6 Most Common Mistakes You'll Make with GoPro Protune Settings
1. Don't Use GoPro Color If You Need to Edit the Footage
GoPro Color is the default Color option, which gives saturated images with vivid colors and high contrast. You can share the footage without processing becasue it can give a quite great look.
The other Color option is Flat, which delivers neutral raw footage looking straight out of camera. Flat gives dull color and low contrast, but it keeps all information of your footage and retains more details in highlights/shadows making it better to do color grading in editing software.
You may prefer to use GoPro Color to get a better-looking clip but Flat is the right choice if you need to post process the footage.
2. Don't Leave White Balance to Auto in Specific Lighting Conditions
White Balance works for controlling color temperature under different lighting conditions. Auto is the default setting, which can automatically adjust colors and tones of your GoPro footage according to shooting situations.
Auto actually works well for outdoor shots or under normal lights. But it is suggested to adjust White Balance when shooting in Protune mode for correcting the temperature for challenging situations. For example, 3000K is great for filming indoors in a candle light while 6500K is used for daylight and overcast.
What You May Be Interested In: Best GoPro Settings for Low Light
3. Don't Set ISO Limit too High When Shooting in Low Light
ISO Limit, referring to the sensitivity of sensor to light, is an important Protune option affecting image quality, especially in low light situations, indoors or at night. A higher ISO can make your footage brighter but may result in noises on images.
There're 3 options – 6400, 1600, 400 – can be selected for recording video. It seems that 1600, the moderate value can help output a brighter video with less noises on image. But, 400 is the best choice to get a perfect balance between brightness and image quality for indoors filming. If you try to shoot a brighter video, put more lights in the room, studio or other low light environments.
4. High Sharpness May Make Your Footage Look Unnatural
In GoPro Protune mode, the sharpness setting can be switched from Low to Medium to High. If you keep the sharpness to high, your footage will become crisp with increased contrast but probably looks artificial and unnatural with you keep the sharpness to high. What's more, noises may appear on images.
High sharpness is the default setting on HERO 6. But Medium or Low is the better option for who want a softer looking and prefer editing the footage flexibly. Instead of High setting on camera, you can add sharpness with the most appropriate degree to GoPro video during post production.
5. 0 Exposure Does Not Work So Good as You Suppose
GoPro Protune Exposure Compensation shows its impact on video brightness. The range of exposure value goes from -2.0 to 2.0 in 0.5 increments. GoPro set exposure to 0 by default and tries to offer the matched brightness or darkness for your video in various conditions. When it comes to challenging environment, you need to adjust exposure to brighten or darken the footage to make it look better.
Please note that it will not come into effect to increase Exposure compensation if the brightness has been reached the ISO Limit in low light.
6. Shutter Speed in Manual Mode Is Not Suitable for Beginners
You can control shutter speed on HERO 7/6/5. Shutter speed is related to brightness of footage. Lower speed makes images brighter and higher makes darkness. Auto is the default setting and there're other 4 options: 1/30, 1/60, 1/120 and 1/240. Auto does a big favor for beginners that it can intelligently change shutter speed to fit for the light.
Manual mode allows you to adjust shutter speed but please keep shooting in a constant lighting condition to make sure that your footage will not be too dark or too bright. For filmmaking, shutter speed is better set at double value of frame rate to achieve cinematic look, e.g.
• FPS = 60, Shutter Speed = 1/120s
• FPS = 120, Shutter Speed = 1/240s
To sum up: GoPro Protune gives a big hand for users to create crispy footages with a variant of colors. Great settings can improve the quality of resulting file and make it easier for post processing. What you should do is to put Protune parameters at the right location and get away from above mistakes you'll make.
GoPro Protune delivers a bigger file size and makes it hard to share on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. Don't worry. Compression can be easily achieved with VideoProc, the program which is good at processing GoPro footages.
VideoProc supports all GoPro HEVC/H.264 recordings in 4K, slow motion, time lapse and more. It includes a pack of processing tools to transode, compress and edit your GoPro raw files. It enables you to lower parameters, trim/split video length, and transcode to the format with high compression ratio with the purpose of reducing video file size to match the requirements of online uploading. With full hardware acceleration, it delivers a fast performance and outputs the file with lossless quality. What's more, it provides a pack of tools to improve video quality, including shaky image stabilization, fisheye correction, noise reduction as well as effects for color enriching. It is the easiest video processing software to help you make an awesome GoPro video.
>> Learn How to Process and Resize GoPro (4K) Footages with VideoProc
>> Or for More GoPro Video Editing Tips
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