Straightening A Crooked Video with GoPro Studio 2.01

Can I say how much I love this sucker! Why, yes, I can. I just rescued a botched video that I hung my head in shame and shoved into a external hard drive. It isn't great, it is barely tolerable but it does have a historical value to some folks.

For those that need to get up to speed; The very generous folks at Go Pro have a video editing software program for their line of action cameras. The software accepts mp4 videos and some forms of .avi. That is it. It doesn't even like .mov video.

You have to really understand that part, no mp4 or the right kind of avi and baby will not see it.

Okay, good.

But if you video does measure up you can import and very easily make corrections.

I hated the video because of the crooked table. Looking at that downward slope just ticked me off. I was hand holding the video. I must have been leaning on something for support. By all rights, that water pitcher should be rolling to the other side of the table.

Yikes! That plus the shakes of the video caused me to put it out to pasture.  Time marches on and I have a bunch of videos that, although they are not perfect, there is an interest in the people and the content.

So, what did Go Pro Studio do for me?
I shall tell you. Cuz I like you.

1. You can zoom into a photo to mask the shakes, other video editing programs can do that no big whoop but it was easy to slide to what I wanted. I didn't get rid of all of them but it is better than it was.
2. You can level a crooked video and see it in real time; there are a few video editing programs that can do this but not as easy as moving a slider. You can do it horizontally or vertically.
3. You can expand or contract the width of the video. I don't know why you'd want to but it was bone easy to do and undo. 

Wait, just thought of it. It isn't ethical but you could give a person a body tuck. You could squeeze a bit ....

Naw. Forget I said that.

You can also do color correction and some other tweaking.

So for unintentionally crooked videos this is a quick solution. It is not a problem free solution. I have to convert the video from AVCHD to mp4. Then I import the video into Go Pro Studio and it does its own conversion processes.

I do my tweaking and send it out a third time. I started out at 1080p and wind up with a soft 720p video. There are still shakes and there is nothing more I can do with it. After YouTube adds its compression juice I'm lucky it isn't totally pixilated.

Not really griping about this; these videos are historical markers and if I was the only person in the room with the camcorder then it works out. 

Besides, I gotta rack up my 10,000 hours of grunt work.

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