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At first glance, the Hero 11 seems like an exceptionally incremental update to the Hero 10 Black. It is physically absolutely identical in literally every way except the side says “11” instead of “10”.
On one hand, that’s a good thing. If you have accessories like the Media Mod or the Max Lens Mod for the Hero 9 or Hero 10, it still works on this one.
On the other hand, it gives you the impression that this isn’t much of an upgrade over the previous gen. But there’s one feature that is definitely worth the upgrade, at least to me.
The Hero 11 has a new, larger sensor that enables you to shoot in 8:7 aspect ratio. What you get from that is basically a tall square:
Here’s the 8:7 footage straight from the camera:
Why is this cool at all? Well, because the 8:7 video gives you 5312 x 4648 pixels, which is big enough to punch out a 4k 9:16 portrait orientation video for social media:
And it looks good too since it’s not a crop of a normal widescreen video. All the pixels are there just like you intentionally shot it in 9:16 portrait mode.
But wait! There’s more! There’s enough pixels there to ALSO crop out a 16:9 standard widescreen video too, with no loss of quality.
16:9 widescreen video, also in full 4k resolution
So basically, you can just shoot one weird square video and get both a 16:9 widescreen video for youtube and a 9:16 portrait orientation video to post on instagram or tiktok or twitter or whatever, both in full 4k resolution. This is a huge time-saver if you’re constantly posting stuff that you want to post in both orientations. It’s built right into the GoPro app too. Just open a video, tap the pencil icon to edit, and then select “Frame” to pick from all the different aspect ratios and crops. Pretty rad stuff.
