Diving Palau, Micronesia with Canon 5D III & ML Raw

I've always wanted to try the Canon 5D III with Magic Lantern underwater. In theory I felt shooting in raw would be more beneficial underwater than on land given the issues with accurate white balance and loss of light with every increment of depth. Unfortunately the post workflow is tedious and time consuming. I think once you get the hang of it, it will get faster and to me it was worth it.

Below were the results and my workflow in post.

Workflow:

Canon set to raw module and not MLV (need the speed of CF and not the sound)

Clips check and marked in/out thru MLV raw viewer

Lightroom/Capture one for correction and enhancements and exported 8-bit tiff

Compressor to convert to ProRes 422

FCPX for video editing

Motion for text

Compressor to convert for upload

Wow looking at that workflow, that's a lot of jumping around. Have you thought of using Resolve or Premiere Pro CC? Both can edit natively (Well PPCC needs to have the .raw file converted to CDNG) and Resolve has awesome coloring tools. PPCC works well with its coloring tools, but definitely the tools aren't as detailed or flexible as Resolve.

Hey Drew,

You're absolutely right! There is a lot of bouncing around in my workflow and Davinci resolve is one of if not the best video colorist software I've run into. I do believe that you can save yourself a lot of time using Davinci. As for adobe, never tried it and would probably take the davinci route if it came to that. The thing about DR is unless you get the paid version you will not be able to reduce noise. Capture One IMO has an unmatched WB corrector which is vital for my underwater shots. Not even lightroom comes close ... IMHO.

I will begin to work more on davinci to see if i can perfect that method of processes, to cut my post editing time. But when I compare my end results using my current workflow vs davinci (to the best of my abilities) I find that the final product looks much better with my current method. With that said, I'm not ruling out DR since its potential is great. It's a work in progress.

Nice! Did you solely use AF for all the wide angle or did you use any MF?

Hey Bill,

Thanks for your post!

I mainly used AF on the wide angle shots. There is an option on ML that allows the use of follow focus which worked very well in the raw shots, but AF alone did a great job. As for the macro, it suffered greatly and thus will be getting the proper gears for any further shooting in macro. I couldn't afford everything before that trip (even crab and electric scallop were shot thru a dome port) but my following purchases will be in regards to that, with the proper flat port and manual gear.

Thanks so much for the quick response. I am scared of ML. I have only one camera body and I am fearful that something will go awry. I like the idea of a follow focus. Were you using that from 3:50 to 4:14 in your video? Everything remains crisp there and you don't suffer from the AF "focus hunt" and whirring sound I have lamented so! I just bought a manual focus gear for my Macro lens/port but to do the same for my wide angle would be yet another $750. Ugh!! What an expensive passion to have.

Hey Bill!

My apologies to this delayed reply.

I actually did not use follow focus on that shot. I kept using as large of an F-Stop as possible on shots when I remembered and this made focusing easier. In macro I presume this would be a different issue. But with the wide angle shots I was aiming to use f-11 - F13 since higher made it too dark. This enabled be to cover a larger area in focus without needing follow focus.

ML was a program i tried to get to know very well before my first dive with it since certain things can go wrong and you should always aim to stay below the max limits of the software. I tested my cam on the max strains i believed i needed underwater and it was successful for every dive but one (a night dive) where i tried something without going thru my safety steps for it. But again, without ML I would have had so much less footage to show since it saved so many of my shots.