MISSION 1

Finally got my hands on the Mission 1 Pro + ND filter combo and was couldn't wait to try it out on my motorcycle ride. First impressions as follows: **The Mission is not** ***that*** **much bigger than the 13** I was pleasantly surprised to find the mission is basically the same height and thickness (not counting the additional lens protrusion) as the 13, and only slightly wider. The big upshot is that I did not have to adjust any of my quick release mounts (helmet chinbar, fuel tank etc) to accomodate the larger camera. I can hotswap the 13 and mission in all scenarios in which I use it, without needing to change the camera angle **The interface is much more snappy** Its a small quality of life change which I didn't think I would appreciate as much as I did (I was perfectly happy with the response on the 13). The camera boots up quicker, quikcapture works straight away, the interface is much more responsive to swipes and taps. I also love how quickly the camera charges up now compared to the 13. Its huge improvement overall to quality of life **The rear screen is gorgeous** I guess gopro is just catching up to the competition here but I really love the quality of the rear display and how representative it is of the final capture. I run mine at 30% brightness and it works great even in bright sunlight for basic framing and viewing of settings. The max brightness also seems much higher than the 13 **The elevated buttons are a godsend for gloved hands** If you ski or ride motorcycles, you will love how tactile and positive the button actuation is on the new model. It was pretty awful on the 13, I was never really sure if i pressed the record button properly and had to check my reflection (when it was mounted to my helmet) to ensure the camera was doing what i wanted it to. **The audio from the built in microphones is significantly better** The ambient pickup and overally sound quality has definitely improved. It also seems much more resistant to clipping (I did not try any other audio settings like 32 bit float, it was set to default). Having said that, the wind noise rejection does not seem a whole lot better. I think gopro has advanced a lot here but is still behind some of the competition when it comes to built in mic quality based on the youtube reviews I have seen **Battery Life is about equal to the 13 at 8K, and much better at 4K or less** I try to record at maximum quality whenever I can, so battery life at 8k Superview feels about the same compared to my 13 at 5.3K. You get about 70-80 minutes on both cameras at those settings which is good enough for me. Being able to charge back up to 80% very quickly on the Mission also helps mitigate battery anxiety. I haven't used it much at 4k but the battery life claims from Gopro seem accurate to me **In good light, the video quality is** **noticeably** **but not** ***significantly*** **better than the 13** The 13 was always the king when it came to good light footage and the mission was only able to sightly improve on it. The biggest differences in good light to me come from the additional dynamic range, you see less blown highlights and much more shadow detail), while in terms of colour you almost cannot tell then apart (which is what you would expect). Rejoice if you exclusively use your 13 in very good light, upgrading to the mission is strictly optional **Near focus distance issues are mostly overblown** Gopro claims minimum focus distance around 60cm. In real life first person POV use, the real number is much lower. Moving footage is far more forgiving of this limitation, with the camera mounted to my chinbar and interacting with objects as near as 30cm away, I am not noticing the nearby objects being out of focus at all. Sure, if you pause the video and zoom in, you will see it, but using it the way it was meant to be used, you are only losing about 10-20cm of actual in focus distance compared to the 13. The blurring of very nearby objects also for some reason doesn't appear as offensive as I thought it was, it almost looks like how a normal human eye perceives objects at such a close distance. But this is subjective and may not apply to you. **I like the new Sport Tone Mapping feature** I used this mode and compared it to Balanced on the regular video mode and I like what it does to the footage: 1 - Hypersmooth works much better when chin mounted and turning my head, before, it would kind of jerk a bit as Hypersmooth would try to cancel the first part of the head turn before realising I was turning my head and letting it turn the rest of the way, this was a slightly disconcerting effect to view on video. Using Sport appears to remove this and provides more natural turns in video 2 - It appears to add some tasteful amounts of contrast to the video which look good for POV footage. I was expecting it to make faces look terrible but when i tried it, it still looked decent (though Balanced made faces look better) , so there is no need to furiously change image settings if you happen to shoot someone's face in your Sport clips. I use Sport for the POV and Open Gate modes because those are my main motorcycle video modes, and Balanced everywhere else **Mission 1 Pro Motion Blur modes are top tier** The ND filters are awesome quality and I love the mirror finish on them. But do we really need an ND64 lens? LOL I love the 4 new motion blur settings (Cinematic High, Medium, Low, Adaptive and Off). You can really dial in the amount of motion blur that you want so easily compared to the 13 and especially the 12 and earlier. I have tried all of them and I am farily certain that High targets a 180 degree shutter angle but I am not sure about the rest. I found Cinematic Medium to be the best compromise between controlling jitter and giving nice creamy motion blur to moving footage but this will depend on your application. A very underrated feature the new mission has compared to the 13 is also a minimum iso of 25. When using ND filters, this is super useful! It allows the camera much more leeway to adjust exposure when any suboptimal ND filter is used, or when lighting conditions vary greatly. I have my iso range set to 25-800 and 99% of the time outdoors you can just throw an ND8 or ND16 on and you will get great footage. Do note that below 100iso you technically lose some dynamic range but the effect is not something i have noticed in normal use If you are a motion blue aficionado like I am, nothing else comes close **I now only use GoPro Labs firmware for the 64BT command** On my 13 I use to run commands to limit shutter angle, remove noise reduction, show shooting parameters and maximise single file sizes. Now I only use the last one. The rest of the commands are built into the regular firmware. Awesome!! Being able to record a single 45 minute clip without dealing with dozens of broken up files is an absolute godsend, its one of my favourite features. You will still need Labs to do it, but its quick, easy, and I have never lost a file in the many years I have been using this function **In lower lighting conditions, the quality difference to the 13 is astounding** I hate the idea of using action cams in low light like all the shilltubers tout as being such a critical feature but I cannot deny how good the camera is in such conditions. I have my denoise set to low on all modes, and at ISO 800, even in the darkest areas, I am seeing an almost perfectly clean image. This makes the camera perform basically optimally in any indoor environment. Before, if I needed to film something indoors, I would use my phone and accept the overprocessed look, now I can use the Mission and get something much nicer looking and cleaner. **Sorry, I still think Flat colour profile is the best** Feel free to disagree but I have always contended that gopro footage looks best out of camera in the flat colour profile. Any other mode simply adds too much contrast, crushes the blacks too much thus killing what little shadow detail remained, and turns skin tones red and I simply can't deal with that look. The Mission offers a new Cinematic colour mode which seems to split the difference between Natural and Flat. Well, sorry but I still don't like it as much. It's better than Natural, but still nowhere near as good as flat. Sorry not sorry **Medium Sharpening is the new Low** On all Hero cameras 13 and earlier, I considered using Low sharpening mandatory. Medium and above was simply too much unless you really like that crunchy digital fake detail look that the average Best Buy customer considers nice. You can add a little post sharpening to Low to improve it a little but Medium was WAY too much. With the Mission being marketed to more pro users, this is no longer the case. Low sharpening is now really soft. I no longer consider useful straight out of camera, you will need to add sharpening in post if you dont want it to look like mashed potatoes. If you want nice straight out of camera footage like I do (I hate editing videos), set your sharpening to medium (but please, no higher than that) **In case you haven't guessed, I really love this camera** I am really enjoying the Mission. Its so far ahead of the 13 which I already considered a near perfect action camera for my use case and being so much better than that really has me over the moon. I am also pleasantly surprised that the drawbacks such as the size and close focus distance did not disturb me anywhere near as much as I thought it would. Will take some time for me to accept how much it costs though Hope you enjoyed reading this and if you have any questions feel free to ask

I can assure you that in normal video use, you will not notice the difference in close focus distance or how sharp objects on the horizon are. The Mission footage will just look better than your Hero at all distances. This whole close focus thing is purely academic. Its the real world footage that counts and it looks great This was a major concern for me and having tested the camera and reviewed the footage, I now know there was absolutely nothing to worry about

Sharpening low on the mission is sharpening off. There is sharpening applied to low on the 11. You are not comparing apples to apples. I have extensively tested the 13 against the mission, i own them both. The mission on sharpening medium looks better than the 13 at all distances and all sharpness settings. There are plenty of videos on youtube you can watch to confirm this

That was a good question so I added it to the main post. My answer: I try to record at maximum quality whenever I can, so battery life at 8k Superview feels about the same compared to my 13 at 5.3K. You get about 70-80 minutes on both cameras at those settings which is good enough for me. Being able to charge back up to 80% very quickly on the Mission also helps mitigate battery anxiety. I haven't used it much at 4k (only in Low Light and subject tracking modes) but the battery life claims from Gopro seem accurate to me Edit: I put the Mission 1 Pro in my fridge at 8k open gate 30fps and i got 65mins footage from exactly 80% battery use. So a full charge should net about 80 mins runtime easily