The GoPro is a great little action camera, and you don’t necessarily need the latest and greatest one
either for some great results, take a look at my retrospective review of the GoPro Hero 8 if
you want to know more about that. However, once you’ve captured your footage and have edited it
together – you still want to make sure that you can export a file that offers good quality and
fidelity, whilst keeping a sensible file size. We’re going to be taking a look at some exporting
settings that I’d recommend for action camera and GoPro edits in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve,
exploring the results of different bitrates, resolutions and codecs and how this affects
your final export. Of course, you may have to make slight tweaks and adjustments based
on what you’re filming but these should provide a good baseline to experiment and begin with.
The settings that we’re looking to adjust are the bitrate, resolution, codec and format.
The main thing we’ll be focusing on is the bitrate and codec/format as the resolution is
likely dictated by your capture resolution. The bitrate is how much data is being used
to store frame data within a video file. For example, a bitrate of 70 megabits per second
will allow you to store a lot more data than 10 megabits per second – whilst both will try their
best to accommodate your project settings, a low bitrate can sometimes struggle to hold enough data
to provide a clear image to the viewer, which can lead to a blocky visual when playing back media.
The resolution is more up to your preference, I usually capture at 2.7K as this gives me a
high enough resolution for recording my bike rides without overwhelming file sizes although
you can apply this to 1080p or 4K footage – definitely feel free to experiment with settings
to figure out what works best for you. There’s then file formats and codecs to think about,
for personal use H.264 in an MP4 format works well as it’s accepted and plays
back on pretty much any website and device — whilst also keeping file sizes sensible.
So let’s move over to Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve to see what this looks like in practice.
So here we are in Premiere Pro. Let's go over to the Export tab at the top of the screen and make
sure that we have the format set to H.264. But let's change the frame size to match our actual
timeline. Let's click that "Match Source" button, this will just match the frame rate and resolution
to match the timeline. Now let's scroll down and enable the "Render at Maximum Bit Depth" and "Use
Maximum Render Quality Settings". These just make sure we get the best output from Premiere Pro.
Let's scroll down a bit further and get to that all important bitrate setting, so, we're going
to take the default of 20 megabits per second and let's ramp this all the way up to 70, so we have
a lot more data going in for each frame. Changing this setting means that each frame will have more
data to work with as the video progresses, which will look great for action camera footage. So
with all of that set, now we can move over and press that Export button and just render it to
our computer. So, with that render underway if you're a DaVinci Resolve editor here's how you
can do the same in DaVinci Resolve. Click on the Deliver tab to open up the render settings and
first of all let's give the file a place to render to. I'm just going to pop this on my desktop.
I'm just going to give it a name such as DaVinci sequence so I can just see
how this turns out compared to my Premiere Pro sequence.
Now let's change the format from QuickTime to MP4 and the codec is set to H.264 which is great.
Now the resolution all checks out with my source footage and the frame rate as well
and let's change this bitrate setting under the quality tab to 70,000 kilobits a second which is
17 megabits per second. And everything else looks good, we can leave that encoding profile on auto.
There's a few more settings here that you might want to mess around with but none of
them are too critical for this, so let's just add it to the queue and start that render.
So let's take a look at how this render turned out and I've also done a render at a lower bit
rate so we can see the benefits of rendering at that higher bit rate. So let's start off with the
lower bit rate just to see a baseline of what a default render setting in Premiere Pro might give
you if you just match everything and don't set that custom bit rate. You can see straight away
that the render actually is a bit more pixelated and struggles to keep all that data going as the
video progresses, but when we switch over to that high quality render either from DaVinci Resolve
or Premiere Pro you get a much higher quality render that is able to deliver much more data
for each frame, so, you get a clearer detail on what is actually going on in the frame.
This is particularly important for action camera footage just because they're always in focus,
everything's in focus, and there's so much going on and changing so rapidly.
Hopefully this video is useful on giving you some pointers and tips for getting
some good renders out of your action camera footage, whether you use DaVinci Resolve or
Premiere Pro for editing your Clips together. That's been it for this video if you liked
it please consider subscribing thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.