GoPro recently released an update for their iOS and Android App, so once you update your camera’s firmware you now have access to a live preview of what you’re filming and, best of all, you can play back or transfer files via WiFi to your phone or tablet.
Here’s the launch video:
As always there’s a bit of a long procedure to endure when updating your GoPro (especially if you’re still using a GoPro hero 2 and WiFi bac pack like me), but once that’s done you can link up to your phone or tablet easily, I’ve done it with my Nexus 7 Android tablet and it works well, there’s still a delay of a couple of seconds on the live preview but it runs smooth enough.
The best bit is that now I can review the footage from a session on the tablet or my phone without having to worry about cables or anything else, this will make it easier to grab stills and share them quickly, and allow interested parties to watch the footage much more quickly than before.
I could have used it recently when on a shoot during which I had the GoPro filming whilst I took stills under water, I could have passed the tablet to the director on the beach who could get a good idea of the angle I was shooting with the fisheye underwater by looking at the gopro videos in between takes, I doubt the WiFi would get far underwater so a live preview would be out for this example, but reviewing the files is a great use of the WiFi BacPac and would probably prompt me to buy one if I hadn’t already invested.
One Caveat is that it doesn’t work with really high resolution or bitrate files, so because I use ProTune mode for video I have to transfer the file back to the tablet before I can play it back, this is an easy process but might mean that I start to avoid using ProTune in this type of situation.