Hi Guys,
I've been diving for 20 years but in the last 10 I've started using underwater cameras. From the very beginning I've been always taking videos. Photos are just 2-3% of my trips.
I've been aways facinated by the moving image, the action underwater and wanted to show this to my friends, relatives... Even at this point I'm just piling up terabytes of ready naterial to my NAS waiting for.. I don't know yet.
Long story short - Sone RX100-1, than 3 than 7. One lost, the other still with me. Started with a Chinese plastic box, than Ikelite, than Nauticam.. I wasn't good enough with the technique so ended up selling everything and switching to Gopro. But I attached two keldans to the rig and I have some pretty good stuff from these years.
Fast forward - from 1 year I'm with Sony A1, the same keldans 8x, nice Nauticam housing, WACP2 and Atomos Ninja for getting raw video. At some point I discovered that raw video is piece of cake to be post produced that the regular MP4 coming out of the camera. With much better quality. Well, it takes a lot of postprocessing as you can imagine but having the right gear (powerful desktop and fast SSDs) it's relatively easy managing those enormous terabytes. When I finish I delete the uncompressed video and keep just the raw files from the Ninja.
At this point I'm really sick of sharks and I'm fascinated with the regular things underwater which are falling exactly into the range of EMWL. I'm in the process of acquiring this beast and also a tripod. Another challenge to be mastered 😎
My understanding is that video is far more mesmerizing than stills. Here come the challenge with shaking your underwater gear and I've researched how to pro's do it. So your camera needs to be completely neutral and also balanced in such way that if you leave it underwater not to dive or lift the nose! After that you need to frame and shoot. I'm almost at that point and if everything else is ok - white balance, exposure.. the result is astonishing with just a little touch in postproduction.
I'm supporting the above posts regarding how accessible now UW video gear is - Gopro, Insta, DJI, Divevolk, etc. and people are more and more using it. Hopefully they'll switch at some point to more professional gear but miniaturizing the gear is also on the list and at some point there is a contradiction between a gopro with case and 1 light and my Nauticam A1 housing with 2 keldans, long arms, big lens and a monitor 😅.
Maybe the future is again to have this wide separation between small gear and big pro production stuff. I've watched David Attenborough team somewhere on he Big barrier reef with Imax gear for a production. The gear was a truck load of suitcases and a team of nearly 10 people! And with the quality that the modern phones and action cameras are bringing this separation will continue in my view. Just a handful of us will be stick somewhere in the middle.