How To Shoot Cinematic Video With GoPro: 5 Tips to improve your GoPro Footage!
In todays post i will introduce some tips to make your gopro footage look more cinematic and increase the quality of your gopro footage!
A Screen Grab From A GoPro Video
Part 1 - The Cinematic Settings
One of the best ways to improve the quality of your gopro footage is by changing your settings!
The settings that come with the gopro straight out of the box is not ideal.
In general you want to be shooting with the settings as follows for the best looking footage.
GoPro Video Settings
Resolution: 4k/60frames
Hypersmooth: Boost
White Balance: 5.5k
BItrate: High
Colour: Natural
Lens: Wide
Shutter: Auto
Iso Min: 100
Iso Max: 200
Once you get used to using the gopro you can tweak the settings slightly depending on the condition, however this is a great place to start.
For example when its getting darker in the evening, increase the ISO Max to 800 or if you know how to colour grade change the colour setting to flat so that you have more flexibility in colour grading the gopro clips in a editing program.
Part 2 film multiple different angles
In order to keep a video interesting it is important that you keep each clip short and include multiple angles and or different types of shot. In movies and TV shows its rare to have exactly the same shot rolling for more than 10 seconds.
Even when a character is talking, it will cut between shots taken from multiple different angles. This goes for your gopro videos too. Whether your creating a family holiday video or a cinematic snowboarding trip compilation, you want to have a variety of shots to keep your video interesting.
An example of a cinematic video i shot with gopro clips is below!
Part 3 Add transitions to your video
My next tip that i have to improve the quality of your videos is to add transitions. I dont like overdoing transitions however when used occasionaly switching between locations and scenes it can be quite effective.
I have created a video on some effective transitions that can be used with the gopro in the video below.
Part 4 Using slow motion and time warp
As i said earlier its very important to mix up your clips to keep your video interesting. One way to do this is to use slow motion or the time warp feature on the gopro. Time warp is like a photo timelapse that is linked together to create a flowing video! It gives off a different feeling to a regular video and can be pretty effective when edited into your video.
The time warp feature can be accessed from the timelapse screen of the gopro hero 10!
Slow motion is another effective form of video to use to mix up the types of video clips. To do slow motion with gopro, make sure to change the settings slightly so that the frame rate is set to 60,120 or 240. The higher the frame rate the more you can slow down your video.
A regular video or film on tv etc is set at 24 frames or 30 frames. Therefore, if you film in 60 frames, changing the video to 30 frames will slow down the video 2 times (60frames/30frames=2)
Clips recorded at 120 frames can be slowed down up to 4 times when converted to 30 frames. 120/30=4times slowed.
Once you film the clips in high frame rates, they will need to be edited in a program to change them to slow motion. I personally use davinci resolve to change my clips to slow motion.
Here is a guide on how to edit the clips into slow motion!
Part 5 Sync The Video To Music
The biggest difference you can make when editing a cinematic video is to cut your video to the beat of the song and choosing a song that fits the mood of your video.
Adding the right song can dramatically improve the video as it creates an atmosphere and makes it feel like your actually there. To make it feel natural its important to cut your shots to the beat of the music. In my editing software i add markers to the beat of the song so i can just slot the clips in!
Thanks for reading, please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions below!
This is a list of the gear that i use!! Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or need recommendations :)
My Main GoPro’s
[Hero 10Black]: https://amzn.to/3pbiEIn
[Hero 9 Black]: https://amzn.to/2YZVwS2
My Backup GoPro
[Hero 8 Black]: https://amzn.to/3DRrKOz
[Hero 5 Black]: https://amzn.to/3DSUqa1
My Main Camera
[Sony A7III]: https://amzn.to/2YXTH8R
My Backup Camera
[Sony A6000]: https://amzn.to/3psXS7x
My Lenses
[Sigma 100-400mm sony e mount]: https://amzn.to/3aMIRoj
[Tamron 17-28mm sony e mount]: https://amzn.to/3jh0YHB
SD card for GoPro
[128gb-fast]: https://amzn.to/2Z62fuf
SD card for Sony Camera
[128gb]: https://amzn.to/3ANFpEw
External Hard Drive
[2tb]: https://amzn.to/3jgNXh8
My GoPro Mounts:
[3 Way Mount]: https://amzn.to/3n9XjN7
[Bite Mount]: https://amzn.to/3FYcd1y
[Neck Mount - for pov]: https://amzn.to/3ANEGTO
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By using the affiliate link I earn a small fee of your purchase, however it does not cost anything extra for you to use them. Thank you for the support!