GoPro Mission 1 Pro Review - 12 things you NEED to know

Over the past few years, there has been a massive debate on what the best action camera out there is. To be honest with you, it was getting pretty close, but GoPro just released the brand new mission one pro. And the question is, is it still a close battle? Is this actually better than everything else on the market? Or is this camera just all hype? That's what I'm going to answer in this video. And I'm going to be covering the top 12 things you need to know about the brand new mission one pro let's do it. Okay. Before we get into things, if you guys could do me a massive favor and just hit the like button, it genuinely helps out the channel so much. And as a reward, I will be putting a photo of an adorable Lama at the end of this video. At the end, I'm also going to be giving you guys a discount code. If you do end up wanting to buy this camera. All right, let's move on. In addition to releasing the mission one pro GoPro, also announced the mission one pro ILS. Unfortunately, I can't release any footage shot on this for now, but I am incredibly excited about this thing. And I'm definitely going to have a lot more videos about it going forward. So make sure you're subscribed if you don't want to miss those. So it has been a year and a half since GoPro released the hero 13. They broke the release a camera every single year cycle. And I'm honestly really happy about that. They actually let the engineering determine the release date instead of the other way around, which in my opinion is really the way to do it. I just got back from a trip with GoPro in Morocco, got a chance to test this thing out a ton and was super surprised. All right, let's cover the basics of this camera first, starting with the physical parts of it. I know all you FPV pilots are out there wondering what the weight is. So I got a scale right here. I'm going to quickly test it. Starting off with the hero 13, we have 160 grams. All right. Now switching over to the mission. One pro is 207 grams. And in all my testing flying this on FPV, you can still absolutely rip. You can do super technical movements. You can fly freestyle and even fly it on smaller quads like cinema loops. All right. Another physical difference here that you are going to notice is that this thing has bigger physical buttons. So we've got the record button there. And then the mode button on this side, as someone who rides motorcycles a lot and I mount it on my chin, it is actually so nice to have the physical buttons cause you can actually feel when you're pressing it, especially if you have gloves on on other cameras, you kind of can tell, but it's not as easy. Also for anyone who is a diver out there, I do a lot of free diving and the hero 13 and all previous GoPros were rated to 10 meters, which is about 30 feet. And the reason for that wasn't ever because this camera can't go down deeper. It was because the pressure would push these buttons in making it impossible to use because they're just always pressed. The mission one pro is rated to 20 meters now, which is about 60 feet. And that is a huge improvement because you don't need to have a housing to go pretty deep. The mounting is also the same as the last camera. So you actually have a quarter 20 here. You have the GoPro fingers and if you have a GoPro quick release mount, boom, you can just lock it on and you're good to go. I cannot tell you how nice this is for FPV and honestly motorcycling too. Okay, let's move inside this camera and talk about what's going on and talk about why they were able to fit so many insane specs into this thing. First off, probably the biggest upgrade here is the upgrade from GP two to GP three. That's basically like the whole board inside. They've been working on this for years and it basically unlocks all these crazy specs that I'm about to talk about. You can even notice this when just turning the camera on. So I'm going to press the on button at the exact same time as the hero 13 and you can check it out. All right, I'm going to just turn both these on mission. One pro here are 13, three, two, one. It just turns on instantly. All right, let's talk about the sensor. This camera now has a full one inch sensor can shoot up to eight K 30 open gate at four by three. It's a bigger sensor, which means bigger pixel size, which means it's also going to be better in low light. The whole open gate thing is kind of funny because it's kind of a new term that companies have just used as like a marketing thing. But you know what else had open gate the hero 11 the hero 12 and the hero 13 there just wasn't really a term for it back then. Got to love marketing. Now this camera has a four by three sensor, so that means no more eight by seven shooting. If you're not familiar, GoPros like the hero 13 had a eight by seven inch sensor, which basically is kind of a square aspect ratio. It was really nice, especially for FPV because you could shoot one clip and crop it either vertically or horizontally. I was a bit worried about this having a four by three sensor just because I post videos on Instagram and YouTube and I love just being able to confidently post vertical and horizontal. But after testing the four by three out, honestly, it still looks great and I'm not going to miss eight by seven as much as I thought I would. Also because it's shooting in eight K, even when you crop vertically, it's still giving you a super high resolution. The mission one also has the widest field of view of any action camera on the market. The hero 13 had 156 degrees. The Osmo action six has 155 and this has 159. So you're just going to be getting this super wide field of view. All right, next up, let's talk about frame rates. The frame rates on this camera are actually mind blowing. In addition to eight K 30 at a four by three crop, you can also shoot eight K 60 at 16 by nine. Again, shooting in eight K allows you to crop and reframe your footage without losing that quality. Here's a quick chart that kind of explains the difference between 10 80 4k and eight K. And as you can see, you're basically getting four times the resolution of four K. This thing also shoots absolutely insane slow-mo and it's probably my favorite thing to mess around with. You can shoot a 10 second slow-mo burst at 10 80 960 frames per second. By the way, this is real 960 frames per second. None of the like AI frame blending that some other cameras do before this camera, you had to buy like a free flight Ember to get those frame rates. While the nine 60 is a 10 80, it still looks really good. We are shooting at nine 60. You don't get access to the 10 bit color that other frame rates and resolutions have, but the results, especially after a nice little color grade still look really good. And as a slow-mo addict, I just can't explain how fun it is to play around with. Like I said, if you're shooting a nine 60, you don't get that 10 bit log that other color modes do, but you do get it when you shoot at four K two 40, the four K two 40 is continuous. It's not like a burst mode or anything. So a great use case for this is on an FPV drone is genuinely become my new favorite mode. And I used it a ton when we were in Morocco, while we were out in Morocco, we went on a horse ride out to the beach and I was able to chase one of the tour guides on the beach. And I shot the whole thing at two 40. And I genuinely cannot believe how good it looks. As you can see here in this shot, I'm kind of far away in the beginning and it still looks really good. And then when I come in closer to the horse, I can swap to two 40 and it just looks so smooth and so cinematic at two 40 frames per second. You can only shoot in 16 by nine, but you can shoot four K one 20 at four thirds and use that full sensor. All right. So getting into color modes now. So you still have the same modes that you do before. So you can shoot in natural vivid or flat, but you also have this new mode called cinematic, which I'm going to explain here in a second, as well as GP log two, everyone does things slightly different here, but in the past I've always just used the natural GoPro color. I just kind of liked the look of it and it just cut down on my editing time in post. A lot of people swear by shooting in flat, but I think a lot of people are now going to switch to this cinematic mode with this new cinematic mode. They basically kind of just made something in between natural and flat, which makes it a little bit less contrasty, but still has nice color. They also turned down a lot of the digital sharpness that is kind of like a hallmark of action cameras. If you know what you're looking at, you can kind of tell something is shot on an action camera just because it's usually over sharpened. But in this mode they turn that way down and just made it look more like a cinema camera. By the way, if you are interested in color grading your footage exactly like you just saw here, I sell a pack of four super simple Lutz that you just lay on top of your footage and it just gives it that cinematic look link is in the description below. All right, next up let's talk photos because this camera now shoots 50 megapixel raw photos. Again, similar to a lot of the other stuff that I saw about this camera. I just couldn't believe how good the photos looked. My friend Emmett was also with us in Morocco and took some amazing photos while we were out there. He usually shoots on these super expensive rigs and even he just couldn't believe how good the photos looked. Here's a couple more photos that he took while we were out there. One thing to note about the 50 megapixel photos though is the buffer time is pretty significant. So if you take a photo, your camera is going to say processing for quite a while. It does get kind of annoying if you're trying to snap a bunch of photos really quick, but I do hope that's something that gets sped up in the future. Alrighty, let's talk dynamic range. This camera shoots up to 14 stops of dynamic range. That is up one stop from the Hero 13. It's up half a stop from the Osmo Action 6 and actually pretty comparable to something like the FX3 that shoots 15. Here's a side by side comparison. I took using the GoPro Hero 13 and the Mission One Pro while we were walking in the markets of Marrakesh. Hero 13 is on the right and Mission One Pro is on the left. Both of these are shot at 4k. You might be wondering why I'm only shooting at 4k 30 on the Mission One instead of 8k 30 and the reason for that is a really cool technology that the Mission One has called pixel grouping. When you down res from 8k to 4k, basically what it does is group sets of four pixels together and each pixel in that group shoots at slightly different exposures, effectively giving you HDR. It is incredibly slick and for shots like this where it's dark in some parts and super bright and others, the difference is huge. The 8k does still have really solid dynamic range, but it's better at 4k. And there's a few little hidden tips and tricks as far as settings go with this camera that I am going to be sharing in a future video. So again, make sure you're subscribed if you don't want to miss out on that. Okay, so let's talk about low light performance because that is a huge discussion right now. In the past, one of the biggest downfalls of cameras like the Hero 13 has been its performance in low light, especially when you compare this to cameras like the Osmo Action 6. So I was very curious to see and very hopeful that this camera had good low light. I can talk specs here all day, but instead I just want to show you an example that I'm going to shoot right here and I'm going to be comparing it to the Hero 13. So as you can see here, I'm slowly lowering the amount of light in the room and it's actually pretty obvious it is a huge improvement. This means we'll be able to shoot far past sunset and at night and the results are going to be solid. A really good example of how good the low light on this camera is is a video that my friend Chris took while they were in South Korea and he actually shot this at 4k 120, which actually makes it more difficult to look good in low light, but it still looks so good. I also am going to be doing more in depth testing with this camera against the Osmo Action 6. So I'm curious to see the side by side of that. All right, let's wrap up here talking about the battery life. The Mission One has the best battery life of any action camera on the market. One cool thing that GoPro added in this camera is an energy saver mode. Basically it just down raises everything to 1080 at 24 frames per second and I haven't personally tested this, but I've seen a ton of other YouTubers test this and they've gotten pretty close to five hours on that mode. Here's a little runtime chart from GoPro directly. Usually these charts are tested in absolutely perfect conditions and the real world performance is usually about 10% less than any of the companies say on paper, but even at some of these higher frame rates and resolutions, you're still getting amazing battery life. All right, so is this camera all hype or is this going to be my new go-to action camera? If it wasn't clear from basically everything that I've talked about throughout this entire video, this is without a doubt the best action camera on the market. The specs and sample footage really just speak for themselves. With that said, this is a little bit pricier than other cameras on the market, but in my opinion, it's well worth it to have the best quality footage possible. And to be honest, I'm kind of surprised they were able to keep this camera as cheap as they were. If you are interested in picking one of these cameras up, there's a link down in the description below where you can get 10% off and you can use that for anything on GoPro's website. It would mean a ton to me if you're already going to pick up this camera, if you use that link, because I just get a slight kickback and it just helps me make more videos like this. If you have any more questions that I didn't cover in this video, feel free to drop them in the comments, but thank you so much for watching. And if you are someone who did like this video earlier, there's going to be an adorable photo of a llama in about 10 seconds. All right. See you guys on the next one. Peace.