4K Video at reasonable cost with the Panasonic LX100?

[ronscuba]

Yes, I recorded goliath groupers on the Castor with my Panasonic LX7. A deep, dark dive. Dan, I think you might have been there the same day. I'm impressed with this little camera.

[vimeo]73668074[/vimeo]

I'm going to take both sides of this debate.

If I wanted the best possible footage to sell, right now I would skip Panasonic LX100 4K and buy a Sony PMW professional camcorder shooting 4-2-2 color space recording at 50+ mbps. As a hobbyist, shooting for my own enjoyment and ease of use, I would buy the Panasonic and use the left over money for an awesome trip to Indonesia.

 

[danvolker]

Yes, I recorded goliath groupers on the Castor with my Panasonic LX7. Dan, I think you might have been there the same day. I'm impressed with this little camera.

[vimeo]73668074[/vimeo]

I'm going to take both sides of this debate. If I wanted the best possible footage to sell, right now I would skip Panasonic LX100 4K and buy a Sony PMW professional camcorder shooting 4-2-2 color space recording at 50+ mbps. As a consumer, shooting for my own enjoyment and ease of use, I would buy the Panasonic and use the left over money for an awesome trip to Indonesia.

Nice Ron,
And I see this Castor area as the idea proving ground for the technology I want....There is a vast backdrop that dramatically enhances the foreground with these amazing Goliaths....but if we light up the Goliaths, we lose so much detail in the distant background that the vastness of the wreck itself is hard to convey.

I am still experimenting with techniques to get closer to a compromise I like for this....I will pull some footage I have been playing with for this, and post it shortly.

 

[ronscuba]

Nice Ron,
And I see this Castor area as the idea proving ground for the technology I want....There is a vast backdrop that dramatically enhances the foreground with these amazing Goliaths....but if we light up the Goliaths, we lose so much detail in the distant background that the vastness of the wreck itself is hard to convey.

I am still experimenting with techniques to get closer to a compromise I like for this....I will pull some footage I have been playing with for this, and post it shortly.

The look you are going for is tricky. Keeping the detail of the distant background requires a deep depth of field, but that means less light hitting the sensor. Have you tried manual fixed aperture but adjusting shutter speed and ISO ?

I gave up trying to get this in a single shot in video. I usually create a progression. Wide angle establishing shot followed by medium angle, then close up. More time in the editing, but full control of the flow. Often the final video is from footage shot at different times. The viewer cannot tell the difference.

 

[danvolker]

The look you are going for is tricky. Keeping the detail of the distant background requires a deep depth of field, but that means less light hitting the sensor. Have you tried manual fixed aperture but adjusting shutter speed and ISO ?

I gave up trying to get this in a single shot in video. I usually create a progression. Wide angle establishing shot followed by medium angle, then close up. More time in the editing, but full control of the flow. Often the final video is from footage shot at different times. The viewer cannot tell the difference.

Tricky, and VERRRYY time consuming

Here is a small piece of a show I have been working on ..the subject Goliaths on Castor, of course
I chose NOT to use lights, so that ambient would pull the background in to sharper viewing....Which made the bottom at 110 very dark....So in post editing, i had to push correcting heavily, at a up-converted 4-4-4 color space...whe4n all done, it gets encoded back to 4-2-0 on Youtube.

[video=youtube_share;K9rDHzfj2Js]http://youtu.be/K9rDHzfj2Js[/video]

Needs to be viewed at 1080 p and full screen, obviously
And if anyone Can't view it like this, please let me know why that is...I am trying to get a better handle on what an internet audience is capable of viewing....by Internet provider, network used ( at companies, on a wifi, etc).

Also...if you play the cineform avi or mov file, the quality is exponentially better than the Youtube H264....Youtube is not using a high enough data rate for real high quality 1080p....Which leads me to wonder if there is a way to "cheat" on the new 4k version of Youtube ( 2160p --what they offer as 4k) --to get the high data rate 1080p content to run into this higher data rate setting....any thoughts by anyone here?

 

[Interceptor121]

Those groupers move slow Ron clips with the lights is much better. The water looks pretty dark and green and there is no red to recover doesn't matter what encoding you use if the color is gone it's gone for good

 

[danvolker]

Those groupers move slow Ron clips with the lights is much better. The water looks pretty dark and green and there is no red to recover doesn't matter what encoding you use if the color is gone it's gone for good

I totally agree...lights make the primary subject, the Goliaths, much better looking.....But what I am hoping for, in the next camera I get, is technology that lets me use big high end video lights for the foreground, AND have this work well with the available light to a hundred feet away....That's what I would spend money on

And as to the nasty resolution that Youtube provides....I am thinking 10 meg per second Limelight, or Brightcove, or other more sophisticated CDN.

Interceptor, does this direction make sense to you, or do you still feel that 4 K could do a better job with videos we can "post" to Scubaboard or to Facebook ?

 

[Interceptor121]

Technology can't beat physics. At 100 feet there is no red left and little green. If you also shoot in the distance the light path is so long that everything is blue. I don't think it makes any difference where you host the videos to be honest. I shoot at 24 Mbps 25p with shutter 1/50. Even when am at ISO 200 and f/4 at depth there is no colour despite being plenty of light. I found that you can actually use filter and lights but at shallower depth. As Ron says you do two three type of shots wide medium and close and try to get them similar so you can assemble them. You can't get all of it in once scene as if you were on land as you are not.
I think youtube is aligned with consumer technology offering and color spaces are not interesting for them resolution instead is

 

[danvolker]

Technology can't beat physics. At 100 feet there is no red left and little green. If you also shoot in the distance the light path is so long that everything is blue. I don't think it makes any difference where you host the videos to be honest. I shoot at 24 Mbps 25p with shutter 1/50. Even when am at ISO 200 and f/4 at depth there is no colour despite being plenty of light. I found that you can actually use filter and lights but at shallower depth. As Ron says you do two three type of shots wide medium and close and try to get them similar so you can assemble them. You can't get all of it in once scene as if you were on land as you are not.
I think youtube is aligned with consumer technology offering and color spaces are not interesting for them resolution instead is

OK...But the "physics" allows us to see an incredible scene at 110 feet deep--our eyes have a bio-technology that allows much more light and dark to be registered into many more gradations....We can see the bright and vivid colors our video lights bring out, and we can also see the full length of the ship, and the perspective and the ambience that today's cameras fail to deliver with normal lighting setups.

What I am talking about is having enough data coming in to the camera, so that something conceptually like HDR can happen in post....whether you are using Adobe Speedgrade, pr some other high end color correcting solution.

 

[Interceptor121]

Am not sure. Even to your eyes that scene looked green and blue. Usually my video contain more tones than my eyes saw during the dive and this is because of filters and lights

 

[r4e]

I am voting for more color depth instead of higher resolution or better packing. Of course, 4:4:4 (at 8 bits) is better than 4:2:0 at 8 bits. But there is a much bigger difference with 14...16bit "RAW" color information per channel.

The problem with 8 bit video in poorly lit ambient light scenes is that the video information occupies a relatively small range of bit values. In post, there is the temptation to enhance the otherwise dull scene with some color grading. But this soon causes the "color steps" to become visible and this ruins the attempt. The eye is extremely sensitive to unevenness in color grades because this is the primary method of how the eye/brain detect the shape and texture of things. The normally accepted 3x8 bit color space is just on the border of being sufficient for topside purposes.

I am very tempted to try out Magic Lantern on my Canon 5DIII, but, I haven't yet dared to. Plus there is the problem of very high media costs and severely Limited shoot times.

Here are samples of videos shot with higher color depth and how much you could post process the video. These samples were shot relativelt shallow. But still I would expect almost similar enhancement (with much less reds) deeper too.

[video=vimeo;47351101]http://vimeo.com/47351101[/video]

The following video explains color grading underwater footage and how you can make dull scenery beautiful in post:

[video=vimeo;32137186]http://vimeo.com/32137186[/video]