So next year I am planning to hike the Appalachian Trail or at least some big chunks of it. So I bought a Hero 7 camera to record videos and pictures. The camera is waterproof to 33ft so hopefully it can handle the regular rain/damp conditions on the AT.
So videos will not be fast action. I plan to post on youtube for family/friends. An later to re-watch at home on TV. What should I record at? Some comments from bloggers I have seen say the record at 4k/30fps. There idea is record at 4k so you can manipulate the video when combining with others and publish something at a lower resolution.
I’ve been trying 4k/30fps and they do not seem to play well on my old pc / laptop. They are jumpy, like slowing down speeding up. I am not talking about the camera moving. I am thinking the old laptop/tablet cannot process the video that fast, or do I just need to download a different player. They play fine on the hero 7 screen and when I transfer to my phone, they play fine on the phone a Samsung S10.
You will need a decent computer to edit video. Your hard drive might be too slow as well.
It would be a good idea to learn how to do color correction. It can really improve the quality of video. But again, that does take some processing power.
Even though the Hero 7 Black does have pretty good stabilization, you might want to consider a handheld gimbal. That will make sure your horizon is level and you don’t wind up with jerky video. They can be bought pretty cheap these days unless dumbass puts more tariffs on them.
How old of a computer and what program are you using to play the video files? You could try using VLC - https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html which is generally pretty good at low resource usage/taking advantage of the various decoder accelerations that different CPUs/GPUs offer.
Also - if you’re playing them directly of the SD card it might be better if you move them to your computer first.
My laptop is a Lenovo T420 with 8gb of memory. It was from 2011. I am playing from hard drive not the sd card. I am using widows media player. VLC also plays it poorly.
Should I record in something less than 4K? This will not be high speed action, but many scenic overlooks.
Is your goal only playback or also editing? You’re going to have a pretty rough time editing even 1080p video on 8 year old laptop hardware (GPU and lack of SSD are probably going to be your biggest bottlenecks there).
You should try shooting some sample clips at 1080p and see how they play. If you’re planning on doing any editing, it may be worth looking at getting a newer laptop/desktop as even the ones in the $500 range are going to be significantly faster across the board (and if you swap out a HDD for a SSD it’ll be even that much faster).
What do you think you’re going to video on a hike? I would think you may want to do something like stop motion, so take a picture every 10 seconds. I guess you may catch some animals that would be cool to video, but I think you’d have to be pretty lucky to have the camera ready and recording. No one is going to want to watch you walk through the woods for more than a few minutes. A boy did a stop motion last year on a 50 mile bike ride, and it was pretty cool because it lasted 1 minute
This should also greatly increase your battery life, which is nice while hiking because you can carry less extras.
x2 on what jmcconne said. Stop motion videos can make a long boring activity seem like OK viewing.
As for recording. I would just go with 720 or 1080 @ 30fps.
For a couple reasons:
4k video eats memory cards like Homer eats donuts. At 720 you can make one memory card last a loooooong time.
There is no need for 4k with high FPS on ‘home movies’ unless you’re shooting action sports or you are James Cameron.
Editing / processing / uploading big 4k/30fps files is a pain in the ass. Do you really need to buy a ‘Deep Blue’ supercomputer just to process your home movies?