Transferring to a computer

Okay, if you want to use your computer to get your footage organized, GoPro offers a handy, free app called GoPro Studio that you can download from the website, absolutely for free, as long as you have a registered camera. Now, you can go ahead and pull this down, and it makes it really easy to work with the actual footage. All you're going to do is need to get the card mounted on your computer. Now we showed you this a little bit before, it's pretty easy. You're going to need something like this, which is the SD card adapter. Take the SD card out of the camera carefully, pop that out, and you can put that into the SD card adapter Make sure it's a snug fit.

I recommend you use a dedicated USB card reader so you get the faster transfer speeds. And we can plug that in there. And the card will mount on the computer. Now, you could of course just copy this off like any other asset. And if you're using an asset manager like Lightroom or Aperture, you can import the GoPro footage and stills into those. Or of course, just use the standard Finder or Windows Explorer controls to copy off the card's contents. All those methods work absolutely fine, this is no different than any other camera's memory card.

But, there is the dedicated GoPro Studio if you want to do a few things more. So, once you've got a card mounted, you could choose to import new files by clicking the plus button. It's going to to ask you to navigate to the card. And when you click open, it will find all of the material. And you see that it loads in. There we go, there's all my clips. If I select a clip, it actually becomes visible and you'll note, you have the ability to get rid of parts of a clip you might not want.

So I could mark an endpoint, there we go, and then an outpoint to indicate the portion of the clip that I'm interested in using. And then, add that clip over into the conversions list. And, it will put it over there, getting ready to actually be converted. You can continue to go through the rest of your clips and trim off any parts of the files you don't want to use. Let's go down here. We'll get rid of the classic beginning of looking into the GoPro camera, which seems to proceed just about every clip that you shoot on a GoPro.

Mark an endpoint, go through. You can use playback controls or drag through. And then mark an outpoint. And again, add the clip to your conversion list. Now, you'll notice you have the ability here to actually rotate or flip a clip, if it was shot upside down. And you can even make minor adjustments here to the image. This gives you the ability to actually do things like convert frame rates, if needed, change the speed. Go ahead and remove some of the fish eye affects, if there's any distortion on the clip. There we go. And that will make it a bit easier to process the clips.

Now, once that's all done, you have the ability here to make a few tweaks. So step two allows you to actually edit if you want to put together a simple movie. Most of you are probably going to choose to use some other software tools that are out there, although the GoPro sequence tool here is perfectly capable to string a few shots together, and you do have some handy templates. So if you don't own any other video editing software, go ahead and check this out, it's pretty easy to use. I'm going to go ahead and click Cancel, and instead I'll just go over back here to import and convert.

You see I've got the clips here. And what I can now do is click the convert button. And those files will become processed. Now in order to specify where the clips are going, there's a small change directory button at the bottom there. Right now, it's navigating to my Movies folder by default. But you could of course click that and target a specific drive that you want to go to. Now, looks like some of those clips are already done. Let's go ahead and switch over to the Finder level for a second. And we'll go into the Movies folder. And you can see, if we sort by date, the GoPro 3 clip should be done.

Let's open that up into QuickTime 7. And you'll notice here, with the info of what happened. This particular clip was transformed into the GoPro CineForm Codec, which is optimized for editing. Now let's talk a little bit about what's going on there. With those clips, you don't have to necessarily convert them. The benefit of going through the GoPro app is that you can trim off parts you don't want before the clips are actually used in the editorial program. You can also take advantage of fixes for things like fish eye or slightly brighten or darken the shot.

On the other hand, if you convert to CineForm, the files actually get bigger. But there's a benefit to that. If you're using an older computer, or one that doesn't have as much RAM or a higher end graphics processing unit, this is actually easier for your computer to work with the files. So, you'll need more disk space, but it just works better for slower processors or under powered computers. Otherwise, if you're using a modern tool, like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro X, you can actually bring those clips in natively or let the video editing tool do the conversion for you.

But, that's the whole process. And don't worry, we'll do a follow up course where we explore more with editing with GoPro footage and talk about the post production process in greater depth.