Camera Shake

[seansrs36]

Does anyone have any suggestions how to avoid camera shake. I am diving with a Sony HDR-12 and a Light and Motion housing. One friend of mine told me to stay wide as much.

Thanks,

Sean

[mobula]

Wideangle is one thing. Even if your dive skills are good you will improve them with filming and also improve shaking, try, try, try. How is the buoyancy of your housing? I can't film with positive housings. I like it slightly negative. Maybe check out this.

[TheBigPhillyFish]

Yes, the wider the less any shake will show up. Also depending on what editing software you have, iMovie or FCP will remove some minor stuff for you. But most of it will be practice practice practice.

[Empty V]

Are you using FCP for editing? If so there are some tools that can help.

Billy

[seansrs36]

I have a PC and was looking at using Premire to do the editing.

[mobula]

Check out Edius 5 also. I had Avid Liquid 7.2, still a nice software, but they stopped further development. Then I tried Edius, I know Premier, and Vegas Pro 8. My favorite is Edius. It is stable, has verything I need and fair price. I did some kind of cross grade from Avid to Edius for 300 Dollars.

I don't see that removing of shaking with a software is a good thing because you are losing quality.

[beautybelow]

a technique I like, especially when shooting smaller things, is to keep the camera stationary and let the subject move in the frame. Even if it moves in and out a little bit, just let it do its thing with the camera still. Even with some bigger things I try not to move the camera too much as far as following the subject.

[mobula]

Yes, this is it. It needs a little while over and underwater to realize that the camera should not move but the subject should :-)

[beautybelow]

fortunately for me I did 3000 plus dives with a still camera before I ever did my first with a video. Practice and developing a "touch" while holding the camera like everyone has said is the key.

[mobula]

Wow, that's a lot of diving, you could have done it earlier :-)

I had 50 dives with a still cam (video only overwater) and then 400 with a video cam, 100 with SCR and camera..

To check the impovement this is what I did:

I showed others my first videos (overwater) from 2002 in French Polynesia. This was kind of embarassing :-) Today I would cut that down from 3 hours to 15 min and it was shaky like hell.