Hero3 Black testing underwater
- Thread starter Marty Cerven
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BDSC
Contributor
Thanks. I read it. So it doesn't seem to have the traditional WB function I am thinking about.
OP
Marty Cerven
Contributor
The H3 black has cam raw wb which gives pretty much full control of wb in post, you can use gopro cineform studio to easily set wb to your slate throughout and use keyframes to adjust this as you change depth levels. Auto I am not a big fan of and this seems to be very much the same as what the hd2 can do and is very hit and miss with more miss then hit lol. Fixing bad auto wb in post is a bit of a nightmare but shooting cam raw has been great for me so far.
Here is another video I shot, this is in the worst conditions of the week with low vis murky waters and a bit more surge. The dive site is probably one of my favorite local sites just a shame the conditions werent perfect but the camera did quite well still I think. The other guys didnt even bother to take many stills with their bigger cameras as conditions made most of their shots quite poor. I didn't quite sharpen it enough in post so will likely re-upload this with the improved render as it turned out quite soft on yt on this upload.
[video=youtube;ecBPS6D9TUk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecBPS6D9TUk[/video]
Here is another video I shot, this is in the worst conditions of the week with low vis murky waters and a bit more surge. The dive site is probably one of my favorite local sites just a shame the conditions werent perfect but the camera did quite well still I think. The other guys didnt even bother to take many stills with their bigger cameras as conditions made most of their shots quite poor. I didn't quite sharpen it enough in post so will likely re-upload this with the improved render as it turned out quite soft on yt on this upload.
[video=youtube;ecBPS6D9TUk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecBPS6D9TUk[/video]
BDSC
Contributor
One has to be impressed with the video these small GoPro's can produce. It makes me wonder what the effect is going to be on the higher end camcorders and housings. I shoot with a Light and Motion housing and a Sony camcorder and am quite pleased with the results I get. I recently looked at the L&M website and it seems they are forever shrinking what they are offering as far as underwater housings go. Do I think the GoPro can produce results as good as what I am getting from my system that can do real time WB.....not really. But, is there enough of a difference that warrants maybe spending $3000 and up for the latest and greatest L&M housing as opposed to several hundred for the new GoPro....not for most people.
skearse
Contributor
Things I should have reminded myself of before we picked up the camera and two wrong sized cards....d'oh. Anyway...tagging along; hopefully we'll be able to post some from our Bonaire trip in a couple of weeks...
sharkshark
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First time poster, long time lurker, as the kids used to say...
Been waiting for some serious testing on this thing... I had the amusing circumstance of finally getting my first underwater camera, a Hero 2, and trying it out a couple weeks back. I'd "rented" one from BestBuy with a return policy w/o the housing, and it was as miserable as expected. Had to wait months for the dive housing to come in stock here in Toronto, picked it up, and did a Monday/Tuesday dive in Kingston/Brockville area.
Got home, loaded up my vids, and then saw the announcement that the Hero2 had been replaced.
D'oh!
Shortest turnaround from having the best to an also ran in my tech life, which is saying something!
So, yeah, pining mildly for the Hero3, as you can imagine.
Still trying to get my head around the need for filters - shooting raw, and not being afraid to mess with AE/Premiere to get the colour balance right, I'd assume my issues have less to do with the need for filtration and more due to the inherent noisiness of the captured image at depth.
This was shot that day, a very short clip of a long dive. The "7up" look is raw Gopro in the St. Lawrence, the other side is me doing some channel mixing in AE. Well, not "raw" raw, I hadn't updated to the protune fw before I shot it - the software came out while I was underwater!
[video=vimeo;51838540]https://vimeo.com/51838540[/video]
Was meant to just be a private test file (hence no chiron or anything), but I made it public so y'all could see it.
I'd love to get a workflow that avoided having to use the cineform colour correction, would be nice for Gopro to release Adobe-compatible colour presets so we have a nice starting point for the camera colour fixes without having to use the kind of irritating software they provide (hey, it's free!)
Finally, it kind of sucks you can't chain the bacpac batter and an lcd, using both at once. The issues you're having with batter life are concerning, exacerbated with the cold environment of water no doubt.
If you can nerd out and let me know some of the settings you're toying with in both Cineform and Prem, I'd be happy to read them.
cheers, happy diving
Been waiting for some serious testing on this thing... I had the amusing circumstance of finally getting my first underwater camera, a Hero 2, and trying it out a couple weeks back. I'd "rented" one from BestBuy with a return policy w/o the housing, and it was as miserable as expected. Had to wait months for the dive housing to come in stock here in Toronto, picked it up, and did a Monday/Tuesday dive in Kingston/Brockville area.
Got home, loaded up my vids, and then saw the announcement that the Hero2 had been replaced.
D'oh!
Shortest turnaround from having the best to an also ran in my tech life, which is saying something!
So, yeah, pining mildly for the Hero3, as you can imagine.
Still trying to get my head around the need for filters - shooting raw, and not being afraid to mess with AE/Premiere to get the colour balance right, I'd assume my issues have less to do with the need for filtration and more due to the inherent noisiness of the captured image at depth.
This was shot that day, a very short clip of a long dive. The "7up" look is raw Gopro in the St. Lawrence, the other side is me doing some channel mixing in AE. Well, not "raw" raw, I hadn't updated to the protune fw before I shot it - the software came out while I was underwater!
[video=vimeo;51838540]https://vimeo.com/51838540[/video]
Was meant to just be a private test file (hence no chiron or anything), but I made it public so y'all could see it.
I'd love to get a workflow that avoided having to use the cineform colour correction, would be nice for Gopro to release Adobe-compatible colour presets so we have a nice starting point for the camera colour fixes without having to use the kind of irritating software they provide (hey, it's free!)
Finally, it kind of sucks you can't chain the bacpac batter and an lcd, using both at once. The issues you're having with batter life are concerning, exacerbated with the cold environment of water no doubt.
If you can nerd out and let me know some of the settings you're toying with in both Cineform and Prem, I'd be happy to read them.
cheers, happy diving
OP
Marty Cerven
Contributor
Regarding filters and colour corrections I think for best results you still need to use both but the H3 with protune on and cam raw wb makes things much easier and you dont have to deal with the random terrible wb of the auto settings in the gopro cameras. WB is just one issue though and this can be corrected in post in some way but can be a real bi$#h fighting the auto settings as they drift which cam raw is a dream to work with in comparison making what was quite a painfull battle at times be something that only takes a few seconds to do. Many times you also just cant quite get it to the point you want if using auto, using a slate and cineform studio for colour balance is quite easy just using the wb sliders till you get it to where you want. When in auto many times I cant do much about whites and or other colours and then even if you get it spot on for one frame there may be a 180 degree shift in the auto settings that completely stuff the next few frames and its a never ending battle in a longer shot but I have had none of these issues shooting HD3b with pt on and cam raw. I have a few shots shot on auto that are just about impossible to match up to my cam raw footage even though at times it can look quite good other times its just way off and thats why I cant see me ever using auto wb underwater again with the H3b.
Using the H3b also shows the benefit of good filters as you go to deeper depths, this camera in protune does have a much greater dynamic range then earlier models so it will still do much better then the earlier models without a filter and at 5-10m you can still get some pretty good results even to the deeper levels you can easily get wb spot on in post. However the lack of reds will still end up with very dominant blues the deeper you go and using the URPro filters I have managed to get much more colour back at all depth levels then I can with unfiltered footage no matter what I do beyond hand painting each frame lol. The filters on earlier cameras were actualy used more to mask the wb issues then purely what they should be used for and thats getting more colours into your videos then the camera will pick u on its own.
I think I will do a basic tutorial at some point in the future showing all the modes with and without filters and showing the raw modes plus corrected in post and the methods I use for my results. My methods are far from the only way of doing things but have given me pretty good consistent results and quite simple to do once you've done it a few times.
Here is a vimeo version of the George Kermode dive and should be a little better quality then what you get on yt. There is also an option to download the original encode which I did at 15mbps bit rate which is still a bit short of the 45mbps 2.7k that it was recorded in but given the low light and all I think not much is lost at the 15mbps rate same as the gopro stock non pt encoding rate and you really shouldn't need to do a final encode at that rate especially if your just uploading to the web.
[vimeo]53412673[/vimeo]
---------- Post Merged at 02:21 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 01:44 PM ----------
As the new hero 3 SRP Blurfix3 SO has been officially announced I can give more info about these and I have found it very easy to use underwater. I have been using the CYD (dome screw in filter) and also the regular 55mm filters CY,GR,swCY and a CP filter above water. Here is the thread by SRP discussing these filter options. http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/gopro-video/437553-gopro-hd3-color-correcting-filter-hd3-srp-will-unveil-dema-11-14-12-a.html
The new adapter does everything I need of it and is 100% vignette free with a hero 3 black above and below water in all modes using the SRP low profile filters. It clips on in fractions of a second and mine is an early version which has been improved in that aspect not that I think it needed to so it will be even easier I guess in the final retail versions due out pretty soon.
Using the H3b also shows the benefit of good filters as you go to deeper depths, this camera in protune does have a much greater dynamic range then earlier models so it will still do much better then the earlier models without a filter and at 5-10m you can still get some pretty good results even to the deeper levels you can easily get wb spot on in post. However the lack of reds will still end up with very dominant blues the deeper you go and using the URPro filters I have managed to get much more colour back at all depth levels then I can with unfiltered footage no matter what I do beyond hand painting each frame lol. The filters on earlier cameras were actualy used more to mask the wb issues then purely what they should be used for and thats getting more colours into your videos then the camera will pick u on its own.
I think I will do a basic tutorial at some point in the future showing all the modes with and without filters and showing the raw modes plus corrected in post and the methods I use for my results. My methods are far from the only way of doing things but have given me pretty good consistent results and quite simple to do once you've done it a few times.
Here is a vimeo version of the George Kermode dive and should be a little better quality then what you get on yt. There is also an option to download the original encode which I did at 15mbps bit rate which is still a bit short of the 45mbps 2.7k that it was recorded in but given the low light and all I think not much is lost at the 15mbps rate same as the gopro stock non pt encoding rate and you really shouldn't need to do a final encode at that rate especially if your just uploading to the web.
[vimeo]53412673[/vimeo]
---------- Post Merged at 02:21 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 01:44 PM ----------
As the new hero 3 SRP Blurfix3 SO has been officially announced I can give more info about these and I have found it very easy to use underwater. I have been using the CYD (dome screw in filter) and also the regular 55mm filters CY,GR,swCY and a CP filter above water. Here is the thread by SRP discussing these filter options. http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/gopro-video/437553-gopro-hd3-color-correcting-filter-hd3-srp-will-unveil-dema-11-14-12-a.html
The new adapter does everything I need of it and is 100% vignette free with a hero 3 black above and below water in all modes using the SRP low profile filters. It clips on in fractions of a second and mine is an early version which has been improved in that aspect not that I think it needed to
so it will be even easier I guess in the final retail versions due out pretty soon.sharkshark
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yeah, watched that one already...
I'm really worried about doing some long drift dive in Cozumel, and having the battery last less than an hour. That'd be annoying. I'd love to see some worse case scenarios a/b'd with the Black, to see just what kind of improvement we really get.
I'm adverse to throwing on filters, more than happy to correct in post. That said, if the images aren't captured via the CCD, we're screwed, even with channel mixing, but I'm not convinced that the filtration really gets us more than capturing with a wide gamut does. Call me skeptical...
I'm really worried about doing some long drift dive in Cozumel, and having the battery last less than an hour. That'd be annoying. I'd love to see some worse case scenarios a/b'd with the Black, to see just what kind of improvement we really get.
I'm adverse to throwing on filters, more than happy to correct in post. That said, if the images aren't captured via the CCD, we're screwed, even with channel mixing, but I'm not convinced that the filtration really gets us more than capturing with a wide gamut does. Call me skeptical...
OP
Marty Cerven
Contributor
yeah, watched that one already...
I'm really worried about doing some long drift dive in Cozumel, and having the battery last less than an hour. That'd be annoying. I'd love to see some worse case scenarios a/b'd with the Black, to see just what kind of improvement we really get.
I'm adverse to throwing on filters, more than happy to correct in post. That said, if the images aren't captured via the CCD, we're screwed, even with channel mixing, but I'm not convinced that the filtration really gets us more than capturing with a wide gamut does. Call me skeptical...
Battery wise if not using the LCD you should still get over an hour close to about 1hr20m recording time, sandby battery drain has been much improved over the older gopro's that burnt as much battery in standby as recording so thats a plus. If you want longer run times without an LCD screen Id highly recommend the batt bacpac which I have been using for over 2 1/2hrs with still a bit to go.
Filter wise at 20m as in the first video I posted I couldnt get any more colour out of it without the filter though wb wise I had no issues. With the CY filter on things were great colour wise and you can get so much out of that footage in post if you want, a filter will reduce light by about 1 stop getting to the sensor but they are designed mostly to only reduce the dominant blues in the water and allow as much of the other colours as possible. I too was skeptical about filters a while back but since having used my first one I just cant see me shooting any natural light dives without them, unless I am diving too deep for them to be effective. They are best to about 25m but can do ok at 30m in good light and vis beyond that your best off with no filter and just some lights as the filter will hurt more then it helps at those levels. I rarely dive beyond 30m anyway so that means I can use filters on all dives, the wet filter setup is good as I can change from cy to gr if we have real crappy green waters which you normaly dont find out til you get down there.
toozler
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yeah, watched that one already...
I'm really worried about doing some long drift dive in Cozumel, and having the battery last less than an hour. That'd be annoying. I'd love to see some worse case scenarios a/b'd with the Black, to see just what kind of improvement we really get.
I'm adverse to throwing on filters, more than happy to correct in post. That said, if the images aren't captured via the CCD, we're screwed, even with channel mixing, but I'm not convinced that the filtration really gets us more than capturing with a wide gamut does. Call me skeptical...
I'm more inclined to using shallow water filters rather than filters for depths up to 65-70ft. Most videos I've seen using filters end up doing more irreparable damage to the image quality (murky, noisy, milky look) then what could be achieved in post-processing without filters.
Filters for shallow waters "absorb" much less of the blue and green wavelengths so the impact on the light intensity reaching the sensor is much less. Even if you are doing post-processing (and by the way, you pulled out a miracle there from that green video), those might be a better option as they will slightly tune down the blues and greens and enhance the reds, purples, oranges and yellows just enough that they can be highlighted on post.
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