California Dive Video - Catalina Island April 2

[miket]

A 7 minute video shot 2 weekends ago at Catalina Island, California.

I really like the way this one turned out. The vis was about 20 feet, pretty low for Catalina, but the way the sun lit up the water made for some cool sunlight effect in the caves/caverns and when looking up thru the kelp canopy. I also got some pretty video of the forest of Gargonians at the dive site "Sea Fan Grotto". I'm glad I had my lights as they were really beautiful in shades of pink, purple, red, and orange.

This is a 19mb WMV (Windows Media Player) video file.

- Click picture for video

- Click picture for video

- Enjoy
MikeT

 

[Jim Ernst]

thank you for sharing that with us, your video is fantastic, and i enjoyed see it very much!!!! thanks again. jim

 

[lwronk]

Great video. Thank you for sharing.

 

[meekal]

love the sunRays... what time of day were you shooting?

what do you use to render your video? the size is tiny in comparison to how beautifully sharp the images are!!! i use MS MEDIA ENCODER and the quality is nowhere near yours.... what's your secret?

 

[Diver Mike]

Great video, Thank you for sharing.

Mike...

 

[miket]

love the sunRays... what time of day were you shooting?

Probably about 2:00pm - 3:00pm I think all those shots came from the last dive of the day before the boat returned to the mainland. It was a beautiful clear sunny day with nearly flat seas, just enough waves to make the sunlight dance on the bottom.

what do you use to render your video? the size is tiny in comparison to how beautifully sharp the images are!!! i use MS MEDIA ENCODER and the quality is nowhere near yours.... what's your secret?

Not a secret at all. I just use the built in Windows Movie Maker to compress my videos. After rendering my edited video from Premiere I load the full quality AVI file into Windows Movie Maker, and just save a movie file. For this one I used the following settings.

Checked - Best fit to file size 19mb

(below were set automatically as i adjusted the size)

video size is 428 x 240
Aspect Ratio 16:9
Frame Rate = 30fps

This comes out to 365k bps speed (about the fastest you want to go for it to stream for most high speed users). Sometimes if a movie is short (minute max) I will use double this setting to get full size 856 x 480. Here is an example (Garibaldi Video - No Sound - Full Size).

The files are named *.wmv but you can rename them to *.avi and they will work on Windows (but will cause problems with Mac users as Quicktime is the default AVI player and will not play a WMV file). Mac users would have to download and open it from within Media Player for Mac (yuck!).

Thanks everyone for checking my video out

I have lots of other cool videos at my website socaldivevideos.com.

- MikeT

 

[EricJ]

I just ordered the Equinox Pro-Pac 6 Housing for my Panasonic GS-500 video camera (I attempted to get the 400, but they discontinued that model).

I've done quite a bit of video editing but never underwater stuff. I can't wait to get started!

I haven't purchased any lights yet, as I want to get the hang of the housing and camera first.

Once I get my first footage, I'd love to post it here and get feeback from Mike T and others.

 

[JodiBB]

Thank for sharing!! I loved seeing the video!

 

[blinkswiler]

Outstanding! Thanks.

 

[miket]

I just ordered the Equinox Pro-Pac 6 Housing for my Panasonic GS-500 video camera (I attempted to get the 400, but they discontinued that model).

Make sure you get a housing that can access this camera's manual modes, especially white balance. When shooting wide angle without lights you are going to need to get all the color you can, without re-white balancing underwater for various conditions the video tends to look very monochrome and washed out.

I never heard of the GS-500, do you have a link to it? You should have looked into Ocean Images, Inc. for housings. I love mine and had many more features not available from Equinox or others.

- MikeT