I have a brand new Hero 8 that I have only shot maybe 30 minutes of video with. Tonight I decided to test the battery usage, which may be an issue in it's own. I was using 4k 60fps wide, boost on, high bitrate, protune settings auto w/ gopro color on and sharpness medium. GPS and wifi were off, and screen brightness was down around 40%. I was using the provided battery and a 32gb SanDisk Extreme microsdxc that I ordered off the GoPro website with the camera.
I started at 37% battery and recorded about 14:25 of video. I believe I ended up between 18% and 20% battery life, which means the GoPro was using well over a percentage of battery for every minute spent recording. However, the real issue came when I stopped recording. The camera immediately began to bug out- by this I mean almost freezing, the regular display (not playback) seemed to only grab a frame every second or so, freezing for a second after this one frame. I could not pull up recorded videos or really press anything on the screen- it was all but frozen. At this point, I decided to power off the GoPro; however, upon pushing the power button, nothing appeared to happen until I finally released. The camera powered down when I did this, but there was no "shutting off" screen, no beeps, it just went black.
When I powered it back on a minute or so later, everything seemed fine until I went to watch the video I recorded. All but the first 32 seconds were completely gone- it showed as if I had recorded a 32 second video then stopped.
What happened here? Is my product defective? I am extremely disappointed with this seemingly immediate failure of the device... I'm lucky I wasn't actually recording something I wanted. Additionally, is this battery usage normal? Once I powered it back on, I started recording again when it was at 11% battery and recorded for 5 minutes. At this point, the battery hit 4% and the camera shutdown due to "low battery". That means 1.4 percent of battery per minute of recording, and an automatic shutdown within seconds of hitting 4%. Is any of this normal?
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Unrelated q - does anyone believe there to actually be a significant difference between the SanDisk Extreme, Extreme Plus, and Extreme Pro? It sounds like the Extreme Plus isn't even being produced anymore, but regardless, I know that the MAX write speeds get better as the cards get better. However, from what I've read the MIN write speeds stay at 30, and for video (especially 4k, but I'd imagine video in general) a flat rate is required instead of a short spike to a higher rate (say for burst photos), so these 3 tiers of cards will essentially perform the same when shooting video on the Hero 8. I do acknowledge that the Pro has a slightly faster read speed, but I don't care much about this as it doesn't seem to affect the camera's actual performance in the slightest. Thoughts?
