Shooting Guanella Pass With The GoPro
I’ve mentioned a few times that I got this new GoPro camera for a Christmas gift and my long-term goal is to provide video of the various passes and canyons featured on this website. So it seemed the perfect thing to do to provide that right from the start when I put up this new page on Guanella Pass.
In the past I would have had to stop to get this photo. Now I can just look at the scene I want and it gets photographed.
- I want the video in time-lapse because I don’t figure many people are going to be interested in watching a 45-minute video of someone riding over some pass.
- I want to be able to extract individual images to use as still photos.
So far, I’ve done a few test runs, crossing Cherry Creek Dam and riding up and down Lookout Mountain. And I used the camera to film a ride through Glenwood Canyon this summer. But I’m still figuring out what works best.
Not sure what settings I’ve used previously, I reread the user manual for about the 15th time and decided I should use the multi-shot mode, set to time-lapse, with a frame rate of two frames per second. I’m going to jump ahead here. Suppose I took 40 minutes to go over Guanella Pass in one direction and another 40 minutes going the other way. Do the math at two frames per second and what I ended up with was about 9,600 individual photographs. Yow! Do you have any idea how hard it is to find one particular photo out of 9,600?
And then I ran into an issue. When importing the images from the camera to the computer it stalled at one point saying there was a problem. And there was. There were several groups of images that could not be opened, imported, or even deleted. Something went wrong.
Of course, this made this a learning opportunity. I recalled that my GoPro Hero4 Black can do time-lapse videos automatically, but older models could not, so I reasoned that the GoPro Studio software must be able to turn those images into a video. All I had to do was figure out how. Which I did, and because the sequence where I came up to the pass itself and started back down was all OK I did create a video of just that part of the ride. That’s probably all anybody’s interested in anyway.
But then I also learned that the Hero4 Black has a new setting just for this, called time-lapse video. That’s the setting I should have used.
Whatever. So I did have plenty of still images to choose from and that one above is an example. It looks fine in this size but would not look good enlarged much more. I don’t even know what resolution setting I was using; I need to figure that out and use the highest possible resolution.
So bottom line, I’m learning via trial and error but this is another thing I hope joining the Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Riders Club may do for. Hopefully, someone in the club has more experience than I do with GoPro cameras and can help teach me. That’s my hope, anyway. We’ll see.
Biker Quote for Today
Ride ’em or weep.
Tags: GoPro camera, Guanella Pass
October 21st, 2017 at 12:51 am
Nice pic, that’s my 350z at the bottom of the hill ;)