GoPro Studio - iMovie 10 - Newb help!

Well I personally use Final Cut X for doing stuff like this. I just copy all video from the SD cards/devices onto the Hard Disk and then add them to the library in FCPX (without any kind of conversion). I then decide on what kind of story I want to tell and go through the footage looking for clips that best tell that story.

second that. don't convert the footage, use the original files for cutting. sort your footage before you begin, use tags, keywords, folders, or take notes while sighting all clips.

then, once you've seen all clips, you'll probably know the good ones & the bad (but important) ones you'll want to include. build your story around those clips. editing is a lot of work - expect to spend a lot of time on it.

I do not convert my footage. Easier to work with raw footage. I use Adobe Bridge for meta tagging of the footage. I have my own system for filing my photos & videos as I am not a fan of iPhoto doing it. Then all work on video is done in Premiere Pro or After Effects unless its a simple little video I need, then I use iMovie. iMovie works quite well for small simple projects.

I realize that Premiere Pro is very expensive but Premiere Elements 12 is just as good and is only $100. Easy to work with and gives you more advanced features to work with than iMovie. You also have FCP, but i can not offer any advice on it as I have never used it.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by convert? Could you explain this?

Anyway, if you convert you videos before you import to iMovie, you will probably lose the creation date and GPS data. That's just a guess, but I think it's likely.

One option is to import the videos into iPhoto. Then you would have the photos and videos side by side and can organize them as you see fit. This is useful for casual home use, but not if you're planning to upload to youtube or if you need to edit more than a small fraction of your videos.

If you need to edit more than a few of the videos, then you'll need to import them into iMovie. When you do this, you can create new Events as needed and sort your videos by event. Then you can create projects to put your videos together.

The other guys on this thread suggested using pro software, but you may not need that. iMovie is great for home projects. You can crop, trim, remove shake, add titles and transitions, edit audio, and add effects (plus a whole lot more). And it's free. If you explain what you want to do, we can suggest the best tool for the job.

I am new to GoPro, but you can download (for free) the GoPro studio software so that you can convert the movie files to a new format. I assumed that GoPro uses it's proprietary codec, and this software let's you convert it to one that can be read on a Mac.
I tried loading a raw source file from the camera via VLC, but that could not display the video.

GoPro Camera Format

blaster_boy said:

I am new to GoPro, but you can download (for free) the GoPro studio software so that you can convert the movie files to a new format. I assumed that GoPro uses it's proprietary codec, and this software let's you convert it to one that can be read on a Mac.
I tried loading a raw source file from the camera via VLC, but that could not display the video.

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All HERO3 and HERO3+ cameras record video using the h.264 codec and the MP4 file type. This is not proprietary and if you merely connect your camera via USB to your Mac, iMovie will recognize the camera and let you import raw footage.

Sounds like you've already offloaded the movies from the camera since you sound like you have a lot of footage, so hopefully you merely copied the .MP4 files (raw footage) from the camera or SDHC card to your Big hard drive. Again, you'd connect the HD to your Mac and in iMovie import the .MP4 (raw footage) into iMovie directly. You don't need GoPro Studio as a step in the middle and you don't want to do any conversions to the raw footage.

Unami said:

second that. don't convert the footage, use the original files for cutting. sort your footage before you begin, use tags, keywords, folders, or take notes while sighting all clips. ......

Click to expand...

I "third it". With FCPX 10.1 we have multiple libraries now.

I DO the same. Create a new library, import. Backup the entire library multiple times and to multiple places. (1) Time Machine, (2) copy to a data hard drive and then move drive to fire safe with all the other backup drives. (3) let on-line "cloud" backup copy my data. I don't erase the media (SD or CF cards) until I know I have three copies with on of them off-site.

Net I review the footage and add all kinds of tags, ratings, comments and organized it in "events" inside the FCPX library. Make sure you add tags for the who, what where, when for every clip. Then you can search based on these tags

I think having searchable video clips is the #1 thing you need to make happen.

Cut it so the pictures tell the story, no words. Then only later maybe record some voice-over.