First Look: GoPro Hero 7

I’m watching Casey Neistat’s preview of the new GoPro camera: the Hero 7 Black.

But I skipped to the comments before I started watching properly and already I’m seeing a lot of “the quality isn’t there” remarks. Some are saying it’s Casey uploading with the poor render settings, others that YouTube is inferior to Vimeo, others that the GoPro itself is not up to top range smartphone standard.

Nick Woodman is there – the founder and CEO of GoPro – who says, “Hero 7 Black is the best GoPro we’ve ever made. It’s the biggest leap forward since the original Hero back in 2009. High definition was the first thing that put GoPro on the map.”

“This is the gimbal killer,” Nick Woodman

“We’re all about capturing people’s active lifestyles. And with activity comes motion and with motion generally comes shake. This thing captures the best stabilised video of any camera…….

…….ever.”

Uhm. OK.

Cut to the mountain bike footage. Certainly does look a lot more smooth with the stabilisation switched on. But yeah, also seems to deliver a lot of artefacts (compared to the DSLR footage).

Casey: “Do you think YouTubers can vlog with the Hero 7?”

Nick: “I don’t understand why you guys are still using these massive cameras, when we make this badass self-capture solution.”

Badass self-capture solution… I like that. Sounds like something escaped convicts would be forced to drink.

Nick: “But yeah, you can absolutely vlog with this thing, man. We’ve improved the audio performance. Increased the dynamic range, to get more natural voices. I mean, look at the size of this thing, dude.”

CEO can say “man” and “dude”. The dude knows his market.

Now Casey meets up with Jeremy – ex green beret special forces, now GoPro marketer – as they head to the water park. Reminds me of a documentary I saw a last year about North Korea. The filmmakers had some of Kim Jong-un’s special People’s Republic “marketers” following them around, too.

Yeah… just make sure you don’t say anything “bad” or “ass-ey” about our new GoPro, dude.

I quite like the trippy slowmo camera drop shot with stretched out audio. I mean, these cameras are fun, right?

Nick: “I think there was a period when a gimbal was really exciting. People were really psyched on seeing stabilised footage that was really accessible. But we’ve made it even more accessible with hypersmooth.”

“Rest in peace, Gimbal?” Casey

I actually wonder why you would want stabilised footage when you’re filming yourself biking or falling off a diving board.

At the end, Casey concludes that he will definitely use the new GoPro for vlogging. But I can’t help but picture Jeremy the other side of the camera, slowly running his thumb along the sharpened edge of his hunting knife.

Well, back to the water park…

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