A1 Underwater test (sorry no footage)

Hi all,

Tested my A1 up at the cove today. First of all BLOODY HELL !! that was cold.

2.5oc We were in there for all of 25mins, Brrrrr... 1, lousy pike as well.

I was using my old Dive buddy plus with 'A1' wedged in with a sock which was a bit of an arse as it moved a few times. But I was happy with the first attempt.

I was at 6metres and using the outdoor W/B mode with the W/B shift on +2. Your going to have to trust me on this because at the moment I can only watch it through the flip out monitor but its promising. My blue water filter was to much for it, red washout, so it was straight through the .55 lens. which worked fine. As soon as I get some editing software sorted I'll report back. But as I said looks good at the first hurdle.

Cannot wait for a decent housing with access to more controls.

Viz was about 2-3metres.

Quick question:

Which editing software. Sony vegas or Premiere pro 1.5 / 2.0. I've never used Sony but have already got Premiere 6. Though I've heard Vegas is good.

Oh yeah looks pretty good on DVCAM mode as well.

Good bye to my old friend TRV950.

Dive safe

DeanB

Dean,

Glad to hear you had a chance to get some filming in with the A1. You're a braver man than I am. There's no way I'd allow anything as expensive as the A1 in contact with MY socks

I've started using Vegas 6. I'm happy with it so far. It looks like it will work well traveling with a notebook in conjuction with Gearshift. That will allow easy proxy editing so I can work with a normal SD data stream when using the slower machine and the Cineform intermediate codec on my desktop.

Part of my decision was price. I simply could not justify the price of Premiere.

I suggest Vegas.

Adobe Premier Pro can handle it, but experience, across multiple versions, is that it can be unreliable. Random crashes. It seems to work okay with AVI, but if trying to edit MPEG2, it became very unreliable. As the output from the capture will be a form of MPEG, I would not bet on no errors.

Hey, for once, the cheaper one is recommended.

Cheers guys,

I'm going to see if I can get a trial version of Vegas. There are a few peeps using it and saying its good for HDV.

I'm not into fancy stuff at the moment just basic fades and wipes etc and good colour filters are a must as you all well know.

They were clean socks bye the way . But I would recommend thick ones as the cam moved about a bit.

Just wired up the A1 to my T.V on the downvert / letterbox mode. Picture looks great. A bit green though but that can me sorted with a decent filter, Manual W/B or in post. Even the DVCAM rocks Also forgot to put it into 'Manual focus' so it kept 'searching' passing fish, bugger. Oh well.

Cheers again guys

Anymore info on Vegas would be cool.

Dive safe

DeanB

A warning on the trial download of Vegas: it does not support HDV. I think it has to do with a licensing issue on the MPEG2 codec. I think there are several products with the same issue. The full version does support HDV.

There is a pretty good forum here:

HDVINFO Vegas

The big problem with the HDV NLE's is that they don't do scene detection. You only have three options: Pay Cineform an arm and a leg, use HDVSplit and edit raw MPEG which has issues too, or use software based scene detection like in Nero which doesn't catch them all.

Otherwise you are cutting all your own scenes.

If I am not mistaken, Final Cut does scene detection.

Dean what housing did you order up for your A1??

Bite the bullet and go Mac/Final Cut Studio guys. I was so frustrated with the limitations of all the Windows packages that I converted last year. Never looked back.

Final Cut Pro eats HDV scene detection for breakfast, and the associated Studio applications are just awesome (Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, SoundTrack Pro, Motion, Live Type, Compressor etc ......) You can capture in most any format and output in most any format.

Of course I had to buy a Power Mac G5 Quad (four 2.5ghz chips!) and a bit of memory to fire up all this stuff, which is one of the reasons I bought an A1 and retrofitted my old 950 housing to save the cost of an FX1+housing etc. The fact that I'm a 70 pound weaking and wouldn't have be able to hand carry the camera+housing on a plane or an inflatable had nothing to do with it ....

Dean I strongly recommend Vegas.

I used Premiere 6 for 3 years and I much prefer Vegas now. Also it does do scene detection since the last version. In any case I still use Scenalyzer for capturing with scene detection but I don't know if it supports HDV. Probably does but check. Scenalyzer is great.

For basic editing Vegas is suberb. It's extremely reliable and tolerant of doing other stuff on the computer. Editing the timeline with auto-ripple on and auto-cross-fades on is a real pleasure. You can continue to edit, muck about, save, whatever and the timeline carries on playing, unlike Premiere 6.

The interface will take some getting used to after using Premiere. One thing I do miss is being able to set one thumbnail on the timeline to equal one second. I used to judge the lengths of my clips using that (e.g. 5 thumbnails = 5 seconds) but because Vegas has a continuously variable zoom of the timeline (like Premiere Pro) you never quite know what length of time you're looking at. To get around this i have moved the edit details (selected events) window to the top so I can see the length of the event as I edit it.

By the way zooming the Vegas timeline with the mouse wheel is fantastic. You will love that after Premiere 6.

I didn't like Premiere Pro mainly because I couldn't get my head around the way transitions work. It was most unintuitive for me. And of course it's more expensive. I got the Vegas + DVD Architect deal straight online from Sony and I thought it was a reasonable deal.

Nick

Dean I strongly recommend Vegas.

 

For basic editing Vegas is suberb.

+1

Propably the fastest NLE around, and without par for audio work. When I tried it 3 years ago, I immediately ditched Premiere (which was a bug fest then, don't know if it improved since) and never looked back; I never even finished what I was working on at the time, just put the Matrox+software on ebay and restarted the project from scratch in Vegas.

Cheers all,

Vegas is looking better and better...

Thought about Mac's but with upgrading everything else..I'm skint.

Mike: I haven't committed to any housing yet but the PRO EVO looks good. I'm happy with Amphibico so I'll probably stay with them.

Cheers again everyone. I'll keep you all updated.

Dive safe

DeanB

Mac G5, Final Cut Pro with an upgraded video card and the Gates housing which allows easy access to the one push assign button. Yippee!!!-Steve

You've got far toooo much money... Or at least did have..

Dive safe

DeanB

Hey everyone,

Not sure if this is the right topic for this but I noticed all the comments about video editting software and just thought I would give my two cents about Premiere Pro

I just upgraded to Adobe Production Studio. --Premiere Pro 2, Audition 2, Encore 2, After Affects7, photoshop CS2...

I love the software but it seems to be very unstable. Editting simple mini dv and I have been getting constant crashes and "unknown errors"

I love the new dynamic link, makes working between programs a dream, but all the crashes are really getting frustrating.

Dean I strongly recommend Vegas.

 

I used Premiere 6 for 3 years and I much prefer Vegas now. Also it does do scene detection since the last version. In any case I still use Scenalyzer for capturing with scene detection but I don't know if it supports HDV. Probably does but check. Scenalyzer is great.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Whoa, hold the bus. He's refering to the A1 camera which is HDV. Are you SURE it does scene detection on HDV?? Almost NOTHING does. If Vegas is still using the standard Cineform Aspect package then it won't.

Every package out there will do scene detection on Standard Def footage (including Vegas).