Getting The Best Ski Footage - Gopro Max?

[bojans]

Last year I made a concerted effort to get really good video of my son skiing for coaching purposes. I tried a number of different things including a DJI gimble mounted to a skidoc orbit with an iphone 11 pro using the follow me feature in the DJI software. This worked really well, no shake when slack came out of the rope, the skier was always in the middle of the frame but DJI has not updated the software for multiple lens phones, I could only film in 1x zoom and the skier was a little too far away at 15' off.

 

I settled on a Gopro 8 mounted to the skidoc with a 12" extension to get a better line of sight on the skier. Video is smooth enough but if I used the narrowest field of view to get a good, fairly zoomed in picture, he would ski out of frame a few times a set. In a wider field of view it was too zoomed out making it more difficult to see the details.

 

Is anyone using a Gopro Max to film skiers from the boat? My understanding is with the 360 degree filming you can later reframe and zoom in on a subject. If my understanding is correct, this would allow smooth video where I can select the zoom and the skier would never be out of frame (even without the ski doc). I am tempted to order one of these to try it out but wanted to see if anyone has any experience.