GEEK TIME: Video and Photo Editing – Full Resolution GoPro video

I’ve had quite a few people ask me over the years just how I do what I do with my pictures, and now videos.

I also had some people who’ve been on the fence over the new GoPro Hero4 Black ask me to put up an uncompressed copy of the video I made a few weeks back. Well, that’s 22GBs.. so that’s out, but I did make a super high bit rate version that is only 2.2GBs.

http://1drv.ms/1yItt1t <--You can download it here. Click download at the top. Yes, you'll need a OneDrive account, but it's free, and most of you already have Microsoft accounts (Xbox Live, etc.. so it'll take moments).Vegas is what I started learning on back in 2007 when I worked as the General Manager/Tuner for a Tuning Shop I was at. I've upgraded through the years but have realized (recently with this new camera) that the workstation I originally built as a photo process deck is really having it's moments burning through some of the plugins I'm running.I use a second generation i7 with 8GB ram, Vertex 4 SSDs, Geforce GTX 750 TI, and Windows 7. It works AWESOME for my photo work flow, but took about an hour to render 5 minutes of video with the settings I use.

On the other hand, Vegas seems to not be friendly in the GPU processing realm with serious issues with it’s OpenCL and CUDA implementations (These are programming interfaces software developers use to leverage the stupidly insane processing power of modern GPUs… video cards), so I’m stuck rendering with the CPU only. I’ll have to see what the latest version of Vegas does to solve some of this, because the 750 TI I use is not a slouch. I can play a mean game of Diablo III at 1920×1080 with everything cranked at >60FPS.

But, back to the photo processing for a moment. I have a very simple workflow. I shoot in what’s called RAW. RAW is the equivalent of a digital “negative”, and like anyone who’s ever developed film in a dark room, you know there’s TONS of stuff you can do to enhance, correct, or tweak the final result you transfer to your print. This is the same way. Sure, you can load up Paint, or Photoshop and do tweaking of contrasts and brightness, but it’s not the same at all. Since you’re working with the raw sensor data, and not a compressed version of the image (which, like JPEG already has tons of data lost in compressing it down in size), the tweaks are more exact to what you want. The end result is a picture that has more dynamic range, and better overall image quality.

I render out the RAW negatives into a 16 bit TIFF file (uncompressed) and then run them through Noise Ninja. This software uses calibrations made for specific makes and models of cameras and does an incredible job of cleaning up artifact noise introduced when you run high ISOs in low light conditions. For those reading this on a whim and don’t follow.. take a picture with your cell phone camera late at night and notice how it looks “grainy”. This piece of software goes a long way to making that picture look awesome again.

From there, I load everything through Photoshop, but honestly, not for any more post processing. I have actions built that automate my water marking, as well as the final conversion from TIFF to 8bit JPEG (including resizing for web sized images).

So you can see, very straight forward! But, back to some of the video editing in closing.

Over the years, I’ve used just about every major type of encoder, always looking for that right blend of size and quality for web work. What has worked great for me is a public domain (free) encoder called x264vfw. Google it. It’s available with installers for a variety of platforms from Windows, to *NIX. In Vegas, you can access it from the Video for Windows options in the rendering dialogues.

From there, you can configure it for your own personal needs. The 2.2GB version I made for sharing is rendered at 30MB/s which isn’t exactly BlueRay quality, but it’ll let people get a real good idea of what the camera can do. Download it and check it out, then compare it to the YouTube version I posted up a few weeks back.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas for (at least) the photo processing. Seems that Nikon and Canon are putting out some cool new “Prosumer” model every few months now. But, all of them are capable of doing photo as well as HD video. While I’m no fan of that concept (I’ll buy a camcorder to take videos… WAIT, I did!), at least now you can explore other ways to seriously get some more quality and mileage out of your investment.