Katie Kilbride shows off the new GoPro Hero4 Black and Silver Music Edition camera at Winter NAMM 2015.
Music Connect: Hey guys! We’re Music Connection here at winter NAMM 2015 with GoPro. We’re going to do a quick little demonstration of the GoPro 4, and then I’ll ask a couple questions at the end, alright? Take it away.
Katie Kilbride: Yeah! So we’re here at NAMM showcase with the new Hero4 Music Edition. There’s both the silver and black. This is the silver. This has an integrated LCD screen on the back so you can kind of see what your camera sees. It’s all by touch here, get into all your modes, photo, video. This price points at $399.
Then we step up to the black, the black shoots at 4K for 30 frames per second. So more geared towards the professional market, wouldn’t want to use it for bigger more cinematic shots but uh the HERO4 still shoots really great quality as well um. They’re both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled, so you’re able to connect it to your GoPro app on your phone. So you can take photos right from your camera to your phone and then share it out with your family and friends.
Some cool parts about the Music Edition here is all mounts made for music. So what we have going on in the jam room over there: All the cameras are connected to the instruments with the various mounts. There are removable adhesive mounts, which attach to a guitar, or there’s a mic stand mount that can then face the singer or out to the audience. There are also clamp mounts that can attach to drum sets or keyboards—really trying to capture all the members of the band.
Another cool feature is the new low-lamp capabilities and night photos and night labs. With that you can shoot in lower settings that are a little bit darker, so if you’re in an indoor arena, some place that’s dark at night, a performance going on inside a studio, you can still capture really great photo and video. So I think that’s the biggest highlighting stuff for all the music people out there.
MC: So as far as sound capability goes, I don’t know if you’ve changed the sound for the music edition or if it’s any different from before, so can we touch base a little bit on that?
Kilbride: Sure! Compared to the [Hero]3+, the dynamic range has been improved two times the amount, so the internal microphone has definitely been improved since the previous editions of the camera. There’s also an external microphone jack here—little mini HDMI—you can plug in three and a half millimeter external microphone, and then that’ll be your adapter where you can plug in anything else on the end.
MC: Awesome. And I know that when people think of the GoPro they tend to think of more extreme sports, bungee jumping stuff like that. What inspired you guys to take on the music side of things?
Kilbride: Definitely our core will always be in action sports—surfing, snowboarding—where the camera concept was initially born, but music we found is a place where a lot of people are using the cameras to capture their experience, whether it’s the artist experience or the fan experience. And I think our goal is to change how music is seen and experienced.
So really allowing you to [put] the cameras in places a big camera couldn’t go. You can set up multiple cameras on the stage. Life on tour you can put them all over your tour bus if you wanted. Also the fan experience taking our GoPro three-way pole mount into the festivals: A lot of festival-goers are capturing their festival experience that way. So we just feel like you could be at home, you could be a 7-year-old with a garage band that you want to play, or really large mainstream artists are using the camera.
MC: How is the music edition going to be available? Because I know with the GoPro3 and the 4 it’s available in Radio Shacks, Best Buy, on the Internet…Is the Music Edition also going to be as widely available?
Kilbride: The Music Edition will be sold at Guitar Centers, Sweetwater, your main music retail shops, as well as on GoPro.com online.
MC: For my last question to get you back to what you were doing and showcasing all this really awesome GoPro stuff out there, with the mounts and everything, what is the coolest way you’ve seen it used since you’ve released it?
Kilbride: For music?
MC: Yeah, the way that it’s been mounted. The coolest video or the coolest way you’ve seen it used.
Kilbride: I would say just watching these guys in here [the showroom]. The coolest way is having all these cameras rigged up and hardwired into the TVs, and even outside at the NAMM stage, it allows people that are really at the back to really get in right into the keys, right into the drums, and see what the artist is doing.
Some edits that our team’s done…we were with Tony Royster Jr. (he’s JayZ’s drummer) [and] we did a full-edit with him and that was really awesome. We also went on tour with the Weekend. He sold out the O2 arena in London, and so we were there to capture all that. But you should stay tuned for this year. We’re going to have some really incredible moments coming out of different festivals and different projects that we’re doing.
MC: Awesome, so keep a watch on GoPro’s Twitter, Facebook…
Kilbride: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, yeah. We also have a YouTube channel. There’s actually a music playlist within that so you can see all the cool music videos that we’ve put up all shot 100% on GoPro.
