GoPro Hero Max
360 ACTION CAMS HAVE COME A LONG WAY SINCE GOPRO’S FUSION, BUT IS THE TECHNOLOGY ADVANCED ENOUGH TO MAKE THE MAX A COMPELLING REPLACEMENT?
GOPRO’S HERO 8 Black sucks up a lot of the air around action cameras, but its new Max 360 action camera is arguably a much bigger upgrade with a more novel feature set. Like its predecessor, the GoPro Fusion, Max uses two 180-degree fisheye lenses to capture everything in its direct line of sight. The Max however, is the first to stitch these two hemispherical video files together automatically into a single 5.6K video file, which is a massive time saver. What’s perhaps even more impressive is that the updated app allows you to edit and publish spherical media from start to finish entirely on a smartphone.
The app update’s major ticket is the inclusion of GoPro’s OverCapture reframing software which can crop your 360-degree video into a 2D format, giving you the ability to retroactively track, frame, zoom, pan and tilt towards anything captured in the spherical video. This means that if you’re happy for videos to be rendered in FullHD then you can simply press record on the camera and forget about shot composition or framing until you are ready to edit. This novel shooting process expands the types of shots media professionals will be able to create and it’s a feature that is particularly well suited to an action camera – since it saves you from worrying about getting everything in shot and lets you focus on what you’re doing.
The GoPro team is keen to point out that the Max has a lot of the new features seen on the Hero 8 Black, but that the Max pushes these a little further. These include greater HyperSmooth digital stabilisation, bigger 360-degree TimeWarp time lapse sequences and wider SuperView shooting formats which are all distinguished form the Hero 8 Black’s features by an additional ‘Max’ prefix on each.
Max also gets decent 16ft (5m) water resistance, inbuilt retractable mounting fingers and is now compact enough to be compatible with GoPro’s entire range of mounting solutions.
To round out the top-line features, the Max has a new six-microphone audio array that captures true three-dimensional audio. The additional microphones also provide additional audio information that can be used by the camera to cancel out background noise and hone in on the sound you want. In practice this is great for isolating voices through wind and giving 3D sound, but the overall quality wasn’t as good as the Hero 8 Black.
The Max even offers the same quality 1080p live streaming capabilities of the Gopro Hero 8 Black, which is a unique bonus for any professional action junkies. Unfortunately, the avant garde spirit of the Max can cut the other way at times, with parts of the app feeling far less polished than the Hero 8 Black and far fewer shooting modes than we’d like. For the most part the automatic on-camera stitching is well lined up, with artifacting only occurring at the mounting point.
Admittedly the GoPro Max isn’t great at 2D footage, so don’t throw out your Hero shooter just yet, but this action cam totally changes 360-video form a quaint immersive medium that required a lot of post processing to something that is an easy-to-use ‘must have’ for anyone wanting to make their action camera footage more versatile and engaging.