New HC7 Footage

Got back from a long weekend diving in Anilao, Philippines and finally got a chance to try my Gates housed HC7 in clearer waters and with a lot more interesting subjects! Got a lot footage to review but I've quickly slapped together a short 2 min preview video. Really shows the good and bad side of the HC7 from crisp well lit shots to struggling to manually white balance in deep low light. Footage is a mix of ambient light and a single 21W HID light. I found myself keeping the cam control button set to manual exposure to prevent the camera from over exposing and really cranking up the gain... Downside was it was just too much of a hassle (or I just didn't have the patience) to set manual focus and then get back to manual exp. Overall, HC7 focuses pretty well with decent lighting though I did suffer from the focus hunting here and there. The turtle, crocodile fish, and lionfish clips show how bad it can get with low light and improper white balancing! (I'm still a noob on color corrections, etc in the NLE's). I used the Sony Handycam capture utility to download the native M2T files, then used premiere pro 2.0 and edited in 1080iHD. Output to a mpeg2 file and then converted to a divx file with high quality settings. 2min video is about 43mb...

One note on the white balance control... It might need a stronger spring as it kept engaging at around 25m and deeper... But with little light at that depth, the HC7 really struggled to set a good white balance. Wasted a lot of good footage (forgot to recharge the HID battery and got stuck without light on a few late afternoon dives).

Enjoy... criticism welcomed... switching over from still to video has been a blast but oh so frustrating and time consuming !!! Thank god I went ahead and upgraded my PC...

I still don't know how you pros can keep your housing so still for those macro shots!

http://stage6.divx.com/user/pakman00/video...ne-2007-Preview

edit: grr, seems the stage6 site is down for the time being... try later... hopefully it should be back up shortly...

Pakman that was a nice little short, I enjoyed that. And the HC7 does appear to take pretty good underwater video! I reaally like the quality of the colour on the white balanced shots.

Wow that was super-washed-out green on that first underwater shot before you white balanced. Looked like my old TRV40 footage. I noticed some focus problems such as one of those nudibranchs but I'm sure you'll soon get over that and the steadiness is not too bad at all. We could all make our shooting steadier.

Next time try uploading a 960x540 video to Stage6. The Stage6 audience is looking for high quality, so if they're paying the bandwidth bill then why not make it really big and clear.

thanks for the tips Nick... I'm still getting used to the constant white balancing!!! TRV40 footage! ouch! lol...

I'm liking stage6 more n more despite their recent outages! Hopefully when I have time this weekend, I'll try to polish that short video up and upload it in higher resolution. Some of the nudi shots looked stunning in full HD on a widescreen.

Is that the backing track from "Many Rivers To Cross"?

Is that the backing track from "Many Rivers To Cross"?

yes it is Nick...

Any luck with finding the best setting for the divx decoder for 960x540 resolutions? Does Vegas have a built-in divx decoder?

You mean encoder? Yes, finally cracked it.

Vegas will not encode DivX directly with a good quality MP3 stream any more so you have to use other methods. Also Vegas will not open a DivX any more, just the audio part.

I am using the Debugmode Framserver to frameserve a full interlaced uncompressed AVI from Vegas to VirtualDub.

In VirtualDub I'm deinterlacing using the "discard field 2" method and resizing to 960x540 using the Lanczos 3 method.

For compression I'm using Lame MP3 at 44,100khz and 160kbps for the audio and for the video Xvid at 2500kbps, 1 pass, with a DX50 fourCC (from "other options").

My Myanmar Magic video on Stage6 is by an older method. Not quite so sharp and bigger bitrate. The next three hopefully up shortly will be by this newer method.

If any of that needs further explanation just ask!

oops, yes I meant encode...

I've been having no luck getting Premiere Pro 2 to export directly to a divx file (just getting some nasty garbled output), so I've been rendering and outputing to mpg2 at 1080i resolutions. Previously, I was trying Canopus Procoder to then convert into divx.

I've started playing around with the Dr. Divx utility and the newer Divx 6.6 encoder with a little more success in getting resizing to 960x540, deinterlacing, 2 pass at fixed bitrate, and getting slightly better file sizes. Seems at 4000kbps, it looks good but going down to 3,000-3,500 - I'm starting to see some artifacts in the background so I'll have to double check my divx encoding settings. Wondering if I should output uncompressed AVI from Premiere Pro first.

I was looking at your Myanmar Magic and thought that looked stunning. Can't wait to see more of your work up there, Nick.

My trouble with the DivX Converter and Dr DivX is that they forced into 960x544 lines (multiples of 16), so my hard work in dropping every other line to give a perfect progressive image goes to waste. If you do the DivX encoding in VirtualDub you can make it exactly 960x540.

You can try an uncompressed AVI but that'll be a whopping file. I've tried that a few times and I get a more stable workflow by frameserving to VirtualDub, thereby avoiding the enormous file. You can use the Debugmode Frameserver to do that. Brilliant program. Make sure your project settings are full HDV before you frameserve (but match the frequency of your input audio, probably 44100khz not 48000khz so it's not conferting up and back down again).

Yeah I still get some artifacts at 2500kbps but you've got to draw the line somewhere. If you go to high you'll really limit the number of views. Let's face it, it's a s**tload better than YouTube

My trouble now is that my files seem to be forever "processing" on the Stage6 site. Getting quite frustrated with it.

My trouble with the DivX Converter and Dr DivX is that they forced into 960x544 lines (multiples of 16), so my hard work in dropping every other line to give a perfect progressive image goes to waste. If you do the DivX encoding in VirtualDub you can make it exactly 960x540.

 

You can try an uncompressed AVI but that'll be a whopping file. I've tried that a few times and I get a more stable workflow by frameserving to VirtualDub, thereby avoiding the enormous file. You can use the Debugmode Frameserver to do that. Brilliant program. Make sure your project settings are full HDV before you frameserve (but match the frequency of your input audio, probably 44100khz not 48000khz so it's not conferting up and back down again).

 

Yeah I still get some artifacts at 2500kbps but you've got to draw the line somewhere. If you go to high you'll really limit the number of views. Let's face it, it's a s**tload better than YouTube

 

My trouble now is that my files seem to be forever "processing" on the Stage6 site. Getting quite frustrated with it.

I'd heard of debugmode... I'll look into that... Somewhat familiar with virtualdub as I had used that ages ago.

No kidding about uploaded videos getting stuck in "processing" on stage 6. I gave up on try to upload a 960x544 resized video.... Been stuck at processing for the past 24hrs... Looking thru the stage6 forums, it might be a sign that there was a problem uploading the file... But I've tried re-uploading that file a number of times... grrr...

I've emailed them about my processing problems. There's definitely a gremlin in their works at the moment.