Ok, I have a basic understanding of these things. There are endless blogs and guides out there the cover the same basic info but they don't get into the deeper technical matters, so this is what I am seeking from any "experts" out there.
Protune is a setting designed to allow more refined postprocessing. It disables the automatic camera adjustments (white balance, exposure, etc.), capturing unadjusted data at a higher bitrate (more raw data), shifgting the adjustments to the post-editing phase. By most accounts, Gopro does a pretty good job with it's automatic adjustments. So the MP4 output, without any further editing, will look pretty good to most with Protune off but flatter and not so good with Protune on. The Protune filter in Studio makes the same adjustments the camera would have made except now you have more data to work with for finer adjustments. If my understanding is wrong, please correct me.
The first question is whether the MP4 output with Protune on is equivalent to the MP4 output with Protune off, except that it simply has more raw data because it was captured at a higher bit rate? Or does it have proprietary info stored there as well? Why it matters. To edit in Gopro Studio, step 1 requires to convert from MP4 to AVI Cineform. But it's a tedious process. I can use a tool like MPEG StreamClip to batch convert an entire folder of MP4's to AVI Cineform while I sleep, then I can go to Gopro Studio and jump straight to step 2, import the AVI's, and start editing. My initial tests indicate no discernible difference whether I use Studio or Streamclip to convert to AVI then apply Protune filter, but maybe my eye is just untrained.
Another thing I'd like to do is edit clips with something else, like AviDemux that can quickly cut the MP4 and save it back without re-encoding, thus I don't have to spend time converting and post-processing a bunch of garbage. I can also use something like MP3Tag to edit the tags in the clips so I have descriptive metadata about the clips.
Another thing I'd like to do is apply image stabilization, which Studio does not have. I haven't settled on a tool but am comparing Vdub/Deshaker, Mercalli v3 SAL, and several editors that use the Mercalli v2 plugin. No matter what, this task will require re-encoding. I'm not sure where in the process to best apply this. I'm leaning towards the end, applying only to post-processed clips.
Essentially what I'm getting at with all this is that I'd like to use a variety of software tools to do edit my video in various ways but I need to know the best order to do it to minimize loss of quality and excessive re-encoding. I am doing a lot of tests but there are a lot of possible combinations and I'm just trying to narrow it down somewhat. Or maybe, at this level, it's all irrelevant as the difference in quality will be imperceptible to most people?
Finally, after you edit a video do you save it back as raw AVI (huge files) for future editing or do you figure you've done all the editing you're likely to do and just save it as MP4?
Protune is a setting designed to allow more refined postprocessing. It disables the automatic camera adjustments (white balance, exposure, etc.), capturing unadjusted data at a higher bitrate (more raw data), shifgting the adjustments to the post-editing phase. By most accounts, Gopro does a pretty good job with it's automatic adjustments. So the MP4 output, without any further editing, will look pretty good to most with Protune off but flatter and not so good with Protune on. The Protune filter in Studio makes the same adjustments the camera would have made except now you have more data to work with for finer adjustments. If my understanding is wrong, please correct me.
The first question is whether the MP4 output with Protune on is equivalent to the MP4 output with Protune off, except that it simply has more raw data because it was captured at a higher bit rate? Or does it have proprietary info stored there as well? Why it matters. To edit in Gopro Studio, step 1 requires to convert from MP4 to AVI Cineform. But it's a tedious process. I can use a tool like MPEG StreamClip to batch convert an entire folder of MP4's to AVI Cineform while I sleep, then I can go to Gopro Studio and jump straight to step 2, import the AVI's, and start editing. My initial tests indicate no discernible difference whether I use Studio or Streamclip to convert to AVI then apply Protune filter, but maybe my eye is just untrained.
Another thing I'd like to do is edit clips with something else, like AviDemux that can quickly cut the MP4 and save it back without re-encoding, thus I don't have to spend time converting and post-processing a bunch of garbage. I can also use something like MP3Tag to edit the tags in the clips so I have descriptive metadata about the clips.
Another thing I'd like to do is apply image stabilization, which Studio does not have. I haven't settled on a tool but am comparing Vdub/Deshaker, Mercalli v3 SAL, and several editors that use the Mercalli v2 plugin. No matter what, this task will require re-encoding. I'm not sure where in the process to best apply this. I'm leaning towards the end, applying only to post-processed clips.
Essentially what I'm getting at with all this is that I'd like to use a variety of software tools to do edit my video in various ways but I need to know the best order to do it to minimize loss of quality and excessive re-encoding. I am doing a lot of tests but there are a lot of possible combinations and I'm just trying to narrow it down somewhat. Or maybe, at this level, it's all irrelevant as the difference in quality will be imperceptible to most people?
Finally, after you edit a video do you save it back as raw AVI (huge files) for future editing or do you figure you've done all the editing you're likely to do and just save it as MP4?
