Video-Newbie questions

Hi and thanks in advance for your help!

I am looking to get deeper into underwater videography and have some questions. I have logged around 200 dives, mostly in south-east-asia. I had a GoPro back then, because I was backpacking and did not want afford and travel with a large underwater housing. Last year I took a long diving cruise through Thailand and brought a GoPro 10 and red filters, but disliked it alot, because it cannot focus and because of the low-light image quality (Example Video, underwater from 2:45). At the same time, I am spoiled by my main camera, a Canon R6 with RF 15-35, F2.8 RF 24-105 F4, EF 35 F1.4, RF 85 F1.2, EF 100 2.8 Macro.

I sold the GoPro and I am going two weeks diving in Italy this year. Now I have to make the decision: Do I buy a housing for my R6 or do I buy a smaller, cheaper housing and camera just for the underwater stuff. Realistically, I will only go diving once a year for a week, with exeptions where I will go on dedicated diving holidays.

I looked into the Seafrog-housing because they aren't too expensive. I understand that a dome is good for UW lenses,  but can I also use a dome (i.e. the 6") for medium focal lengthes and macro? I don't really want to bring multiple ports, is it then better to use a flat port or dome?

How many video lights would you recommend for a beginner like me? Can I get away with zero lights because of the large lens apertures? Or do you use large F-stopps for depth of field all the time and because of the sun's red-light-fading anyway?

I am afraid I will go full overkill with a large housing, but I think it would be also sad to not use the Camera stuff I already have. Maybe someone experienced can give me an opinion on that. In total I don't want to spend more than 1500€ (in the beginning ).

Thank you for your expertise!

Armin

As far as SeaFrogs housings go, this is one of the better ones, with good placement of controls, and better than average lens support. You can use your 15-35mm for wide-angle, 24-105mm for fish portraits, and EF 100mm for macro. The 8-inch dome is on the small side for full-frame cameras, but it's perfectly serviceable as long as you're not looking for pinpoint sharpness across the whole frame. I wouldn't bother with the six-inch dome - it's decent on crop-sensor cameras, but too small for full-frame. A weakness of this solution is that there is no fisheye lens support (i.e. EF 8-15mm f/4), but since you're shooting video, this is less of an issue.

If you go forward with it, I highly recommend getting a Vivid Leak Sentinel vacuum system - they make a version that is compatible with SeaFrogs housings, and it works much better than SeaFrogs' own VPS-100.

As far as lights go, SUPE/Scubalamp and DivePro are popular mid-market choices.

Just because you own a camera doesn't automatically make it the best choice to house and take UW.  Full frame certainly involves more expense to take UW and everything is bigger.

Likewise just because a camera ticks the video box , doesn't mean it is ideal to take UW video.  You should look into the fine print on how it achieves various video formats, for example it might take a crop from the main sensor to achieve a number of video formats, which might be OK on land but it really a limitation UW.  So you need to read the fine print.  Look into how the camera achieves various video formats.

As for domes vs flat ports each has their place, You COULD use a dome port for macro, but it comes with limitations as the dome uses up some of your working distance.   A flat port is not going to work for wide angle as the edges will be very poor quality.

As for video lights, you could start out with ambient shooting in clear tropical waters and do manual white balance.  If you decide to go this way check out how many steps are needed to do a WB, some cameras are one touch, I think some Canon models are about 10 steps, you might be able to train yourself to deal with that but it would annoy he hell out of me.  This would be an issue if you dive irregularly.  Manual WB is quite important for quality video and you do it with and without lights.  The lights are not there to provide your main light source (except at night) but rather to add back red and yellow light to achieve daylight colour balance.  You can do ambient WB down to about 10m beyond that there is generally not enough red light to WB.

I would suggest thinking about what subjects you want to shoot the most and under what conditions and work back from there to work out which camera to use.

Thank you for your feedback! I still have a couple of months to decide and I will look into this before I decide. I will also see if I might find something on the used market. Thank you so far, I will report back to double check when I have an idea what to get.

6 hours ago, ChrisRoss said:

You should look into the fine print on how it achieves various video formats, for example it might take a crop from the main sensor to achieve a number of video formats, which might be OK on land but it really a limitation UW.  So you need to read the fine print.  Look into how the camera achieves various video formats.

In this case, that isn't an issue for Meister-Hubert.  The R6 does full frame 60p and looks great.  It has a bit more rolling shutter than the R6ii and other options, unless you are shooting 60p which has a 1.07x crop and a rolling shutter speed of 14ms - which means it is not something to be concerned about in the least since we all usually shoot 60p underwater.  It also white balances very well for diving... however it takes a bunch of button pushes so practice before you put it in the housing and then a bunch on land with the camera in the housing so it is really second nature.  

To the OP - The wide aperture of the lens is not important underwater as you will want to shoot stopped down to increase corner (and anything but the center if shooting at 2.8) sharpness behind a dome port with the 15-35mm lens.  If shooting big things in the middle (aka Shark swimming up) you can open up the lens a bit.  I rarely shoot wider than F/8 even when shooting video (its less of an issue for video than stills where I sit at f/13). So very different from land use application of aperture. 

In the backscatter recommendations for the 15-35, it also suggests using a diopter to achieve best focus.  You may want to look into that before your trip.  

The R6 is a wonderful camera.  I concur with the investment of a very good leak check system for whatever housing you end up getting.