Filming POV Skiing Footage
I film with a GoPro Hero 13 Black and the ultra-wide angle lens mod. I use GoPro Labs to activate true integer frame rates, which lets me record in real 60 frames per second and makes working with overlays much easier. I shoot in 4K with a square aspect ratio and stabilization enabled.
I mount the GoPro on the front of my helmet, angled slightly downward. I've tried several mount points, and it results in the best POV perspective by far. While skiing, your head remains quietly fixed down-slope more so than any other part of your body, so this helps a lot with natural stabilization. This means the in-camera GoPro stabilization doesn't have to work as hard either, resulting in higher quality footage.
Once I'm done for the day, I return home and upload the files to my computer with an SD card reader and move into the overlay stage.
Generating The Video Overlays
I use three overlay types in the finished videos: an audio visualizer, GPS speed and altitude overlays, and a trail difficulty overlay.
// Audio Visualizer
First, I extract the audio from the footage I want to use and upload it to tuneform.com. From there, I use the oscilloscope visualizer template to create a visualizer from that audio, then download the finished video.
// GPS Speed And Altitude
For the GoPro GPS telemetry overlays, I use Shred Scopes. Specifically, I use the speed and altitude templates from the black diamond collection. I have a couple custom templates set up which contain each of those built-in templates pre-placed in both a vertical (4k 9:16) frame and a desktop (4k 16:9) frame. I then use the Shred Scopes batch mode exporter to render out overlay videos with transparent backgrounds for each of the GoPro clips I film during a session.
// Trail Difficulty
The trail difficulty overlay is custom. I created the audio effects in Ableton Live, designed the trail difficulty icons in Photoshop, and combined everything in Adobe Premiere Pro. I now have finished overlay videos ready for each difficulty level, including green, blue, black, double black, and extreme terrain.
Bringing All The Components Together
I use either DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro to composite the layers into one final video. The main GoPro footage becomes the base layer, then I place the GPS overlays and audio visualizer at the top of the frame.
I then sync the trail difficulty overlay to the moment I click my poles together. At this point, the video is ready for export.
The GoPro captures good enough footage that I do not usually need to color correct the POV footage. I create both a vertical version for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, plus a 16:9 version for YouTube. This is the reason I like filming in a square format: it gives me flexibility to drop the footage into differently sized sequences without major cropping or repositioning tweaks.
Exporting The Final Video
For export, I use the highest bitrate I can, keep the video in 4K, and encode it as an H.264 MP4 file. That keeps the finished video easy to upload to my accounts without having to deal with video format issues.
I also make sure that I don't accidentally double up any audio layers, as the Tuneform visualizer exports with the audio track on it. I'll mute this track and leave the one from the original GoPro footage, so the audio doesn't clip and distort on export.
The audio from the trail difficulty overlay is typically not loud enough to make the output distort, but just in case, I place iZotope's Ozone Maximizer on the output master track to ensure the final exported audio never clips.