This post is not directly related to my fitness journey, but it does relate to showing some of it on YouTube.
A while back I purchased a secondhand GoPro Fusion 360 camera from someone on Facebook Marketplace for £118.00 including postage, I used this to take some footage of my first solo outing in my single on 15/10/2022 as well as the following day when I went out in it again with the leisure group the next day.
I had hoped to use it to record my first real outing on 01/10/2022, however as mentioned in that post, the number holder was ‘missing’ and so I had nowhere to mount the camera and I had not thought to bring the suction cup mount as an alternative mounting solution.
I now had over 2 hours of footage from the GoPro Fusion 360 that I needed to scrub through and try and create some videos.
Copying the files over to my Mac was relatively straightforward, if slow, by means of a MicroSD USB adapter, 34GB of files from the Saturday and 60GB from the Sunday.
This is when I discover that the GoPro Fusion Studio app, that I need to convert these files into an Equirectangular Projection, is no longer supported on a Mac, however it still works on Windows, so I decide to make use of my Son’s gaming PC to transcode the files.
I copy them onto a 400GB external SATA drive and have him copy them locally onto his PC and download the relevant software.
After setting up the renders and kicking them off, we quickly realise that this is going to fill up his hard drive before the first one even finishes, so decide to have it write to the 400GB drive instead, although even this runs out of space!
The final rendered files are 156GB and 260GB in size, so will not both fit on the drive – I am going to need a decent storage solution for this type of file if I want to keep the full size renders moving forwards.
The renders take about 3 and 4 hours respectively to generate and I can then copy them back to my Mac where I can edit them in Adobe Premier Pro using the GoPro FX ReFrame plugin.
I created a 5 minute video of My First Solo Launch
from the first set of footage.
I have yet to decide what to do with the rest of the footage from this outing as it is largely repetitive footage of me rowing.
I took a bunch of stills from the leisure rowing footage,
Including this rather ‘arty’ selfie:
Once again I need to decide what I want to do with the rest of the footage, although there is a good section near the start where the crew of one of the quads starts singing ‘Row, Row, Row your Boat’ at me.
I decided that working with the GoPro Fusion 360 was going to be a bit too much of a pain, so went looking for a GoPro Max at a sensible price.
I won an almost new GoPro Max (used once) on eBay for just over 1/2 the new price and it arrived on 21/10/2022 just in time for recording some footage on the weekend should the opportunity present itself.
I was able to record footage of my second solo outing on the Saturday (23/10/2022) on the GoPro Max, so I could now try out a different process using apps that are actually supported and work on my Mac.
I had ordered a High speed 6Gbps, USB 3.0 MicroSD adapter from Amazon, for £10.88 which should speed up the copying of the large files from the GoPro Max MicroSD card.
Converting one of the .360 files from the GoPro Max into a HiRez Render takes about 10 minutes on my iMac Pro using the GoPro Player app.
The footage direct from the GoPro Max is about 4GB for an 8 minute segment, but once you convert it into a HiRez render, it grows to around 85GB! Then by the time it has been edited for YouTube it is back down to about 4GB for a 5 minute video.
All of this needs to be stored somewhere and ideally backed up as well, as such I decided that the GoPro subscription at £49.99 a year for unlimited image/video storage, plus replacement camera insurance for all of my GoPro cameras was a good option.
I have also decided to build a NAS server for hosting all of the files at home for editing, but having a cloud backup as well makes sense, although I will probably only use the cloud for the original files, and probably copies of the final videos, as it just takes too long to upload the renders, this build will be documented in My Home Blog.