What I’ve been doing for the past month…
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Good rant 
And quite useful, as you’ll see in your YouTube comments.
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Hopefully, you don’t run into the same headaches as I did with action cameras
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I love my GoPro’s! which is why there are some GoPro-specific features in Shotcut. I rarely have freezing issues. Maybe it’s the SD cards I use. Yes, it does overheat when I am in the summer sun on long recordings while maxing out the features (res, fps, stabilization). Now, I stop and restart it more often.
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I just can’t take any chances anymore with once-in-a-lifetime shots, especially under water. The Osmo action never froze. Not even once in a whole month’s worth of recording. Extreme heat, under water, long recordings…never. It is just reliable.
Nice video. I’ve had a Gopro 7 for 3-4 years and by now I understand when it’s likely to freeze and what to do so I’m pretty happy most of the time.
Extreme heat and extreme cold is the only thing that actually make it freeze consistently but I have a workaround that works for me: I remove the battery and keep it connected directly to a power bank, this seems to work even at crazy -20*C while skiing or in the direct summer sun while biking but of course this can’t work underwater or while raining.
Besides temperature, one of the main freeze sources for me has been the oldest battery (I have 3 in total, each bought about 1 year apart), every time it drops under 30% the video recording corrupts after the first 20 - 30 seconds and the screen freezes in an off mode. As long as I remember not to use that battery at all and swap in a new 100% battery every time I want to make sure I record something, it’s been all good for me.
Personally, I don’t think the memory cards are [almost ever] to blame. Sure a knock-off fake “2TB” 3$ aliexpress card will definitely fail, but honestly, any standard/popular brand (samsung/kingston/sandisk etc) class 10 card WILL be able to sustain all the regular modes of the camera, I’ve had 5$ 32 GB cards that worked with no issues, right now I use a 20$ kingston 256GB class V30 card which at 30MB/s guaranteed write speed should be enough for all modes even on the latest cameras.
Keep in mind MB/s is different from bitrate Mb/s.
Looking at the latest Gopro 11 bitrate table, ALL standard modes max out at 60mbps (so a measly 7.5MB/s average, sure maybe it writes in bursts so peaks are higher but there’s plenty of leeway to average out). The High Bitrate and 10 bit modes peak out at 120mbps which is more than the standard cheap class10 cards can do, but way lower than the V30 cards ( 120mbps = 15MB/s average).
Btw Ben, one important thing apparently most people don’t know: the “gopro reset” you mention is actually not needed, pretty much all electronic devices have a “hard shut down” trigger which is to hold down the power button for about 10 or 15 seconds. For me this has 100% always worked no matter how weirdly frozen the camera was, maybe give it a try if you still have your gopro around, I really doubt that it’s been removed in the later gopro cameras
Oh, and if you can somehow still trade your action 3 for the 4, definitely do it, every single comparison of the 2 has been pretty clear in the favour of the 4.
I think the Gopro cameras have the best image quality, full stop. Even compared with the newest DJI action 4 which sadly lacks a bit in high dynamic range situations and is missing some fun features (how does dji not have GPS in the base camera yet??, also gyro data only in some modes and only since action 4).
But to also give a point to DJI, they absolutely destory Gopro in updates and fixes, sadly it’s very clear that gopro is doing a 2 month of updates for each new camera then only critical bugs are fixed, new features are reserved for the next year’s camera, while DJI actually updated the original osmo action even 2 years later.
Overall, I think the action cams have gotten quite a bit too expensive for my taste, I really hope I don’t lose my GP7 too soon as I don’t want to pay more than 250-300$ for an action cam, and currently in europe the GP11 and action 4 are close to 500$ sadly (yes, just the base camera package).
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Thanks, guys. I don’t know anything about this stuff, but I want to buy an action camera, so I followed along here. I just googled on “GoPro alternative” and got some interesting, very recent hits. This is the first one:
Seeing the official reviews of GoPro12 (wow, they removed the GPS??) now the choice is clear, go with whetever the better deal you can find between a DJI Action 4 vs GoPro 11.
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They found that removing GPS will extend battery life, so that’s how they came up with that new feature
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Just something I landed on recently that might be of interest regarding SSD cards:
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Well that’s just extreme 
also wow, I’d be really mad to lose data that way.
I do not know what you are doing but I have GoPro for underwater video since I got rid of my SLR dual strobe give cost of overweight luggage in 2016. I have had 5,6,7,10,11 and 12 and never had a problem. I did purchase the higher end SD cards. I have dove all over South Pacific and Caribbean (warm water never cold). Not sure what your problem is but my guess is your SD card and an overflowed buffer. I also have no idea what you were discuss about 8 minute clips. If I do a 1 hour dive I get a single clip and file that I process.
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