A Couple of Issues With The HD GoPro
First is a relatively minor image quality issue that most people probably won't notice. There is a noticeable amount of chromatic aberration in the GoPro's image. Chromatic Aberration (CA from now on) is one of those things that once you know what it is and see it once, it jumps out at you in every image you see. Here is a frame from the GoPro:

Notice the blue and yellow "highlights" on the tree in the upper right of the image:

So what now? This makes the image look, well, not as good as if the CA wasn't there, so is there a way to fix it? Well I wouldn't be posting this if there wasn't! For still images, Photoshop has a filter to remove and adjust CA. Its in the Filter > Distort > Lens Correction menu. For video, the best color grading tool I know of is Magic Bullet Looks. It's not cheap, but it is a really powerful tool, is super easy to use and is really a lot of fun! Take a look at the image after I adjusted it with MBL:

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The second issue I had with the HD GoPro was editing the footage. The files the GoPro generated are h.264 .mp4 files which are very generic and although not the ideal format to edit, should work just fine. The files play back fine in VLC and Quicktime, Premiere Pro CS4 however, had issues. Crashing, freezing, very slow performance and several of the files would not even load up correctly, the image would be all green or black. I'm not sure what the issue is here. PPro should be able to edit the files.
Luckily, I was able to come up with a work around. It requires quicktime pro to convert the .MP4 files to .MOV. Just load up the original source file into Quicktime, then go File > Save As. Keep the default setting and save the file:

It's not going to reencode the file, it just has to save a new copy so the process doesn't take too long. Then import these .MOV file into Premiere Pro and you should be good.
A few things:
-The issue I had with PPro was with the 720 60p clips. I haven't shot anything in the other frame rates / resolutions so I don't know if the problem is just this format.
-I'm using Premiere Pro CS4.1, the latest version
-I'm not sure what is wrong here. My guess is that there is something with the way the GoPro generates the .MP4 file that makes Premiere go bonkers. Converting it to the .MOV wrapper seems to work just fine.
-I'll try to update this post as I learn more



















