Trip Video - Maldives, February 2020

[CWK]

I can see from the video that poor viz. It reminds me of taking video of the schooling hammerheads early morning without light in Banda Sea, as you don’t want to scare the shy fish away with bright light. However, the Tiger Shark shouldn’t be afraid of video light, should it?

You can come across hammerhead or tiger or other sharks on a blue water dive at Fuvhmulah. So no lights on those dives. I was mostly at 30m when I did the tigers and greys, and 39m for the silver tips.

 

[Pearlman]

You can come across hammerhead or tiger or other sharks on a blue water dive at Fuvhmulah. So no lights on those dives. I was mostly at 30m when I did the tigers and greys, and 39m for the silver tips.

You mean lights should be avoided so the sharks will come close? Are the big ones light-shy?

P

 

[CWK]

You mean lights should be avoided so the sharks will come close? Are the big ones light-shy?

P

Hammerhead are considered light shy by many. If you have video lights on, you may not see them at all.

 

[Dan]

You mean lights should be avoided so the sharks will come close? Are the big ones light-shy?

P

Except for Oceanic Whitetip. Unfortunately they don’t seem like to hang around in Maldives, at least I haven’t seen any YouTube videos about them in Maldives.

I did see them in Red Sea.

 

[CWK]

Nice one! You may want to experiment with dialing back on the saturation and color-grading a bit? The video looked over-saturated to me ...

Cheers
P

I found time to review the project and remove the tweaks to saturation. You are quite correct - over saturated. Lesson learned. Thanks

 

[Dan]

...39m for the silver tips.

That’s deep. In Socorro they hang around 25-28m and they are not afraid of us & video lights.

 

[deeper thoughts]

Very nice, plenty of fish and nice color

 

[CWK]

Very nice, plenty of fish and nice color

Many thanks (assuming that you are referring to my video).

 

[deeper thoughts]

Many thanks (assuming that you are referring to my video).

Yes

 

[Pearlman]

Thanks for your critique. I am experimenting with luma and saturation. I also find that lighting conditions that I work under affects my colour grading. For example, working in the dark and working with overhead cabin lights on leads to different results. And even changing the brightness level on my laptop results in different grading decisions.

I found time to review the project and remove the tweaks to saturation. You are quite correct - over saturated. Lesson learned. Thanks

You are welcome!
From your earlier post, it looks like your color grading environment was not optimal. I found it helped to use only D65 white light behind the monitor or overhead and I also happen to have a whiteboard to glance at when looking away from the monitor. I make sure the overhead white lighting is turned on to ensure the viewing conditions are not too dim before I adjust color/brightness/contrast. Then I create a LUT for the UW footage to reuse with all other clips. Once a LUT is created I can work in sub-optimal (dim) conditions late nights - to do other stuff like position a subclip in the timeline sequence, or work on timing audio tracks etc., provided I don't touch the color grading bits except in ideal lighting conditions.

That said - I am still learning video editing and yet to come out with my first proper scuba video.

Cheers