The new GoPro Hero5 Black, released last month, is the California company’s first action cam with built-in GPS. At launch, you couldn’t use it for anything more than geotagging photos, which…lame. With an update last week to GoPro’s , you can finally overlay some of that telemetry data—things like speed, a traced GPS path, altitude, etc.—over your footage.
Other options include G-force, elevation gain, distance traveled, and a speed graph. You can choose to enable these gauges individually, and each can then be moved around and resized. What’s currently available looks good and is easy to read, but it must be said that Garmin and Sony both offer far more options in terms of fields and styles to choose from. GoPro is playing catch-up here. It will work only with the Hero5 Black, as it’s currently the only GoPro camera that has GPS.
To add these overlays onto your video, go into the Quik for Desktop app, select an individual clip, add the overlays to it, and adjust them as you like. You must then save that as a new clip, and then you can pull sections from that new clip into your edit. It’s a bit cumbersome—it would be nice to be able to add, remove, or tweak the gauges while you’re in the edit screen—but it’s definitely nice to have the option to add these.
Some things don’t always translate to video, so it’s nice to be able to show exactly how quickly you got down the line on that wave, how steep that snowboard run was, or how many Gs you pulled on that mountain bike run. GoPro says it’s looking at adding overlays to the Quik mobile app as well but can’t yet confirm a date. Until then, you’ll have to geek out on your desktop about your now-quantifiable shredding.