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Adding Telemetry Gauges to GoPro Video
(one boater's comments in late 2020)
I have a GoPro Hero 7. If you have GPS turned on with your GoPro - your GoPro will store its gps data in your video files. The GoPro app (now called “legacy app” by GoPro probably because they don't intend to support it) that allows you to show various displays and gauges for data in the videos is Quik. In general you need to turn on any data display/gauge you are interested in before you do any other editing of the original GoPro videos, because editing will often discard the GPS data attached to the GoPro video files. (Editors that import video don't typically edit the originals so you won't lose the data that way - it's only editing the original mp4 files that will lose the data). I have only used the desktop version of Quik because among other things video editing/mods with a phone seems absurd to me. I guess some kind of canned modifications with a phone for output to social media might be reasonable but that's not my interest. (Editor's note 4/2022 - using the GoPro mobile app may be the only up-to-date way that GoPro currently provides for adding gauges - Quik reportedly doesn't work for Hero 8 and even though GoPro considers Quik for desktops to be “legacy” software they have not provided anything newer for non-mobile editing - which personally seems almost bizarre to me, although as a programmer I am somewhat familiar with how hardware companies under budget or neglect software support).
You can still download Quik for desktops from GoPro. Unfortunately there have been all kinds of problems with the Hero 8 and gauge enabling.
There are 3rd party programs that can be used to enable gauges (that probably also work with the Hero 8) - I have gone down this route before, in part because Quik is lousy software with all kinds of bugs, but the alternatives I have used are not a piece of cake to use either (making copies of the original videos is a good precaution if you wind up experimenting with all of this). If you have a Hero 8 we can talk about what you might do to enable gauges. If you have a previous Hero model and want to use Quik - I have a few suggestions about how to avoid some of its annoyances.
To elaborate a little further - what Quik does is to take the GPS data attached to a GoPro video file (if GPS was turned on) and reprocesses the video adding a video overlay that displays the data via a gauge or graph in sync with the visual display. I suspect that most other consumer cameras do something similar if they can (tack on data to video files). It would not make much sense to require most affordable video cameras to do extra processing in real time to add such gauges to their videos as they are being recorded. Adding gauges really should be a post recording process. Maybe when we have even more affordable, faster processors in video cameras that will change, but the increase in processing power will have to come faster than their increase in resolution, etc.
Okay - when you get around to trying Quik don't be surprised if it sucks somewhat.
Basic procedure once you have found and opened the video in question for viewing within Quik (Quik can also perform firmware updates for older GoPros I believe):
1) open the gauge control and turn on display of any gauges you want
2) create a “clip” - the initial default is to use the whole video in question and to create a new file with a “-1” added to the old file name. You can choose part of the video file to create a clip but I recommend you do as little work within Quik as possible - just add the gauge to your whole files and do any editing you want with different software - almost any video editor should be better than Quik. You could create clips with and without the gauges as you might be inclined - the decision to use Quik this way might be reasonable if you are using hardware on the limited side, otherwise you should be able to achieve the same purpose with your video editing software and minimize running into potential issues trying to use Quik.
Adding gauges takes a bit of time for the processing to work - the older your computer probably the longer it will take. I upgraded my 6 yr. old laptop recently - as much as anything so video processing could be faster and I would be able to use some video editing software that my old laptop can't run without driving me crazy.
The video on the GoPro has a limit in file size so longer videos are broken into multiple files in the camera storage. Depending on the resolution you have your camera set at these files will represent more or less run time. I have my camera set at less than maximum resolution because I don't really need the highest rez and the camera battery lasts longer at lower rez. (You will probably notice that your camera battery also does not last as long with GPS turned on)
You can stitch those videos together with video editing software - but I recommend cutting one file at a time to get the parts that you want before you add additional files because everything can be slower and more cumbersome if you load all of your video up at once. You can even edit each file as a separate project, output a video from each, then combine them into one video - this can be helpful when your processor and/or memory has problems working on more video at once.
Most if not all video editors just record metadata/editing information in their project files. So they typically have to reload the source video files into memory whenever you reload your project - which can be slow with slower computers. One side benefit that I noticed from the way it is done - I have edited some videos where I did not turn the gauges on, but I later went back and added the gauges, renamed the original mp4 files and gave the file versions with gauges the original mp4 file names and my video editor project I had already created now loaded the with-gauge versions just fine and I could output the same video as before only now with gauges added - I did not have to re-edit everything. (of course the originals did have to have the GPS info - I didn't even realize that my GPS was turned on all along)
My experience with Quik for Windows is that I can only run it a couple of times before I have to reboot to get it to run again. It has some kind of memory leak/lingering background processes that get screwed up apparently. Happened with my old computer and still happens with my new one.
