Editting Gopro Videos

Hey guys,

I took the Gopro out on a few rides and now i wanna make the videos smaller in size but not quality, i have a few 3:00 clips but when i use the GoPro software the clip comes out to 2GB @ 720p...and the RAW video is only 330mb...WTF and i even trimmed some off the original clip, doesn't make sense to me.

anyway i do have adobe premiere installed, how would i go about saving the file to make it suitable to upload to youtube without losing quality?or basically convert it to a file that i can upload to youtube while meeting max size requirements.

also is there a way to take HD stills of video that i made?

and if there are better programs that are easier to use let me know also

Premier elements, or Premier Pro?

Either way, what you are talking about is called CODEC's.

Most HD cameras today shoot in a compressed format like h.264 or AVCHD.

It is mathematically very hard to edit a compressed CODEC, so many editing programs transcode to a less compressed or uncompressed codec for editing.

Once you have the sequence how you like it, export out a new clip and pay attention to the output settings.

You want to export back to h.264 at the same frame size and rate and that will make a much smaller file that is more suitable for upload.

You can upload your 2GB files to YouTube (provided you have the bandwidth). They take care of the processing and streaming. I upload all my videos to YouTube in as high quality / large a format as possible.

While some deride it, for simple basic editing / fade in/out etc. there's nothing wrong with Windows Movie Maker.

any luck with taking HD stills to save as Jpeg's?

yes, you can export still frames as .jpg as well as several other types of image files.

Be aware that video (even HD) is not terribly high res compared to modern digital still cameras.

1920 x 1080 is about as large an image as you can hope for.

In the File:export menu you should be able to select "image" or "still" instead of "sequence" or "work area" and accomplish what you are after.

And Tim is right, if you stay within the limitations of WMM it will work OK on a reasonably fast machine for simple things.

I'm not a big fan of it compared to other programs, but it is certainly better than nothing.