In the video below I will show you how to use the GoPro HERO9 Black as a webcam. Previously, I did a video on a HERO7 Black, but this one should be more straightforward and you don’t need a cam link.
So first of all, you will want to open the side panel and that’ll expose the battery, the memory card and the USB-C slot you need. I have a three-meter cable I bought separately, which I will use to connect it to the camlink.
So plug the smaller USB-C cable into the GO PRO and the other end into your computer. Then we are going to download some software from the GoPro website, and we should be able to use the GoPro as a webcam.
We don’t need to have a camlink, so that’s good. Okay, so you will have to jump on your computer and have your GoPro ready. Once plugged in then we’ll download the software. The next step is to turn the camera on and make sure your camera is up to date.
Okay, so it’s now on and it should say USB connected on the device. In this example, I’m using an M1 Mac, but it will work on the Intel Macs as well as on Windows. Webcam mode is only supported from HERO4 Black and above.
So basically, all you just need is your camera, USB-C cable, your computer, and obviously some sort of mounting option. I’ve got a cheap mount that I’ve connected it to with the lights, which kind of does the job. We’re going to download the webcam desktop utility, so let’s go ahead and download it here. Let’s go and download this utility. Okay, and then it’s saying I need to restart this, so I’ll be back in just a jiffy.
Once rebooted now, you should have an icon in the top corner. Then on the GoPro itself, it will say webcam. I think it is quite good quality what it is. You can change the settings.
You can create new profiles down below, but I’ve just used the standard one for now and modified it. So let me show you what settings I’ve used for a webcam. Okay. So what settings have I used?
I’ve got it set to 5k 30, so you might wanna change that. You want to set the lens, to linear rather than these are the wide ones. I think it looks best for a webcam. Turn hypersmooth off because that affects the webcam quality. Then, you will need to change the bit rate to high.
Okay, so the shutter speed, I put one over 60 and I set the ISO minimum and max to a hundred. If you have some LED lights, set the white balance to match the lights mine was 5000K. Next, you need to turn the sharpness down to low and then that’s pretty much it.
You can restore it once you tweaked them out, but I like that. So, and like below here, you can add yours under the profile. And then, once you’ve plugged it in, you should get good quality. Have a play around with the settings. So like the white balance, et cetera, to suit your environment.
This should work with Teams or Zoom or I haven’t tried it in OBS yet, but it should, in theory, work.