From the course: Video Gear

Controlling the camera

From the course: Video Gear

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Controlling the camera

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- Now Rich, it seems like every action camera or really any camera out there has a app to control it these days. And the GoPro app is probably one of the better ones out there and obviously they've been doing it for a long time. Now before we jump into the app, I just want to be clear about one thing. You don't have to use the app to control the camera. This one button approach works pretty well. Now granted the screen up here on the session is very very small. As I said before, it's a little thinner than my pinky finger here. - It's kind of like two matchsticks. - Yeah. But it's actually pretty good. I find it to be a little easier to read. It's a little brighter, a little more definition to it, say compared to a Silver or to a Black. - And it's not using the sort of iconography. It uses more of a written out approach like text based approach. - Right, so let's just forget about the app for a second. If I wanted to turn on and start recording and switch between photos and videos, how would I do that on the actual camera? - Well on the bottom here we have a button that sort of wakes it up for that wireless mode. It is also technically a power button, but that's really going to be to like hey, say "Wake up, see the app." - Yeah, so we can run the camera in two different ways. We can say hey run it off the app or run it locally. - Yeah. Now the power button, the trigger button, all of that is sort of on the top here. - Yep. - If I press that for sort of a medium press and release, you know it's got to wake up the camera. Sometimes it takes a try or two. (camera beeps twice) But when you hold that, I held it for a long press, you see it's just firing off stills. - Okay so long press firing off stills. - A shorter press is going to engage it in video mode. Now I've got the camera set up in wireless mode so it's wanting to use it, but there. You see, I pushed it, it went into video mode. Now the thing is, not quite as responsive as the two button camera. Where one button is power, but that's okay. This is sort of designed to just be simpler to operate. And you know it's running. - Yeah. Alright so you can see it's recording here, and here is the LCD screen. It shows a little counter of my, you know, my record time. And then on the front of the camera, we have a little tally light there in the upper corner. And then we also have a little tally light on the back of the camera. So if you have this in a frame or mounted somewhere if you're in the front or the back you can see that it is recording. Now, Rich, probably the preferred way of running this of course though, is with the app. It's a little less, you know, awkward with the buttons and deep push versus slight push. That kind of a thing. - It's totally designed for a smartphone user. Now the big thing is if you're an existing GoPro user, you have to update the GoPro app on your mobile device because in order to support the new phone, they pushed out a new version of the app. So if you haven't done that, update first. So we just connect the camera and it'll walk you through the whole set up time the first time you do. Notice that all of the things just become available. You can kind of tell here - We have a lot of GoPros. - We have a lot of GoPros, so but I'll just turn that on. And it says alright, make sure the session is on. I do like that they've sort of built in these step by step tutorials, now. - Yeah, it's a little more visual I think. And so people who are a little bit of, you know, technology scared, it gives them some nice big pictures and nice instructions on how to do this. - Now you're going to need to power on the device possibly work through the screen to get the W-iFi up. Like all wireless cameras and these small cameras it can be a bit tricky the first few times. So now the wireless is on, I'll say yeah it's on. And it tells me I have to connect to that on the Wi-Fi. So I'm going to go out to my desktop, navigate over to my settings, and just like all GoPro cameras, you're going to need to switch from your standard network to the GoPro. Now you're going to choose it in your WiFi network there. Let it successfully connect here and establish that it's got it. Now you might need to occasionally forget and reconnect. Sometimes these things are a little tricky. - Yeah it's like other cameras I've had to do a little bit of a dance around at least the first couple times to get the set up properly. But it seems like once you do it once it should be good. - You see here it's connected now. We've got a blue dot saying I see my session. - Which is a good thing. - Alright so we've got it, I tap it. And now it's starting up and let's see. There's our studio, there's Rob. - Hey. - And you notice here, like all things with the wireless app a slight lag. So I go up and down. - I've actually found, I don't know if its just an updated chip or whatever's going on in it, it does seem to be a little bit faster than the Hero 4, the Silver, and the Black. Makes sense, you know, new generation of connectivity, new version of the app. But that delay is important if you're trying to time things out in real time for perfection. You're going to have a little lag there. - As we move this across here, my finger going across versus the video feed, left, right. I think it's like half a second, maybe. At best. - Now on the app itself, you have a couple of little nifty things there. You can obviously see your Wi-Fi connectivity, your battery power, which is nice to see on the app up there in the upper right hand corner. You can power on and off the device. Obviously down in the lower right hand corner if you click that little wrench icon we can go into some settings. This is nice to configure. So it will let us because we're connected to the session Maximum of 1440p on this. You have your camera set up to 1080. And depending on the resolution you're in, you're going to get different frame rates. So we can do 1080p 60 as a maximum. But right now you're in 30 mode, which is fine. And just like with the other GoPro cameras, you can control the field of view, you can control a lot of the other camera settings like the spot meter, you can turn Protune on and off. Things of that nature. - And you did mention that we have Protune with some more professional features. As we get into some of those controls here, you're going to notice that we can really start to refine things like the ISO and the sharpness a little bit of the photo settings, you know, what are we working with, eight or five megapixels. So all the standard things that you expect in the app. It still has the multi-frame, the burst mode, we can assign that frame rate, you know, what's the interval. One shot every minute? One shot every five seconds? And also, looking like a time lapse type mode. You do have metering controls. All those things you expect. - Now the one thing I do like, Rich, that a lot of people don't adjust but I do because it drives me crazy, the LED blink. I turn that off all the time. Especially if you're trying to hide the camera in, you know, on set and be a little inconspicuous, turning that off is a good thing. - As well as the audible beeps, so it doesn't keep making that beeping sound that drives you nuts. - Yep. Absloutely. - Alright so we have all those controls in there like you would expect on most things. The ability to set the date and time on the camera which is great. So all I did was hit Set Date and Time button. How did these two devices know the date and time? - Magic of GPS network connectivity super computer or something, I don't know. - I'm on a Wi-Fi network, it just checked in - Just like your Iphone or your Android phone does it just finds the time. - Makes it a lot easier. So all in all, pretty simple. We got our basic controls. Now it's not just controlling it though for shooting. I mean, yeah this is great. We've got the live preview. We turn that sideways. That's kind of a decent thing, right? I can see what's going on on set. And you know, I can use this sort of as a controlling viewfinder. When I'm ready, I just hit the record button. And now it's recording. Now you'll notice with the recording, the lag time goes up a little bit, Rob. - Yeah, cause it's doing some processing. But on the camera itself, I can tell that you are in fact recording. I have a little counter right there. It's telling me in 1080p, 30 frames per second and in video mode. So I can see that right on the display itself. - Now I would like the ability to shut that screen off. I don't know if I have that yet, but all the LEDs and the beeps have been shut off. So when I stop, if I was using this as a discreet camera on set, it didn't beep, it didn't blink. - Absolutely. That's a really nice little handy feature. - You know the thing I really love though? The ability to tap a button and see what's on the camera. - Yep. - Review our video clips, everything else. Now it takes just a second to buffer. But if you've mounted this camera in a hard to reach place like a set or a behind the scenes shot, not only can you start and stop the camera, but you've got full playback. And then you can do on set review. Tap a button, the clip buffers and downloads. And they've actually done some nice refinements, Rob. Watch as we play this back here. It's got that sort of intelligent scrubbing that as we scrub through - Yep. - You know it allows you to quickly cue up and buffer so you can take a long clip and just find what you want. - Yeah and this is directly from the camera over Wi-Fi. We actually haven't taken out the SD card, plugged it in the computer, transferred anything. This is kind of streaming, if you will, from the camera. Again, just the caveat being that there is a little bit of lag, depending on the speed of your microSD card. And this is another point, you know, get the best microSD card you can get. - Yeah. - Because you know, that's going to dramatically help you with these kind of things. - Now if you are using that on set, the last thing I would say is consider tethering the camera to a battery, pop that sideport out, run that micro USB cable to something like an external battery brick. You can plug in a USB battery, just like you would charge up a phone with. And that will significantly extend the time but this camera is pretty intelligent. So if you're not rolling, it's designed to strengthen that battery out. - Alright Rich. So that's a lot of in depth information talking about what's in the box, and the technical specs. But I still think that there's some more work to do and some more discussion to be had on the new session. So we're going to do a follow up week where we'll dive into a little bit more, talking about evaluating some of the footage, giving some of our opinions on whether this camera is worth buying, how it compares to the rest of the ecosystem. It's a compelling option with a lot more to discuss. - Yeah. And we're going to actually make sure that you see how this camera performs when you put it on a real world set and you put it under some tough situations. We're going to do some active athlete shooting, and of course, as the camera is supposed to be waterproof, we're going to strap it on a kid and tell him togo jump in a lake.

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