Nikon D800 Video Suggestions Wanted

Now that I have my D800 and Aquatica housing, I've planned its maiden voyage for December.

Does anybody have any suggestions for getting good video results?

I've been reading many of the general DSLR comments, and there seem to be many opinions about lights/no lights, red filter/no red filter, manual vs. auto white balance, etc. I'll probably try as many variations as I can manage.

I'd especially appreciate hearing from those who have taken D800 video underwater.

I use the Nikon 17-35 zoom for wide and either the 60 or 120 macro for close up. I do have two Sola 1200s for my video rig, but I'll need handle adapters if I plan lights. I don't have a red filter (and I'll need two, one for the macros and one for the wide), so I'll need those if I go that route.

My hope is that the no-light solution will work well enough. I usually dive with strobes for still work.

Thanks for any help you can provide. This will be my first DSLR video experience.

We experimented this summer with a video camera using a red filter and we got very nice results, but this may depend

also on the excellent viz we have here in Sardinia where we get 30 Meter viz and blue waters.

We have several video lights, 35W Fe-Mi HID, 4000 Lumen Mangrove LED and brand new Hartenberger 35W HID.

The FA-Mi HID are very concentrated and leave a hot spot, leaving the impression that they are more powerful.

The mangrove 4000 Lumen LED are very wide 120° and very bright, but on a sunny day they don't penetrate more than one Meter

because of their very wide, equal light spread.

The Hartenberger 35W HID just arrived yesterday and we just tried them on land and they seem brighter as the 4000 Lumen Mangrove Led,

but i belive that this depend on the more narrow beam.

Your Sola 1200 will work fine for Macro work or on night dives, but i fear that during day and clear waters they won't illuminate well

I did some quick tests with my D800 and video and my impression is that on wide angle best is to set the lens to her hyperfocal distance

and switch off the autofocus. Video cameras have a more sophisticated or better more appropiate autofocus while DSLR's have some problems

with focusing under water.

Chris

Chris:

Thanks. I'm hoping not to use lights at all if I can avoid it, unless I'm going down specifically for macro video and nothing else. I agree that the Solas will not do much for wide. And I plan to do mostly what the camera was meant to do and likely does best: take stills. What I will be interested in seeing is how much I can get away with if I am shooting wide (strobe arms attached) and something comes by that just begs for a bit of video.

My initial temptation is to just shoot without a filter or lights and see what I have to do in Final Cut Pro post-processing. I'm not sure a filter is the right answer, because I'm unsure what that will do to my still work.

In the end, I'll probably just stick with my housed Sony HD for vids and leave the D800 to stills. Just thought I'd post to see what others are doing.

We are using Canon 5dm2 17-40mm with red filter & manual white balance using sand/rubbles at almost every shot, which produces excellent result and no lights required. However I think if you intend to use it for video & photo combo, might be tricky as having the red filter will produce very red photos when taken with strobes. Of course you can always tweak it in post.. haven't tried it myself.

Definitely try the video with D800 and share it with us!

Yep, I think that's the problem with the red filter. Great video, but I'm not sure post production on stills will give me a decent result. You can do a lot with Photoshop, but . . . .

Well,

the red or orange filter works only reasonable on wide angle and ambient light on video and photo,

but you should limit it to use with video where the red filter works best.

The back draw is that you have to decide before closing the housing what to do; video or photos.

You can see it here, there are some parts where you can see the 2 Mangove LED Lights on, the rest is only a orange filter.

Chris

Chris:

My evolving thinking is, as you suggest in part,

1. To get decent video from the D800 wide, I probably need a red or orange filter.

2. With wide, I will have to decide beforehand whether I will do video or stills, since flash + red filter will be challenging to correct in Photoshop;

3. For macro, probably no filter needed. I will be using lights no matter what, stills or video.

Rich

If you want to simulate a red filter, just point at one and do a white balance on a neutral grey with red subtracted out (or point a pix of UW shot w/o filter, which should be pretty blue), then save it in white balance memory.