The "I struggle with a Gopro" thread

I thought i would just title this thread as is because im sure i will have a million more stupid questions about this camera. I thought when i bought it i would strap it on and shoot professional footage lol. Im finding out I'm about as bad with this thing as one can get. So, after originally asking about my jumpy playback footage you guys suggested getting a class 10 card. I went with a sandisk, took it on our trip to flaming gorge, and just uploaded the footage to my POS macbook pro. I still cannot get clean playback. Its jumping around like i took a bunch of stills. The sound runs through mostly without skipping but the video feed wont. What in the world do i have to buy for this POS computer so that it will play this back without skipping? I thought macs were the end all for photo and video editing?! Why did i ever stop using a PC?
 

Vumad

Super Hero, with a cape!
Location
St. Pete, FL
sorry for my ignorance but what is VLC

www.google.com

To answer your question, it is an open source video player that plays back most formats. Windows Media Player, for example, lack the codecs (i think) to play back the .mp4 format the go pro uses. I believe your mac should be able to play them.

"POS macbook pro"

I believe you already know your issue, but you are hoping for a less expensive option. The fact is, digital video takes a lot of computing power. My laptop is about 8 years old, and I get choppy playback with VLC. I can run the go pro edit software but it's very annoying because the computer is vastly underpowered. This is all recording 720@30. My new gopro black only does 720@60 so it's even worse now. I don't even bother recording in 1080p, because I can't do anything with it. That includes watching it.

Simple and free test, assuming you have a new phone and a wifi gopro. Just stream to your phone. My iPhone 5 plays the videos back perfect while streaming from the Black, so I know all of my playback issues come from my computer.
 
I have a 2008 MacBook Pro I do all my videos on. I agree Quicktime can sometimes be a pain in raw GoPro videos, but I edit everything in Final Cut Pro X and the resulting video plays ok in Quicktime. VLC is certainly a powerful video player though.
 
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