My settings for GoPro HERO (2018) and HERO5 Black
June 16, 2020
June 16, 2020
Following my article on how I configure my Panasonic LX100, I wanted to make a similar article on my GoPro HERO (2018) and HERO5 Black configuration.
Some of those settings are based on the recommendations of this video (which I highly recommend on tuning GoPro settings), with my personal tweaks and adaptations for the HERO (2018).
First things first, the hardware for the HERO (2018) and HERO5 Black is essentially the same. The HERO (2018) comes with a stripped down firmware with a limited set of features, but the hardware is as capable.
This means that if you have a HERO (2018), by flashing the firmware of a HERO5 Black on your HERO (2018), you get a HERO5 Black for half the price.
This article is not about this modification, and obviously itās not my fault if you fuck up your GoPro by trying that out.
That being said, letās look at the settings I use.
I usually shoot in 1080p. This allows for built-in stabilization (4K doesnāt have stabilization) which is nice as itās usually pretty heavy to stabilize in post and Iād rather spend my time shooting stuff outside than having a slow workflow dealing with post stabilization. Also takes about 4 times less space which is convenient, and most importantly, uses a lot less battery.
Note: stabilization crops the footage by 10%, but Iām fine with that as the GoPro is already pretty damn wide by default, but if for some reason I were to want those 10% back and donāt need stabilization (or not that much), I would turn off built-in stabilization.
In some cases I will shoot 2.7K or 4K, like if I shoot a bit wider than I need and plan to crop in post, so that I can keep a decent image quality by doing so if I output in 2K or 1080p. I do this mostly just for static shots using a tripod where I want the option to adjust the framing in post, but I often use the LX100 for this kind of shots, and keep the GoPro for action shots, where I rarely ever crop the footage anyways.
A thing to note is that the 1440p option is 1920x1440, so a 4:3 ratio, so that wonāt match e.g. 2K on YouTube which expects 16:9 2560x1440. The closest to that will be the 2.7K option which is 2704x1520, which is the one I use when I plan to export 2K video on YouTube.
I could think about using the 1440p option when I would otherwise use 1080p, then crop it back in my timeline to a 16:9 ratio, but that would give me more height to play with if Iām also gonna crop that footage in 9:16 for Instagram and such.
Finally, if I know I donāt need a lot of shots, thus I donāt really care about space and battery, I might shoot 4K so that when exporting in 2K or 1080p it looks even nicer.
I shoot in 24 FPS. I match this on all of my cameras. I donāt really care about the ācinematic lookā that everybody tells that 24 FPS brings, but whatever look it gives to my video, I like it, or more likely, I just donāt mind it / donāt care.
24 FPS is a setting thatās available on all my cameras and the main thing I care about is having all of them recording in the same frame rate so that it stays consistent without duplicating or dropping frames when mixing shots together in a sequence (while mostly nobody notices that, I still care about it, donāt ask me). Typically, my LX100 allows for 24, 25 and 50 FPS, while the GoPro allows for 24, 30, 48, 60 and more. Here, 24 is the only frame rate that allows me to natively match shots from both cameras.
Iāll set a higher frame rate if Iām doing a shot that Iām planning to do slow motion with.
I like shooting in wide. I like the, well, wideness of the wide setting. I find SuperView a bit too wide, too much distortion to my taste.
If Iām shooting a farther subject, I might put it in Linear mode so that not only I can focus more on the subject, but also remove all the distortion from the GoPro lens and give a more regular camera feel.
First, itās useful to understand all the Protune settings before tweaking them. Thereās countless articles about that, but one of my favorite is GoPro Protune settings explained on havecamerawilltravel.com.
I use the Flat color profile as opposed to the GoPro one. This looks, well, flat, but allows for more flexibility in post production when playing with colors, contrast, exposure and stuff.
If you donāt want to mess with post production color correction, donāt bother with the Flat profile.
Iāve shot for a while in auto white balance and this did a great job, however Iāve found that it would be sometimes inconsistent when shooting different scenes in the same lighting. For example, shooting sand and a river, and without moving, doing a second shot of the forest and sky, it would balance the colors totally differently between the two shots.
Thatās to be expected with auto white balance which can be confused when a scene contains a lot of a given color.
To avoid that, if I can afford to take the time, Iāll set my white balance manually.
Typically, Iāll use 5500K for a clear sunny sky, 6500K for an overcast sky, 3000K for evening or night.
Also, I donāt ever use the Native option. This claims to give more flexibility in post without having to manually set the white balance, but Iāve never managed to deal properly with that Native white balance in post. Itās been consistently fucking up my reds and oranges in a way that you canāt distinguish them from each other and that I couldnāt recover in post, and the last thing I want to do when color correcting is applying masks to finely adjust colors in some parts of the shot.
If I donāt want to manually set a correct white balance but still want consistency between shots (so no auto white balance), Iāll just leave it on 5500K whatever the lighting is like, and adjust the colors in post to make it look more natural. That preserves more of the colors to my perception.
ISO 1600 (default when in Protune mode). The ISO is actually not the ISO (yep), it is the maximum ISO. That means that the GoPro will pick a lower ISO if it can according to the light situation, but will crank up the ISO gradually to that limit to maintain the exposure before slowing down the shutter speed (which will start to cause blur and a laggy feeling at some point).
If Iām shooting at night, I might set the ISO limit even higher to make sure I get something as Iād rather have something than nothing even if it means itās gonna have a lot of noise.
I leave that on auto.
Where I would usually set the shutter speed manually is either for
stills, and I donāt really use the GoPro for that, or on videos, to get
a ānaturalā look by setting the shutter speed to 180Ā° (1/(2xfps), so
1/48 if Iām shooting 24 FPS and so on). That usually requires to add a ND
filter to get proper exposure, and I tend to not have a ND filter on my
GoPro, so I leave that alone.
I need to play with this more, but these days if Iāve got plenty of light, Iām setting -1.0 to get more details in the highlights, since with the Flat color profile, I get a lot of details in the shadows already. That allows for higher dynamic range after color correction at the cost of some extra noise in the shadows.
In low light, Iāll leave it to 0.
At first, I tried leaving it on Low so that I can adjust the sharpness to my taste in post, as you canāt really remove sharpness as much as you can add sharpness after the fact.
In practice I never bothered adjusting sharpness in post. So I put it back to High, until I saw some YouTube video where they suggested to just leave it in Medium if youāre not gonna add some in post, so I just did that.
To be honest I donāt look closely enough to my own footage to notice any difference between sharpness settings. I will sometimes reupload a video before publishing just to remove 0.5 dB to a music track or to move tint from +7 to +8 on a clip but sharpness isnāt one of those things Iām overly perfectionist about. š
On my HERO (2018) with the HERO5 Black firmware, the āLowā and āMediumā settings do absolutely nothing (as in, they generate a WAW file but itās completely silent).
As for the āHighā one, it gives me two channels, one for each mic (the āleftā one is on top of the GoPro, and the ārightā one is actually on the right). This WAV file sound exactly the same as the MP4 audio, I made no difference in terms of processing, so I just use the audio from the MP4 (which is also in better sync, as the WAV doesnāt exactly match with the video and needs to be manually synced).
The left and right channels of the MP4 audio do match exactly what we have in the WAV in terms of directionality, so we can easily make it mono, using only the top or right mic in some situations if that improves the quality or can help remove unwanted noises.
Finally, sliding after the Protune menu, we can find a āManual Audio Controlā panel, that I enabled, and ticked āStereo Onlyā, which should be the same as setting āWindā to āOffā on more recent GoPro (like in the video I mentioned in the beginning of this article).
It seems that lately you canāt adjust Protune settings for a GoPro Session from the app anymore. Luckily, thereās still a few ways to configure it e.g. to use a flat profile and fixed white balance like I like to, using the trick from this Reddit post.
Simply put a cal.txt file at the root of the SD card with the
following content:
_tapp protune on
_tapp protune_color flat
_tapp protune_white_balance 5500K
According to this document which also lists many other options, the available Protune options are the following:
protune [on|off]
protune_color [gopro|flat]
protune_sharpness [high|medium|low]
protune_white_balance [auto|3000K|5500K|6500K|native]
protune_iso_limit [400|1600]
protune_ev_comp <ev> (-2.0 <= ev <= +2.0)