Have you seen this?

http://www.prodad.com/home/products/actioncam/300582316,l-us.html

Like MusicVid says, you need to re-expand the ProTune levels, and this should be done in 32 bits. If you convert to Cineform and use their software for any color changes, this will be done automatically.

Thanks musicvid great feedback, I have been using the cuneiform gopro tool for the conversion. I tried everything to get the ciniform codec working with 12 but only swapping the dll out worked for me others have posted the same but I know it works form some people out of the box as well.

I'm going to try out all the other tips when I get home Sunday i can see what you are saying and really interesting with those screen shots you posted looking forward to it really helpful will post revised once ive done it to see how i did :) thanks!

Thanks Laurance I did do that and worked it in 32 bit but I think I killed the highlights instead of doing what musicvid said. Saying that I was impressed with that result so looking forward to seeing what it's like doing it properly :)! That link looks really interesting I can see yet another purchase coming on! Thanks so much for that will be interested to see outcomes of using it!

You and I are thinking along very much parallel lines (GH3 and GoPro for action shots). Which GoPro do you have? Have you seen this?

http://www.steadicamcurve.com/?ref=CGqfl

The point that is so often overlooked is that GoPro, like so many others, is capable of shooting 0-255 in full light. Regardless of which codec flavor or editing mode, the luminance must be normalized to 16-235 before encoding. My way of doing this (putting the filter on the output) is very handy, but it is not the only way.

Hey Laurence we have the same setup :) I got the hero 3 black and the GH3 I just can't put down, love filming with it amazing, learning so much.

Both,

New link test link of short sections of same footage (should play 2.39:1 anamorphic style see comment s below!)

I've taken the feedback above and think I've applied it correctly and fixed audio as well :) I also couldn't resist playing getting the wide angle lens corrected, managed to figure out how to do it with all open source stuff as well so didnt have to shell out any cash!, happy to share but it's all virtualdub to get it into the workflow for vegas, not sure if that's ok do do on this forum or not.

Really interesting, correcting the lens shows how much that was masking the stability looks more shaky to me, had to go anamorphic to crop out and straighten and dropped it to 25p as I think it looks better than 30p added the fake motion blur again.

So tonight I'm going to try chest mounted and 1440p 48fps which is max for protune so that should give me more wiggle room for cropping and resize for lens fix and I think chest is going to be more stable than head, we will see.

thx for help with this really enjoying figuring it out.

Yes, no blown highlights this time -- much better.

So much better! Wow!

Think I've got my head around this now but happy to be corrected as always!

For my current plans1440p 48fps protune seems to be the way to go it's a full uncropped 4:3 capture of the sensor so you get 1920 x 1440 so for framing for 1080p out you now have an additional 420px height to play with / do nice pans up and down / if the camera isn't quite set up right etc. Think you would probably be at risk of higher chance of shutter roll if you were doing anything fast so in that situation I'd got 1080p 60 fps protune.

I've got my head around the ciniform issue I was having after chatting to them, the free version has restriction on 3rd party applications using it to encode hence why I didn't appear in Vegas without me changing the dll (which I suspect shouldn't have worked ;) ) and where it does work it's restricted to 1080p 4:2:2 out

If you buy the ciniform premier or professional gopro software then that restriction is lifted and you get two licenses one for pc one for laptop that allows you to encode 1440p etc. I'm going to bit the bullet and get it, it works so well with vegas on my system.

The fisheye on the 1440p is much less pronounced to my eye but I worked through a bunch of solutions that I'll share as I've not seen anyone posting specifically for 1440p wide Hero 3 black as yet.

Filmed a brick wall and used that as a reference to test.

deform in vegas, you can sort of make it work but the edges are not so good and it's a bit wobbly.
proDad wouldn't import 1440p ciniform avi for me so couldn't test it and I wasn't going to start messing about with more re renderings, perhaps the all in one package will.
debarrel in virtual dub did a better job suspect it could do a lot better but I found the alpha / beta inputs hard to work with and couldn't get it aligned as much as I wanted.
new blue effects looked to me like it worked in a similar way to debarell / deform so I didn't test it, looked ok from some of the results people had posted but I could see distortion around the edges.
avisynth defish is amazing slight learning curve as I'd not used avisynth before but the results are astounding I'll post my settings later I just want to double check but it's looking really good I only used the basic default settings and moved the fov until everything was straight, just want to check I haven't missed anything.

Currently rendering chest mounted 1440p out to 1080p test that I defished hopefully be done when I pop home for lunch and I'll share, kept hanging last night but I think that's my system and where I'm playing with reelsmart, need to break it into more manageable chunks!

Wow, you've taught yourself a lot over just a few days. Good work.
You're idea of shooting 4:3 to maximise sensor usage is interesting.
WRT field curvature, GoPro should simply offer a more "normal" lens option.
FWIW, the Cineform Studio codec is exposed and available for rendering in VPro 8. So maybe it's just disabled in 12.

I've spent a lot of time doing helmet and handlebar cam work on a mountain bike. I've also used the chest harness.

Camera shake is the real issue with this camera. I've got the older version, the Hero 2. To get the most usable footage with regard to shake, I've found that shooting 720-60p is the way to go. Then in order of best camera stability, use:

Chest harness
Handlebar (or maybe pommel?)
helmet mount is the worst by far. Your head shakes a lot and the helmet moves on your head.

Be prepared to stabilize every frame unless you're not moving.

Rocky

"helmet mount is the worst by far. Your head shakes a lot and the helmet moves on your head."

Hang one of these on your chinstrap and you've got a steadicam . . .


J

Yeh chest mount did not work as well as I had hoped for me and I think pommel will have same issue, glad I'm working through this now! I don't think trying to stabilize the footage below is going to work but haven't tried.



Thats cropped 1440p no defish trouble is the horse rolls left to right up and down, when it's on my head I naturally absorb a lot of the movement in my body and keep my head stiller. Canter would be ok I think as I'm out of the saddle and using my legs as shock absorbers but can't canter everywhere :)

Going to try middle and narrow pov back to 1080p 60fps see what that looks like next, suspect I'm just going to have to be really conscious about when I get the shots and not waste time running the gopro for ages when the horse walking etc. wonder if I can come up with a quick release clamp for the chest harnesses so I can just grab it and quickly clip it back on.

Also defishing it makes it worse (but the defish process works), each frame is defished ok but because of the pitch and yaw it looks terrible when played like being on a bad boat trip, I actually felt sick watching it! I think if it was defished on footage that didnt pitch and yaw or had wider vistas it would look good if anyone wants to try the settings I derived are as follows.

download latest avsynth install using default settings.
download defish multithread just search for it unzip it and put it wherever you like.

create a text file called whatever.avs
Put the following in it the txt file LoadPlugin is where you unziped your plugin and AviSource is whatever avi file you want to process. I derived horizontal field of view at 92deg for the 1440p setting it will be different for others i think, didn't calculate it so it may be a little off but it looks ok to me.

LoadPlugin("f:\raw\df\defish_mt.dll")
AviSource("f:\raw\20132004\out\29praw.avi")
ConvertToRGB32()
defish(fov=92)

save that file then just open it in virtualdub like you would any other avi file, use whatever render settings you like, I did ciniform in and out, add a little sharp if you want as it's bee manipualted a bit (msharpen filter is good or in premium gopro ciniform you can non destructively add sharp there which is cool) save it as avi import into vegas.

More testing :)

@musicvid I suspect the horse might complain! and I'm going to be out for around 5 hours so although I'm pretty fit that might be a little too much :) that's another reason I'm not too keen on head cam that's going to get annoying unless I can balance it, perhaps someone nice from gopro will lend me 3 more so I can put one on each side :)

Replying to myself must be mad but just to finish this off with my findings

Med POV gives a much nicer look for the horse shots I think, sure there's a lot of motion but it is what it is and when I do it for real I'll make sure I don't take loads of shots walking etc. gopro bombed for me at 60fps protune but i think thats because my class 10 bitrate is at the low end of class ten, never realized thought class 10 was class 10!... will get a faster one at some point but it's fine at 50fps protune 1080p med and wide which is good enough.



Was looking relooking at some of my indoor stuff I shot a while back when I first got the gopro and reaplied what I learnt in this thread, when your close in I think wides not that bad, this I shot at 100fps 720p and dropped to 25p with reelsmart motion blur and without which is kind of cool to look at the difference in feel.



Got whole workflow in vegas except the initial gopro ciniform conversion now as well so that's much easier. If I defish I'll still do that in virtual dub but i think med view is good enough for what I want and the type of shot.

ohh and got so fed up with my pc now I'm doing a bit more brought a new one, looking forward to that turning up, got a bit carried away!

I've been doing a bunch of GoPro experimentation as well. What I'm finding is that ProTune can look really good if you use the Cineform codec and their Protune compensation. Doing the same thing in Vegas is something that I cannot yet do consistently. Just when I think I have a good compensation recipe and am happy with the look with one clip, I try it out on another and it is way off. If I am using the native GoPro files, I am better leaving ProTune off. If I am using Cineform, Protune looks good, but not necessarily that much better than just using the non-Protune native clips in Vegas and touching them up a bit with color correction. So far Protune is looking like a Cineform only tool.

Just a simple question:
protune mode can record more dynamic range than normal mode?
If yes, can we convert/render it to 8bit format with Vegas?

With hero2 i used protune mode because of higher bitrate. Normal mode bitrate was low, and i saw picture sharpness changes at every gop start.. But with hero3 black it seems normal mode bitrate is quite good.

thx

I don't think there is a measurable increase in dynamic range with Protune on the Hero3 Black. I think it simply softens and flattens the image and stays about 35 - 40 mbps. This flattening with an 8 bit, 4:2:0 codec simply robs the middle to give a tiny bit more latitude in the highs and lows for a given bit rate. If you have enough light.

You can definitely get usable images out of Protune files with an 8 bit project, but even on my 2.5k 27" monitor I can't determine any benefit vs. non Protune files. Even when transcoding via Cineform, I'm not able to determine any benefit. If you like the flat look for your final output it can be a very nice creative choice though.

It seems that when you really need it, blown highlights, underexposed shadows and when the light is marginal is when Protune falls down as it increases noise exponentially.

Cheers,
Pete

Yes, protune records more dynamic range.
8- bit 2.2 gamma output is not going to contain any more dynamic range than 8-bit 2.2 gamma source. So we are stuck with that at the present time.

I'm going to quote laurence one final time:
"With Cineform vs native footage, there really isn't any gain in performance before you start color correcting."

So if you're happy with GoPro native footage, by all means stick with it and save yourself some headaches. We won't be delivering 10-bit 4K to our clients for some time yet, unless we're fortunate enough to be doing mainscreen features and Imax.

I hadn't realised quite how the ciniform part worked until I got stuck in where you makes the changes in the edit piece and they appear in your timeline, I love the white balance where you can actually set colour temperature etc.

I changed my mind about buying the premium version the additional features were just not enough to justify the expense for what I use it for + it mangles my audio if I use it to convert my GH3 files which would have perhaps tempted me if I could have quickly put everything in the same format.

So I can do the initial gopro non destructive colour correction in ciniform gorpro free version and just use the scopes etc in vegas to check (rather than the inbuilt scopes in the premium version) and if I want to do anything funky above 1080p which the free one is limited to for apps outside of the free ciniform gopro app I'll just render it out to raw / a different intermediate avi before bringing it into vegas.

I am properly in love with my gopro tho fisheye and all :) some of the slowmo stuff you can do is great I was playing with it over the weekend just tend to leave it on my gh3 hotshoe mount as a back up / different view

Yeah, Cineform mangles my GH3 audio as well.