GoPro reveals what the GPS in the Hero5 Black camera is for
If you ever wanted to prove just how fast, how high or how far you went -- now you can.
- More than two decades experience writing about PCs and accessories, and 15 years writing about cameras of all kinds.
GoPro just unlocked the hidden potential of the Hero5 camera's GPS data.
As of today, you can download its Quik for Desktop software for playing, editing and sharing your videos, and it will transform that data into telemetry gauges you can overlay onto your clips.
It's simple to use, too: Just record your video with the GPS turned on and connected to satellites and the camera starts collecting information for GPS path, speed, altitude, g-force and elevation gain. Import your clips into Quik and you'll see a little gauge icon when you playback a video.
Quik lets you select what data you want to overlay.
From there you can select just what info you want to display on top of your clips. There's an Info Cluster that gives you date and time, distance in kilometers or miles, altitude and elevation gain; a speedometer and speed graph (the latter comes in handy for tagging high-speed highlights); GPS path; and g-force. All of them can be resized and placed anywhere on your clip.
GoPro's site has all the details, but I did a quick test of it and, like I said earlier, it's simple to use. Having the GPS on will cut into the battery life some, which should be expected but is still something to keep in mind. Also, after you turn on the GPS, you'll want to make sure you're locked onto some satellites before you start recording. That seems like a given, but I still managed to record several clips thinking it would lock quickly after I started moving and missed out on data because of it.
You can check out the clip below to get an idea of what it will do, but it's definitely a nice addition and makes paying extra for the Hero5 Black more worthwhile for sure.