Hero3 Black testing underwater

[Marty Cerven]

You really shouldn't be having any temperature issues in that situation and I would contact GoPro support if your getting thermal shutdowns in those conditions as it shouldn't be happening.

My black does get quite hot after a full battery run and even after using it in the housing the housing itself feels quite warm but it has never shut down. At the other forum I am at there has only been one guy that has had the same issues, the gopro does run quite hot but it is designed to do so. If its cutting out like yours there must be something wrong with it, either its using older firmware or there is a dodgy chip inside.

I am quite amazed at how much power they can get out of such a little package and they will be pushing the chips close to their limits with such performance and no real cooling other then a likely large heatsink that will spread the heat out to the cameras housing. Being designed to work inside a sealed air environment as is the underwater housing it should be able to operate without issues out of the housing at your temperatures.

Its unfortunate but likely there will be a few dodgy units floating around and this is also one of the main reasons I ran all my battery tests, to stress test the camera and make sure it wont play up on me when Im underwater with it.

 

[yarik83]

And that is exactly why I am doing this now. My dive season is over probably until March so I have plenty of time to twiddle with it.

720 @ 120fps never once shut down due to temperature. Tomorrow I will run a benchmark on both cameras in identical scenarios doing the realistic challenge.

I will set both cameras to 1080 60fps, put them inside housing and drop both cameras inside one of my fish tanks. I will stop after 1 hour and give them 1 hour rest time and then drop them back in for 1 hour. This will replicate a usual 2 tank dive trip with 1 hour surface interval.

When all said and done I am going to replicate same test with 720 120fps (which is my target shooting preference) and see how that goes.

My bonica camera took about a year to dial in. I went from bonica to bonica hddv 720p to bonica hddv 1080/720p and each camera had its fussy times. I actually had to custom order 3 batteries from china which last 2 times as long as with stock battery. Having gone through that experience it was a no-brainer for me to get gopros with battery backpacks.

If I can, miraculously squeeze out 4 hours out of camera I will be one happy panda.

I will make a post here tomorrow letting you know how it went.

 

[Marty Cerven]

Any reason why you think you will mostly shoot in 120p as this will reduce the amount of light the camera gets by quite a bit underwater. 1080p60 has some pretty impressive image quality in all 3 FOV's just a shame that narrow isnt in protune because it really is a big improvement over the hero2 narrow fov modes but I much prefer cam raw wb for uw use and this is only in protune modes.

I haven't shot too much in 1080p60 underwater yet but will try those next time as Im still finding a bit of rolling shutter wobble when my stability isn't quite perfect for various reasons such as surge and currents or as in most of my first few test dives I didn't really focus so much on my camera work because I was just trying to test the modes to get an idea of how the new camera goes.

All those dives I was missing most of my gear as I had sent my dive computer away for a warranty issue and had to rely on old school gauges rather then everything on my wrist, then on one dive my BCD played up so I ended up sending all my gear away for service so was diving with all unfamiliar gear which wasn't ideal whilst also trying to figure out a new camera and lead/navigate most of those dives too lol. 30p is great with the tray if I can actually stop and setup shots focusing on the video but these dives where we cover a fair bit of ground and never really staying still are pretty tough to get great stable video out of them. On top of that I noticed my wetsuit has a bit of a hole in it, so time to get a new one of those, which wasn't great in the 14c waters as most likely my hands were also shaking a little thanks to slightly freezing my balls off nearly all dives lol.

So that's all my excuses for the fairly shaky test footage and I hope my next few videos will be a bit better stability wise. These were more just test dives but I figured I may as well put some of them up to show what the h3b is capable of. I have learned a bit on how best to use the camera mostly regarding wb but still haven't given most of the other modes a shot underwater. I will try a few more over the next few dives but I only just got all my gear back so Im ready to go diving again for my next batch of tests. Water temps are rising as its getting closer to summer and we are probably at a whopping 16c atm.

---------- Post added November 25th, 2012 at 05:57 PM ----------

Diving the ex HMAS Canberra, conditions were pretty good but vis could have been better. Still not much life on the wreck and we didn't penetrate it on this dive with a couple first timers to the site in our buddy group.

Max depth 26m for me, dive site max is 28m here. All shot with the hero3 black edition while trying out a few modes. All 2.7k with protune off at the beginning and auto wb until 1:20 where it was on cam raw and did much better overall I think.

I tried a few different URPro filters here with the SRP Blurfix3 adapter on this dive. Regular glass cyan 55mm filter first 50sec then the GR until 1:20 where I used the CYD filter.

All colour corrected to try and match them up using cineform studio, which was a bit tricky with the auto wb shots compared to those shot in cam raw.

[video=youtube;pF2RUj8Ufyc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF2RUj8Ufyc&feature=youtu.be[/video]

A little shaky still, read my disclaimer in my previous post

 

[yarik83]

Good question.

When I first started filming my videos I thought that if I shot in highest quality possible I would gather up my family or friends and we would all cozy up on a sofa and watch this. In reality neither my friends or my family want to gather up and cozy up nor do they want to spend an hour watching my stuff. Since youtube and all kinds of mobile devices allow people to view videos I mainly share my stuff through youtube, adding and or removing videos every now and then. Youtube in term has ability to change video quality but has all kinds of upload limitations and degradation of quality (hence why many people use vimeo). For my purposes I found that 720 @60fps does a wonderful job especially since many people experience buffering issues on higher quality videos. And since most people do not view videos on full screen nor in highest quality or on mobile devices...720 is as high as I am willing to go. Higher framerate in my experience leads to less editing headaches down the road.

Unfortunately my camera is having a hard time picking up what I call fish fry. Hundreds of baby fish that swim so fast that even at 60fps camera is like "Ohh I don't know what to do man".

Check out this video shot with my camera+wide angle lens. You are welcomed to watch entire thing but scroll over to 5:08 and you will see what I am talking about.

[video=youtube;t4lJnVE9S00]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4lJnVE9S00&feature=plcp[/video]

 

[ronscuba]

Good question.

When I first started filming my videos I thought that if I shot in highest quality possible I would gather up my family or friends and we would all cozy up on a sofa and watch this. In reality neither my friends or my family want to gather up and cozy up nor do they want to spend an hour watching my stuff. .....

LOL, I know what you mean Yarik. Seeing people's reactions to watching my videos live can be humbling, but also a learning experience.

Marty, the 2.7k footage with the raw wb is impressive. Are you using cineform 100% or also using your normal video editing sw ?

 

[Marty Cerven]

LOL, I know what you mean Yarik. Seeing people's reactions to watching your videos live can be humbling, but also a learning experience.

Marty, the 2.7k footage with the raw wb is impressive. Are you using cineform 100% or also using your normal video editing sw ?

The youtube edit was 100% cineform for all colour and image settings, its cut up, transitioned and scaled down to 1080p in Premiere Pro CS6 but no other effects were used in that edit.

Here is a Vimeo version of the same video only difference is here I also used some neat video noise reduction and a slight vignette in magic bullet looks.

[video=vimeo;54232123]https://vimeo.com/54232123[/video]

 

[sharkshark]

Sigh, so jealous of these dives... I love that this is considered poor vis for you.

Would still love for anyone to chime in in terms of bypassing cineform and using Premiere/AE/Avid for full colour correction of the protune stuff - anyone have an idea how we can get these default curves implemented as starting points?

The youtube edit was 100% cineform for all colour and image settings, its cut up, transitioned and scaled down to 1080p in Premiere Pro CS6 but no other effects were used in that edit.

Here is a Vimeo version of the same video only difference is here I also used some neat video noise reduction and a slight vignette in magic bullet looks.

[video=vimeo;54232123]https://vimeo.com/54232123[/video]

 

[RockyHeap]

In the real world, conditions even at the same dive site vary too much even on the same day for "starting points" of color correction.

In a past life in my point and shoot world, I really never embraced RAW photos even though my camera could do it.


Video is a whole new ball game.


I'm headed to Hawaii soon, and plan on giving the Hero3 a real workout, with a White semi-circle of PVC pipe bungeed to one fore-arm to establish a "set" for white balance before each snip of video shot, to reference in Post Processing and really learn the RAW function of the gopro.

stay tuned.

 

[Marty Cerven]

Actually the vis is close to as good as we get and the best I've had on this site, its just our weather conditions were about as good as your ever going to get. With peak swell measured over the last 48hrs was 48cm with an average swell around 20cm. That is completly unheard of down here in the bass strait. Where the regular average swell is at 2m+ peaking at over 3m and much more often being well above 5m then it gets ever gets below 2m. This was the calmest I'd ever seen the wave height data and the smoothest boat ride ever outside the heads, this is why we were surprised not to get 20m plus vis but this was fine at around 15m Of say.

Compared to my first dive at the site, we dropped down the shot line and couldn't see the wreck. Thinking wtf it must be just here set the compass in the correct directions kicked a couple times and head butted the hull. Vis was so bad I couldn't see past my elbows and my second dive there vis was much better at about 2m lol.

Re bypassing cineform, I did do some videos without it just using magic bullet looks plugin within premiere and never even using the cine form files. I could easily do all plus much more but it was a fair bit slower for the basic stuff such as wb adjustments, exposure, contrast and saturation. This is where cineform is very quick, easy and can do as good a job. I don't use the presets in cine form at all or very rarely instead setting everything with the sliders and key frames throughout my shots. Most of this was all filmed on a continuous shot and the current cine form version doesn't cut up h3b pro tune files.

The basic settings in cs6 within premiere or after effects aren't as good as cineform but there are other plugins that can do the same along with many more options such as magic bullet looks that I also use. I have not used adobe speed grade but that should be another option for adobe users, as I have mb looks I didn't want to re learn another method of doing basically the same thing. Speed grade also uses metadata the same as cine form and so its easy enough for me to just use cf studio then delving into speed grade.

There are plenty of software options some very expensive and some free, along with some basic built in functionality inside your editor, these are getting better but still a bit behind most of what the plugins or alternative software can do.

 

[Marty Cerven]

Though this is not an underwater test its something I will be trying very soon as I only just got some of these filters in the other day.

I did some basic land based tests and here is a quick video showing the hero3 black with all 4 macro filters stacked +1+2+4+10 in 1080p60 narrow mode. A single +10 is vignette free on my camera in wide mode but the edges are a little distorted, cheap filters

but 1080p narrow is great on the hero3 black so I will most likely be using that with the macro filters anyway. Then switch to wide modes and URPro filters for all non macro shots.

[video=youtube_share;l_J2LNMUgpc]http://youtu.be/l_J2LNMUgpc[/video]

These filters are just some cheap generics and I will try better brands but local supply of premium +10 macro filters is non existent so I have ordered a few better ones including a +20 from the US to have a try with.