GOPRO CINEFORM STUDIO
PAGE 5
The Advantages of the GoPro CineForm Codec for Editing
Your GoPro Hero camera is a unique device. It records high definition video that looks great, but yet
creates a very small data file. The way it does this is through creating a video clip that is highly
“compressed”. Image compression is used in many types of computer and digital device images like
JPEG files from your mobile phone or camera. Most DSLR cameras that shoot high definition video
as well as many other video cameras create similar files.
When you edit your video clips together in your favorite video editing software (your chosen
application could be anything from Windows Movie Maker or iMovie up to Adobe Premiere Pro or
Final Cut Pro, to name a few), part of your computer
ʼ
s job in playing the footage back is the
“decompression” (you might think of it as “reconstruction”) of the video clip so you can see the full
frame when playing and editing the video clips. Your camera
ʼ
s files are easy enough to play back in
most media players, but cutting them together in an editing application or altering their color or other
characteristics can stress your computer, and give you less than ideal results.
Converting your camera footage to GoPro CineForm files makes a copy of your original footage that
results in a much larger file size (make sure you have enough hard drive space), but they actually
improve the responsiveness of your computer and your editing software because the files are
designed to work with your computer much more efficiently than MPEG4.
With GoPro 3D content, conversion to a GoPro CineForm file keeps the two clips that provide the
“left eye” and “right eye” view in one file, allowing you to adjust alignment, and you can simply edit
them like any other video file.
Inside GoPro
ʼ
s CineForm Studio, you can make color, framing, or 3D alignment or viewing
adjustments to your GoPro CineForm files, and these changes will be reflected in the same footage
inside your editing software. GoPro CineForm files preserve image and color quality better than your
camera
ʼ
s original MPEG4 files through any color adjustments you make during editing. This leads
many users to keep GoPro CineForm Studio open while they
ʼ
re editing their footage in another
application as they can click back and forth between applications, making adjustments to their
footage in Studio and clicking back to their editing application to continue to cut their clips together
while the adjustments they made are updated immediately upon their return to editing.
The way GoPro CineForm Studio makes these changes to your GoPro CineForm clips is by saving
your changes made in the
ʻ
Edit
ʼ
interface of the software as
ʻ
metadata
ʼ
. You may have heard this
term before and the typical explanation is “It
ʼ
s data about the data...” A better way to define it is that
when you make framing or color or 3D alignment changes in Studio, you are saving a
ʻ
description
ʼ
of
how to play the video back, and not actually altering the clip itself. Your video editing application
simply plays the footage back with your adjustments, even if you made them during an editing
session by moving between your editing software and GoPro CineForm Studio.
The power of using metadata is being able to make changes and then change your mind without
actually affecting the original footage in a way that would affect the image quality. You can always go
back to the original footage and start over if you need to, because no matter what you adjusted in
Studio, it can be reversed, reset, or revised without affecting the original image until you
ʼ
re ready to
export the finished video.
