I was surprised and pleased to see this as a feature of my new GoPro and have been itching to give it a try out.

Today was a day in the office, packed with meetings and conference calls. But it was a nice, sunny day, my GoPro mount on the bike had been applied only about 36 hours previously, rather than the recommended 72, a few tests tugging at it eased my concerns. The mounting point I used today was beneath the lights, underneath the fairing. I did have an additional concern about the travel of the forks if I needed to brake hard, as there was only a 3 inch gap between the bottom of the GoPro and the front mudguard. After a few test pushes down on the bars, I decided it would be okay.

So a bike day.

I was nervous, heading in, and then later heading back home, that I might arrive and find the camera missing in action, but in both cases, it remained securely in place.

I am not yet fully versed in the GoPro Studio software, it is going to take some experimenting with. For the export, I opted for YouTube settings. From a 2.3GB AVI file, it produced a 0.1GB MP4, with H.264 encoding (this is the compression codec). It didn’t play correctly in Windows Media Player, but seemed fine in the QuickTime Player.

Upload to YouTube took about 10 minutes. Add another 10 minutes that YouTube spent processing”.  Then I realised the audio hadn’t been trimmed to the size of the video clip and could not figure out how to do that in the GoPro Studio software. So I resorted to doing that in the YouTube video editor for the version I had already uploaded. That took a while longer. A good while longer! I won’t make that mistake again. It was still processing as I embedded this link.

YouTube:

I might switch to Vimeo at some point though. And decided to trim the MP3 in Audacity, reload into GoPro studio, then export again (which only saved a few MB), then I uploaded to Vimeo for comparison. It estimated at 5 minutes. These seems far better than YouTube, though I didn’t actually time the YouTube upload to be fair and other factors, such as bandwidth on the internet connection and how much data other users may be using will impact this. And there is a catch. After uploading, Vimeo informed me that it would take another 45 odd minutes to process the video. Apparently if I pay, I get priority processing. Worth knowing.

I am going to need more hard disk space. Much more!