you to continue to refine your shot as needed, and you'll note that by taking the time to white balance you can compensate for different lighting conditions as well as get the exposure and the contrast that you deem most useful.

While the eyedropper works well, you might need to tweak just a little bit. This is a tougher shot here because we have underwater, plus the sun and it's creating a lot of different color temperatures and that looks pretty good. You'll also find a variety of presets for simple looks. Now, it's as simple as putting your clips in your timeline and telling a story. Maybe I want to start with this shot first. Well, I can grab those, and simply rearrange, and you see they change order.

When you're all done you'll have the ability to export and you can go ahead and simply choose easy presets for things like Vimeo, YouTube, or a high-definition archive. Again, this is just a simple overview of GoPro Studio. Be sure to check out our complete course available in the online library.