GoPro CineForm Pro-Tune: What does it mean for new folks?

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dwlmgold

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I am new to GoPro and purchased a Hero2 for my wife. I successfully installed the new firmware and we will soon be off to Roatan for a week. I have CineForm Studio and Adobe Premiere Elements 11. I am a novice with both video editing tools. I will be shooting with a red filter and a white card, but no lights down to 75 feet or so (Mary's Place). The question is - would using the Pro-Tune functions assist me in getting a better post production product? If it would assist me, how? Thanks in advance.
 
Well, you will basically get a higher data rate, which could be quite useful for underwater video (there´s quite a bit of camera movement). Now, you will NEED to apply a color correction filter in Premiere. I am not familiar with Premiere Elements (or Premiere even), you should definitively check before heading off to Roatan how the whole workflow works for you. Even if not underwater, shooting stuff around both interior and exterior shots will give you a good idea of what CineStyle (the ProTune is basically CineStyle color setting for the GoPro) can do for you and what kind of post-production advantages it will give you.

Im not going to get very technical because I would have to double check some of my facts, but I can give you sort of an explanation "for mortals" about the type of encoding a setting like ProTune provides. When you are working with professional grade digital cameras (an Arri Alexa for example), you want to have as much information as possible available. This is NOT automatically going to produce a better quality image on itself, but it will give you post-production "freedom" to tailor it to whatever your heart desires.

Before ProTune (or with Protune turned off) you would get a predefined color/sharpness/contrast encoding that would be the "accepted general standard" of what people usually consider "good looking image". Now, this MIGHT NOT BE the look you are aiming for (let´s call it high contrast, good amount of chroma and quite a bit of sharpness). Then you would have to work with an already "processed" image to be able to achieve the look you are striving for. This "look achievement" thing is usually called COLOR GRADING. It will balance out the different settings (chroma, color, luminance, sharpness, contrast, etc) and achieve a certain look. Without ProTune, you need to work AGAINST the default setting and you loose some quality and the maximum limits where you can work get reduced.

With ProTune you get a FLAT IMAGE. It has settings for contrast, chroma, luminance, color, etc that are very NEUTRAL. They are optimized to be able to achieve the best balance for working the COLOR GRADING the way you want. The objective is to keep all values in a point where you have the most control in post-production to have as much information available so you can "move around the look of things". This is very good if you know what you are doing. And your software has the ability to work this values, and you can efficiently copy, paste and retouch the setting amongst different clips and cuts. Not a lot of video editing software has this capabilities, or has them available in an "efficient and usable package".

ProTune is a great addition to the GoPro, but I would´t recommend it to a vacationer just wanting to get underwater shots. It will certainly double and probably quadruple the amount of post work you have to do on whatever you do. And you NEED to be confident about your abilities in managing color grading. Of course anyone can learn anything. But if you have never fooled with color grading, it´s going to be frustrating. So baby steps, take on maybe only one day of ProTune and then work with that to learn how to do color grading (if your software even supports it).

Also with ProTune you get a higher bitrate (more information is actually recorded in terms of compression, this is good of course, but will also eat up your cards and make the whole video bigger).

It´s hard to explain the use of something like Pro Tune when you don´t understand the whole digital cinema acquisition workflow. But this is the best I could do to explain it in a nutshell for a diving forum. If you have questions on these things, feel free to shoot them and I will try to rephrase to answer them or answer new questions.
 
Thank you. Your response was useful and informative. I will stay outside the Pro-Tune arena for now but if I move up the learning curve, I know it will be there.
 
Very good explanation ElGaucho and it covers pretty much everything, anyone wanting even more detail about what it does here is a post by David Newman from Cineform on his personal blog regarding protune and the GoPro.

CineForm Insider: Protune

This does get pretty technical so you may get more from ElGaucho's post then this but for those that want further info this may find this interesting from the guy that helped to develop this.

Other thing to take note of is the higher data rate with Protune will mean you will use much more data on a trip away, about 3 times more data needed for the same amount of total recording time. 32GB SD cards will fill up quickly and you will need either lots of SD cards or a large storage drive to store your footage on while your away.
 
Without protune the max rate is about 15Mbps with protune its 35Mbps so its more like 2.5 times the data rate but both are variable bit rates ive seen my protune footage get close to 40Mbps at times.

That is a pretty substantial increase in bit rate. Curious to see how it translates to video improvement. The Hero 3 specs look great too.
 
Hero 3 black gets up to 45Mbps from what I have heard but at 2.7k30p it needs at least that and its one mode I want to try underwater. Low light looks quite well improved from the first few test videos posted online and WB options are a great boost, which hopefully make it to the next Hero 2 firmware also fingers crossed.
 
Hero 3 black gets up to 45Mbps from what I have heard but at 2.7k30p it needs at least that and its one mode I want to try underwater. Low light looks quite well improved from the first few test videos posted online and WB options are a great boost, which hopefully make it to the next Hero 2 firmware also fingers crossed.

Ah! It's kinda cruel to mention the hero 3 to someone who bought a hero 2 only a week ago. Ouch.

Im in a similar boat. Only had my hero2 for a couple of months and have already bought a bunch of accessories. Wish I knew an upgrade was coming!

ha. I should move myself to the whine and cheese forum. The hero 3 looks pretty great.
 
Ah, it is all in the timing. Our week in Roatan is about one week too early for the SRP dome filter and 2-3 weeks early for the Hero 3 black. Although the H3 black does look good, I do not regret the H2 purchase as I wanted to at least get in a pool and play with settings and human/camera interfaces (head mount, monopole, ProMount, wife) before we have fish, the Prince Albert, seahorses, and coral to capture. I got the Polar filter so I can also leak test the installed filter (with the housing empty) as well.

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” - William A. Ward.
 

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