After giving you the ability to shoot photos and videos while jumping out of planes, surfing or skiing, GoPro is now making it super easy for you to share videos and photos from your GoPro Hero 3 near-instantly using its new app.
Available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, the app will allow you to preview and download photos and videos from your GoPro action cam to your smartphone or tablet using Wi-Fi.
From there, it is as simple as sharing or uploading like you would with any pictures or video taken on your phone.
Speaking to TechRadar, Rick Loughery, GoPro's Global Director of Communications said: "We want to use the mobile phone as a companion, we don't want to compete with it."
"The way we look as it is, there's capture, create, share and manage. The camera is all about capture, the create and share is what we're doing with the app. So the app we really look at as instant gratification."
Instant gratification
Using Wi-Fi to connect to the camera, you can not only download your videos and photos straight to your device, but you can also control settings and take snaps remotely.
"The app provides a really intuitive way to look at all your shots… a pretty intuitive way to move around the camera [settings]," said Loughery.
"It's very much 'here's where I'm at right now' type of deal," he told us while demonstrating just how quickly the files are transferred from the camera onto your device so that you can then upload it onto Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or however else you want to share with friends and family.
"And so, boom. It's there, it's downloaded. That is what the app is about… that instant gratification."
While the ability to pull videos and photos are only available on Android and iOS, the app on Windows phone lets you access the rest of the features, including checking your camera's battery levels and remaining card capacity.
But the main focus with the app is to make it easier to share.
"That's the goal – make it quick for someone. Like a good recipe to make some fun, share-able content," Loughery said.
"Our biggest marketers are our customers. They're out there tagging their videos: 'check out my GoPro shot' or 'check out my GoPro video'… we want to keep fueling that fire."
The Studio
To help make GoPro content share-able, the company will soon also be releasing a new video editing software as an update of its old GoPro Studio program.
"You've got a lot of people that can use Windows Movie Maker, Final Cut, iMovie, but then you have a lot of people that we heard from that were like, 'This Windows Movie Maker and iMovie is still kind of too much, I just want something basic, something easy'," Loughery said.
It's a simple program that will let you drag and drop your videos into the software where you will then be able to cut the length of videos, stitch a number of videos together, add filters, text and some transitions.
Loughery added that a key feature of the new software will be GoPro video templates.
"One of things we hear [from customers] is, 'We love your videos, but I don't have any skills and I'd love to make GoPro-style videos'. So we did templates."
You can start with a blank template for a basic edit, or pick one of the available official GoPro videos as a template to place your clips into.
Each template provides a description of each cut, as well as timing and points of edit into which you just replace all the targets with your own video clips. It then matches the video clips to the cadence of the song and automatically adjusts the speed. You can also add text, filters or your own transitions.
App vs. software
The software will also allow you to take screenshots from your video, giving you photos at 5MP. If the video is recorded in 4K, then the screenshot will be 8MP.
GoPro will be looking into getting some basic photo editing functions into the software, but currently, the software is focused on video.
"I think honestly, what we'll end up doing with photo, we might put some tools in there, but you'll see more updates in the app to give you more tools on that," Loughery said, adding that they may even add a tool for mini stitches on the app for photos.
The problem with cheap
When we asked Rick about the Kogan action cam, which has similar specifications as a GoPro, but costs only $119, he said that the quality of the components used could affect performance in the long run.
"If it's at a low price point, you've got to look at what the quality is, the design of it, the number of accessories. That's really something that has differentiated us from other competitors over the years," he said.
"Competition is a good thing, but right now, I'm not too worried about it."
The GoPro App is out now, while GoPro Studio will release in beta in early August.
