Downloading GoPro video footage during trip

[robint]

How is everyone downloading your GoPro video footage when you are on a week vacation with maybe 20 dives?
Do you take a laptop, save files to it daily, then transfer them when you get home?

I am trying to decide how to handle this for my upcoming Cozumel trip. I have a small netbook (3 yrs old) and a Passport drive... this is where we used to download a copy of all my husband's still shots and also my video footage from my old rig. Then when we got home from trip, we could just plug the passport into the home desktop and transfer.
I am wondering if I should go get a NEW small laptop for travel as the old one may be too slow for HD files.

robin

 

[Marty Cerven]

I think the best method is to just transfer them to a portable hard drive, your netbook should be able to do this but just give it a try and see how it goes. Either that or Just bring many SD cards with you I have been using some cheap ARAM c10 sd cards lately in the gopros and they work great, price is now down to $39 for 32GB cards and in all speed tests Ive done are much faster then my ultra and extreme Sandisk cards. I buy them from A large computer store in Australia and luckily they have a shop a few hundred meters from my house A-RAM ARSDCL10-32GB - $39.00 - Scorpion Technology

Speed will be all down to what your using though as transferring large files via slow USB drives can be very slow, give it a try with your netbook and you will see how it performs and if you will need an upgrade.

 

[JoeSpirit]

Doesn't the GoPro store onto SD cards? Seems to me that carrying extra SDs along takes up less space (if that's a concern). Just figure out what size card you need for each taping effort. How much space do you use on a dive for instance. And get a number of cards that size. That way if one card goes bad on you, you don't lose all of your footage.

Never had an SD go bad, but I've heard of it happening.

 

[flareside]

As Marty says, transferring files on the netbook shouldn't be a problem and if you keep your netbook fairly clean (filewise), it shouldn't be a problem to view them either. If the files don't play smoothly either run CCleaner (CCleaner - Standard) to clean up your system or use a player that uses less system resources like Splash Light (Free Splash Lite Download)

And you might consider replacing the hard disk in your netbook with a Solid State Drive (SSD) as they really help a netbook with file access times and battery life. Just be sure to verify if your HD is accessible first as some can be a real bear to put a new HD in.

 

[robint]

thanks... we travel with the netbook so my husband can download all his photos each night and view them, plus it is a nice backup in case of catastrophic F****. It hasn't happened to him, but it did happen to me with my first video rig (latch was caught on something and I didn't see it...).

So I am testing it out today. I really don't want to buy a bunch of SD cards if I don't have to, would like to download files nightly if it is possible. And since there are netbooks for around $300, I may get a new one anyhow. (My current one got dropped and so the LCD has a cracked area...)

robin

 

[irishtn]

I bring my laptop on every vacation. I take lots of topside photos as well as video. I bought the tiny Asus with the I7 processor. Incredibly fast.

 

[fdog]

With a GoPro, assuming you're shooting video at R5 (1080p), the data rate is ~4 GB/hour. So that's conceivably 80 GB.

The Passport would work. I have one that I've used as a backup drive, so I can tell you that the two bottlenecks would be:

1. Download speed from the card to the laptop. Typical built-in laptop card readers will take 20-40 minutes to download a day's worth (16 GB) of data.
2. Transfer speed to the Passport. The "pipe" via USB to the Passport is very small, and the Passport spins at 5400 rpm, so it writes data very slowly, 16 GB in maybe 30 minutes.

Here's how I addressed the speed issues:

I purchased a high-speed SD/UDMA card reader that fits in the Express Card slot on my laptop. I can dump an entire 16 GB card faster than my laptop's hard drive can write it. Typically I see 8 GB in 90 seconds, since my laptop has a 7200 RPM hard drive.

Also, I use a dedicated device, the Hyperdrive, to backup my video and photos. This is way faster than exporting to a Passport drive! It is a bit slower than the laptop, but still decent, ~ 8 GB in 2 minutes. It is convenient enough that often I will not bother booting the laptop, and just copy to the Hyperdrive.

Hope this helps!


All the best, James

 

[robint]

thanks fdog... I may have to upgrade the laptop. It is taking forever to convert these files today, and I don't plan to spend the vacation sitting at my computer.

 

[irishtn]

Yeah if you get a good laptop, you could wait til you get back to your room/villa, put the card in, then go to dinner or lunch, and by the time your done eating, all the videos are ready to go. I shoot thousands of photos each day in RAW format, and video every dive, and just usually do it at night. For all my cameras(3) I have 32 GB cards just in case I forget to download one day, that way I know I have enough space. The SD card is more likely to fail than your computers HD, and much easier to recover if disaster strikes.
I do like the speed options though that fdog mentioned. Although usually, it doesnt take more than a few beers, and they are ready to go. If you do get a good laptop like the one I mentioned, you could actually already start editing the videos while your on vacation, on the plane home for example. But the laptop has to be a powerful one or the software will never run efficiently.