14Dec GoPro Hero 3 app, not much of a selling point
The first thing you’ll notice about this photograph is that i’m not holding a camera in the “live view” screen display. That’s because there is so much delay between what the camera is seeing and what the tablet is displaying that I was easily able to photograph the tablet before the screen caught up with the action. This feature might be good for framing a shot but that’s about the extent of it. Also note the extreme waste of space on screen. Selections could have easily been place above or bellow the screen allowing for a larger viewing frame.
You’ll notice that the screen says “preview not supported”. That’s because the live view feature is not available if the camera is recording at 4k and 2.7k, this screen also showed up a few times when trying to record at 1080p. You do however get full preview until you hit the record button, which is better then nothing I guess.
If you want to use 4k or 2.7k modes you’ll have to set them up on the gopro itself. The 4k and 2.7k modes are missing from the selection screen, as well as some of the other supported sizes and frame rates. Also when you try to press the 1080-30 selector at least on my device it would jump back to 960-48 as soon as the menu closed.
I’ve tested this out on my phone which had even more bugs. It looks like the GoPro app is half baked at best, the promo videos seem to promise a lot of features but as of right now you’d probably be better off buying the touch screen or using the hdmi output. Hopefully this is just a beta release. The Hero 3 black edition has a lot of great features, but this is not one of them.
December 14th, 2012 at 9:24 pm
FYI – All functionality seems to work on the iPhone 4, but there’s still a 5 second lag at 2.7k, so kindof useless. That’s okay, on my handheld slider rig, I flip the iPhone toward my kids and play a Netflix cartoon. Deer in the headlights. Works like a charm.
December 14th, 2012 at 9:46 pm
All I have are android devices.
December 14th, 2012 at 10:37 pm
New update for the android app is out now. 2.7k and other settings work now. Also almost fullscreen preview and looks like the delay is reduced. But no preview when recording.
December 15th, 2012 at 1:15 am
Loving your coverage of the Hero 3 Deejay. Thanks mate.
December 15th, 2012 at 9:56 am
Good info… I think these may be temporary bugs for the first release. Generally GoPro seems on top of things, but this app may have gotten away from them time-wise, and they needed to get something out for Christmas sales. If you look at the quality of the Hero3 line, they obviously have their stuff together. Hopefully, an update will be forthcoming to resolve these issues.
That said, do you think there may be bandwidth issues for the live previews of the higher res images?
December 15th, 2012 at 11:00 am
Bandwidth does play a roll in lag. Basically they transcode the video to a compressed format on one side, send it to your device then transcode for playback. The transcoding time is probably one of the biggest part of the lag. However companies like teradek are getting lag in the millisecond range over wifi compared to the 5 or 6 seconds of lag on the hero 3. So there is room for improvement.
An update to the app was released last night so I will be testing it out today and let you know if they’ve made any improvements.
December 26th, 2012 at 9:58 am
I’ve just put a WiFi back on my Hero 2 with updated soft/firmware throughout. It is still very laggy.
The (almost) live view is very useful on a smart phone though (I use an iPhone 4) as you can at least frame up the shot and decide which zoom level to go with. All of this was very hit an miss previously.
Once framed up, swap the control off the smart phone onto the remote button and you that then switch on and off at will.
January 2nd, 2013 at 8:28 am
Even with the delay I still find the iPhone version of the app very useful. It’s incredibly easy and quick to switch settings (vs. pressing those 2 buttons over and over on the GoPro). Of course the LCD back makes it a bit easier to switch settings too. It would be nice to have a live preview, but I didn’t expect much more out of a $400 camera that already does alot.
September 13th, 2013 at 4:10 am
I agree with Axilrod ,
I use this app(v 2.0) with iPhone and it works perfectly
fucking amazing camera.