The new Hypersmooth feature in the latest GoPro Hero 7 Black has been praised a lot, and to be honest, I was skeptical. I mean, from past experience, GoPro’s digital stabilization has the tendency to make shaky FPV videos look even worse! How good can HyperSmooth be?
Shocked!
I am completely blown away by HyperSmooth after my maiden flight! It can produce butter smooth videos even from a shaky drone.
It works so well without any effort, it almost feels like cheating! Seriously, I really don’t see why you would want to buy ReelSteady anymore (a video stabilizer for video editor). It’s that good!
This is probably the secret weapon of many top pilots :) It’s new era where noob pilots can make professional looking FPV videos :)
Further Reading: HD Camera for Racing Drones.
Where to Buy GoPro Hero 7 Black
- Amazon (US): https://amzn.to/2TZekNb
- Amazon (UK): https://amzn.to/2JsXPVP
If you already have the Hero 7, make sure to get some Temper Glass protector for it.
Testing
Let me show you a quick video how well it worked.
The quad is a 7″ rig I built the last few days. The video you are watching, is the maiden flight. I didn’t know how good or bad the quad was going to perform. No tuning, all the filters and PID were left at stock (except I changed the rates).
The quad had some bad vibrations, and the 20MPH gusts didn’t help either. You can clearly see it has some jello in the footage, the vibration was even noticeably in my FPV feed.
I thought, why not give HyperSmooth a try and see how it deals with jello in FPV videos? Mind blown as I was going through the footage!
I mean, it makes it look like a really well tuned quad. I have heard lots of good things, but seeing how well this works with my own eyes amazes me even more.
Acrobatics like flips and rolls look natural, I really can’t tell digital stabilization was used.
HyperSmooth comes with a downside however, it crops the image by about 5%, according to GoPro. It’s not much, but noticeable. It’s not that bad if you use Superview.
7 comments
Hi Oscar.
for Today (Aug 2020), What do you think about “I really don’t see why you would want to buy ReelSteady anymore”?
Is it still correct or for Today ReelSteady with GoPro 6 or 8 better than GoPro 7 in terms of Stabilization?
Thank you so much.
Torpong P.
Reelsteady offers more flexibility while Hypersmoooth is more effortless as it’s automatically done inside the camera.
Depends on how you use the camera, to use the camera as it is, Hero 7 is a pretty good choice. But for DIY projects like Naked GoPro I still prefer Hero 6 + Reelsteady.
Can anyone tell me how to hook the Gopro Hero 7 black up as the FPV camera? The latency is not an issue. I just need to know how to hook the sub c to the a video Tx
You can’t, it has no AV out.
What about latency?
I see some bad news about large latency ( 2 to 3 seconds) hypersmooth causes.
community.gopro.com/t5/Cameras/Gopro-Hero-7-Black-HDMI-output-delay/td-p/253823
It doesn’t matter, you are using it for recording, not as an FPV camera.
Hi Oscar, yes, everyone was blown away when seeing hypersmooth footage for the first time. I would say it’s innovation rather than cheating and innovation is what we want. I also slightly disagree on your statement with reelsteady. Reelseady still have it’s place in certain situations. Sometimes when risking, flying long distance in difficult terrain when you are afraid to loose your quad, you can put cheap session5 on your quad instead of expensive hero7 and then stabilize the footage in reelsteady. Also another case could be a micro quad when you want to reduce the weight as much as you can. And yet again, putting session5 which weight about 20-30g less and stabilize in post-processing phase might be a good option.