(Yet another) Raja Ampat video - with 5Dmk2

Hello Everybody,

Here is a video I recently finished of Raja Ampat portion of this years Indonesian dive trip (dove from MV Pindito). Shot with Canon 5Dmk2 ("old" 1.0.4 firmware), ambient light only. Ikelite housing, Canon 24mm and 50mm primes. "Learning goal" for this "excercise" was to achieve a fairly constant and pleasing color of water throughout the video. Hence, most scenes are adjusted in post (Premiere CS4) for brightness, contrast, whitebalance and black/white levels. Its pretty clear though that nothing beats getting it as right as possible UW. Some scenes maybe turned little too saturated...at least on some non-color managed monitors! And some corner softness is evident in some scenes... Well - must have something to work on in the future!

Hope You like it.

- Mikko -

Fantastic.

I think I have to change my opinion that DLSR's are not ready for underwater video.

Congratulations Mikko! Outstanding. Loved the message too. Very well done. I could see too how hard it was to hold the camera steady for the closeup shots. Did you WB during the dives or set it at a known setting and fix it in post?

Lots to love in this,

Steve

Ronscuba, Steve,

Thank You!!! I hold your comments in very high regard! :D

Steve,

Pretty much all scenes on video were manually WBd underwater individually for each shot. There are couple of scenes on the video that have received heavier WB "treatment" in post though (5:34, 6:36). Its my experience that if the WB for the shot is way off the mark, there just isn't enough dynamic range left to do miracles. Or at least its quite a bit of work to "revive" the clip and make it colorwise match clips that were more properly WBd underwater.

For WB, in tropics I use pair of gloves with gray/white(ish) palm side and usually WB against that. Works well for wide angle, slightly tougher with longer lenses. I have found this approach to be generally more convenient than carrying white slate with me. Or alternatively I just use something white(ish) that I can find nearby (a buddy with white tank is sometimes very helpful!).

Thanks partner,

White glove, what a great idea! Why didn't I think of that?

Cheers,

Steve

Very nice Mikko, well done!

You did a great job blending the color from scene to scene. Surprised at the quality you achieved, you did a great job!

Stunning!! I like the color very much. Did you do any manual WB?

Looks great!

Great piece, well done. The start of "section 2" seemed a little overexposed to my eye, but just a very minor thing.

Hi Mikko

Just a few more questions.. What did you have your focus set as? Were you refocusing for each shot or did you have a setting that worked best for WA etc.

I'm about take my 7D underwater so appreciate the input.

Cheers, Simon

nice, well done!

I like the theme and the music.

I am surprised of the quality of the camera, but using a still camera to shoot video is shakking that is for sure, and i think you are a good diver i see you try to controll the shaking so much as possible, but a still camera and housing is just not made for shooting video (without tripod).

Great work there.

The cameras put out great quality that's for sure but I'm with Brumpy.

Wobble wobble is no good and most shots will be wide plus tracking tight moving in&out subjects on the fly impossible.

Hello All,

Tonywu, RickM, kkfok, NWDiver, Insomniac982, Brumpy, Wagsy: Thank You! Appreciate it.

Steve, In the interest of full disclosure, picked the idea of white gloves from my GF; she wears a super thin white latex glove over her dry glove here in Cal! Works remarkably well.

NWDiver, You are right about the overexposure! I suppose I wanted to show the "Boo windows" (3:56) and the turtle slightly too much on the video.

SimonSpear, I personally have found using the "Live AF with face detection" auto focus mode to suit me best. Admittedly its slow(ish), but for me seems to produce better / more predictable results than Quick AF, and Live AF (dont ask why FD variant works better for me ). I have found trying to manually focus the lenses be too much of a pain UW. I would be curious to hear if anyone has found manually focusing UW working well for them? With the introduction of latest 5D2 firmware, I have moved to pretty much shooting in fully manual mode (M). E.g. I control aperture, shutter speed and set ISO (=="gain") to auto to allow camera to adjust for varying lightning conditions. Then I play with my shutter / f-stops so that I get the ISO that is not too noisy. I like this because it gives me good control over depth of field, and prevents camera going nuts with shutter speeds when ramping aperture to e.g. 2.8 (e.g. you dont usually need 1/1000 second shutter speeds with video; 1/60 will do often just fine) while allowing camera to compensate with ISO to differnet lightning conditions. I pretty much re-focus for each shot - its tricky at first, but having shot still cameras when they still manually focused and being no stranger to the concept of hyperfocal distance, I have found it fairly easy under most circumstances to find something to focus agains which will keep what ever Im shooting withing sharp range. Of course by looking the video here, you could argue that its not always right on the mark either! ;-) I hope this was helpful!

Brumpy, Wagsy, I totally agree with you that still camera housings are far from optimal for video! I know I would place an order immediately if someone would come up with housing for 5d2 which would have stability of more classic video housings, bring many of the controls to the handles, and have an external monitor! Not having follow focus I can deal with! To this end I was pestering all video / still housing manufacturers preps in LA scuba show couple of weeks back on their plans to create video housings for DSLRs. It may have been my accent but seemed like I was talking greek to most of them! There was one that said that they had built video housing for 5d2 and it was going UW for first tests pretty much when the show was taking place; the guy didnt know any more than that though. And never sent me any more info either. I suppose I have to find his card from somewhere and ask the status!

Cheers!!

Heading off to Big Sur in couple of weeks to do some diving (and maybe video) there!