GoPro Hero2 Editing software for PC

Good info. Thanks for sharing.

Al

Yeah, really good info, thanks.  I'm loving Sony Vegas.  I got mine at Best Buy for $40.  When I have questions on how to use Vegas, I turn to YouTube.

Did you get Vegas 10 or 11?

I haven't played with Vegas much, but I've heard good things about it.   Will have tO get a demo version to try it out.    I use Sony Acid for producing my audio tracks, and love it.

I carry two batteries for every camera, and use 16GB cards.  A 16GB card will record almost 5 hours at 720P-30, which is the life of two batteries.  There is a battery backpak that allows you to install two batteries in the case.  It uses the expansion port, so you can not use the LCD backpack at the same time.  Extra batteries are about $12 on eBay, and there are many different chargers available for cheap as well.  Also, the camera uses almost as much battery power in standby mode as it does to record because of the internal heater, so turn it off when not recording.

The most difficult part of filming a fishing trip is knowing when to turn the camera on.   

I have two cameras and eight batteries. On a multi-day fishing trip, I never know when I will have time to recharge, and
recharge takes a while. I leave the camera on. I would rather edit out useless footage than to miss good action or lose out
because dirty water gets splashed on the camera or a floppy hat flips up to block the recording (yes, it did happen).

I bought Vegas 11.  I'm really happy with it.  I've done some videos where I've sped up the playback rate, as well as slow mo stuff. 
Now that I've learned the basics of Vegas, my videos are gonna be awesome!  I'm hoping Santa will bring me a larger memory card
and the Battery Bacpac so I can do some time lapse stuff.  I love my GoPro!

I am waiting for my new laptop to come in and see how it likes these programs..lol 

I bought a 32mb class 10 memory stick so I just have to worry about having enough batteries.

I use to use Sony Vegas back in the day but when I ran into WMM it was so much easier....but I bet the latest one kicks butt.

Just for grins, I installed Vegas 10 last night to check it out.  I really like it.   The timeline is more traditional than Power Director, and the transitions and efx are really good.  I found that the live rendering engine was a little slow, but after making some tweaks to the settings, I was able to get very smooth previews.  I will compile this weekend's adventure in Vegas to see how it does.   

Yeah! The little preview window of my current project is super choppy/laggy, how do I correct that?

How long do your videos take to render? My 8 minute Ab Season Closer took like two hours!

I'm using version 10, not 11, so there might be differences, but the first thing I did to improve the playback was to turn off the Media Manager.  Options-> Preferences -> General ->  Un Check "Enable Memory Manager".  Then exit and restart Vegas.  I also decreased the Preview RAM.  Options-> Preferences -> Video -> "Dynamic RAM Preview".   Set it to 150-200. 

To get a smooth preview of an effect or transition, drag the workspace marker, also called Loop region in some software (not sure what Vegas calls it), over about a 20 sec portion of the time line you want to preview.  It highlights blue on my version.  Then push Shift-b.  This will render the selected section for real time playback.  My system takes 2-3 seconds to render the 20 second selection.  You can now playback the selection section to see what the final output will look like.

Every time you render a new preview, it deletes the previous render, so check each transition, then move on to the next.   Other software packages, like Power Director, render as you edit in real time.  Its a great feature, but a major resource hog.  Vegas seems to be more stable because of the way it handles previews.

Two hours to render 8 minutes is not bad.   I haven't output anything on Vegas yet since I've only played with it for an hour or two, but I usually figure about 10 minutes of render time for every 1 minute of video.  On some computers, it could be 4 times that long depending on hardware.

The movie Toy Story took more than 5 years to render.  Several times, they restarted the rendering process half way through to install new hardware components in hopes of speeding up the process.   The actual final render took 7 months.  Today, it could be completed in a few days.

Hey Wes, what do you do for a living? You sure know your stuff about video editing! Thanks for the help and sharing your knowledge!

Hey Wes, what do you do for a living? You sure know your stuff about video editing! Thanks for the help and sharing your knowledge!

I retired from the automotive industry about 5 years ago to stay home with my sons, now 4 and 2.  I have been freelancing as a videographer for an A/V production studio in Seattle since I was a teenager, shooting and editing everything from weddings to rodeos. 

I'm more than happy to help any one who wants to make movies at home.   

Slightly off topic. This GoPro video has some cool editing. I like the stop motion and multi camera swing shots. Never thought a pogo stick would be so interesting.

Enjoy, Al

http://devour.com/video/pogo-gopro/

That's awesome. 

GoPro website has software available for editing videos; the basic is freeware and they have a professional version for a few bucks....

I used Video Pad Video Editor...really fantastic easy to use please choose get it now and try it

http://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/index.html

I just wanted to give my positive feedback for these 2 specific post, along with the rest.  I clipped the footage I wanted with the go pro editing software that is free and made avi out of them.  Once I did that I edited the avi files under Pad Video Editor and its a breeze under that program.  Very Straight forward.  I recorded this video under 1080 x720p Wide at 30fps.  In my opinion unless you are doing slow motion the faster fps and higher resolution is not needed...I am happy with this setting and it works for what I am doing.  Thanks everyone for the feedback here, it has helped a great deal.