My 9 year son is keen to shoot and edit his own movies and I am keen to encourage this. Sensing an opportunity here to have use of one for SUP and KiteSurfing, would a GoPro be suitable for "normal" (non-sporting) videocam use or would it be too clunky (esp. for young hands)? Also, the images produced have a slight "fish eye" effect (IMHO), I think, to increase the depth of focus. Can this be overridden?

Many thanks for any input,

Cheers.

Having read your other posts, I was hoping you would reply . Thanks for the informative post and the clip was great! Yeah, I figured the lack of zoom would actually be a plus in his case.

Hope you don't mind me piggy-backing another question. What editing suite would you recommend for a kid? Ease-of-use would be favoured over sophistication of features. Many people recommend one of the Sony Vegas products. What do you think?

Cheers again.

i am on a mac - something like imovie would work well.

For PC - there are tons of basic editors out there - do a go pro search to see if any of them will work with the file format.

Be aware that you will have to transcode to an intermediate format (google it if this doesnt sound familiar) if you wish to do anything other than basic cuts with the footage - as the very technology that makes the file sizes so small also hamstrings you when you are trying to play out rendered footage in real time.

The compression is too much for the computer to be able to deal with quickly once its had color grades / speed changes etc applied.

Great - thanks for all the posts, some useful advice there.