Fishrock Dives SRP filter on GoPro Dive housing

[Marty Cerven]

Rather then keep spamming the official SRP filter thread, I thought Id start my own thread with the videos from my recent dive test trip. I will also include my comparison videos here once they are done. I lucked out on the weather a bit as they had 2 bad days whilst I was there with fairly big sees stirring up the water and pretty big currents at times. Not ideal conditions to use filters at 30m but the results were great at 29m or shallower, if we had the more regular 25m+ vis they get here the deeper footage would have turned out quite a bit better.

Here are the first 3 videos from the trip.

Dive 1 max depth 28.9m, some wb corrections made in post. Lights used at times but I have included footage with only the filter on as I preferred it over the clear lens shots when lights were used.



Dive 2 max depth 24m no colour corrections here, clear lens used in cave filter from entrance and exit of cave. Currents were so strong at the cave exit no grey nurse sharks were found here like usual but we found one hiding in a more sheltered area.



Dive 3, lots of Wobbygong sharks this dive. Max depth 29m at beginning then slowly rising through the dive, software WB correction in post throughout and no lights used. The GoPro's all went quite green at the beginning here again at the max depth but the URPro still did best of all and a fair bit of colour was able to be recovered via colorista 2 plugin in premiere pro cs6 and clicking on my slate at various depths. The clear lens was just all green with no chance of recovering any colour and the BS housing was better then no filter but using the same method for colour correction just created noise more then anything else. The oculus does similar to the URPro in regaining colour but loses more detail.



Dive 4 max depth 30m, some wb correction made in post. All filter footage no lights used this dive. Found plenty of grey nurse sharks at the continuation of the shallow cave exit at around 25-30m depth where the GoPro was struggling a little at this light level.



I will include some raw footage side by side comparisons later showing how the URPro filter by SRP (not yet released), Magic Filter by Backscatter, Oculus filter for the GoPro dive and the Blurfix URPro screw in and clip on filter (not yet released) all compared here.

This is the setup I used to film this so I can compare all filters performance, though I never used all 6 at once with my dive buddy wearing one on his head each dive and I had 4 or five cams on the tray each time.

 

[Interceptor121]

That's a hell of a rig Marty
Great subjects your videos have really improved in terms of stability. Particularly jealous about the wobbegong shark
I prefer the footage with no lights your sola 500 have narrow beams and you can see the areas of the picture where the beam doesn't reach. The width can be improved with home made diffusers like Pringles tops or other translucent can tops
Looking forward to the rest of the clips!!!

 

[Marty Cerven]

I didnt get around to aiming the lights too well on the dives and only aimed them properly for the cave video. But as this was all shot in 1080p wide they do fill the frame quite well in the dark if aimed properly. Using multiple cams not all aimed in the exact same spot didnt make it too easy to setup properly.

During the day its a bit harder to aim the lights as they arent as obvious and they get overpowered by daylight at a fairly short distance due to the lower output. The conditions were quite brutal out there surge and current wise so stability was still an issue. We also swam through most of the sites covering lots of ground so I didnt have much time to setup shots and hang around in one place for too long.

I dont think a diffuser would help and only reduce the overall output, only higher lumens or getting much closer to the subjects would help for daylight use with the lights I have.

The next video is like a wobby farm so you may want to check that. Stability wise I think I have done better with the tray on other dives but compared to my early headcam dives this is much better then those.

 

[Interceptor121]

Yes the torch effect in the cave is good
Diffuser that 1 f-stop from the lights add maybe 10-15 degrees
It depends on how you aim them the lights you have don't have wide beam
If you had two 800s you could put them in flood mode which means even keeping them fix pointing straight away from the housing you cover most of the frame
Unless you shoot macro or close up there should not be need to aim specifically

 

[Knackas]

Great stuff Marty,

Our club was up there in July and we got lucky with the weather and had a few days of great vis. Out of the 10 divers we had on the trip 6 had Gopro's with one diver losing his on the exit of the cave. Unbelievably we found it the next day and he was rapt. The Gopro's have certainly changed the game with their size,quality and price.

 

[Marty Cerven]

Yes the torch effect in the cave is good
Diffuser that 1 f-stop from the lights add maybe 10-15 degrees
It depends on how you aim them the lights you have don't have wide beam
If you had two 800s you could put them in flood mode which means even keeping them fix pointing straight away from the housing you cover most of the frame
Unless you shoot macro or close up there should not be need to aim specifically

Going by specs the Sola 500 photo lights I have are a 60 degree flood beam which is the same as the flood modes in all the higher output Sola's. This is plenty wide enough but like I said I think its just underpowered to fill the frame properly in daylight use and using a diffuser would just reduce lumens as it can easily enough fill the frame when completely dark.

But even videos shot with Sola 1200s and GoPro cameras do a similar thing from what I have seen and the full wide frame is hard to fill in daylight as the outside of the beam isn't as powerful as the inside it appears. In complete darkness they do give a nice wide beam that has a very smooth dropoff but in daylight this smooth dropoff really doesnt show up and tends to be overpowered by the daylight.

If you get close enough to the subject then you can get it to fill the frame but as in shots in the big schools of fish the lights struggle to light those on the outside of the frame. With the GoPro dive housing being wider then the blurfix housing in full wide mode it doesn't help much here and ideally Id like to have Sola 2000's or higher for daylight use, the cost of these are quite high when talking GoPro cameras and the main reason I prefer to just use filters in daylight use. These dives were pretty much testing the filters to their limits and at 30m in this relatively low vis they struggled, but compared to some still shots taken by others they did ok in the same conditions. Here are a few photos taken by the DM of the sharks during the 3rd video I posted here to give an idea of the true conditions we had.

These were shot with a Fujifilm finepix 550exr so not a great still cam but show how that dealt with this light.

f/3.5 1/30 exposure for most of these according to the image stats. GoPro at 1080p30 would most likely be 1/60 exposure and the filter here at this depth was taking away a bit of the much needed light but no filter had the video very green in comparison which I will show later with the side by side videos.

Great stuff Marty,

Our club was up there in July and we got lucky with the weather and had a few days of great vis. Out of the 10 divers we had on the trip 6 had Gopro's with one diver losing his on the exit of the cave. Unbelievably we found it the next day and he was rapt. The Gopro's have certainly changed the game with their size,quality and price.

I heard the guys found a GoPro there the day before but nobody claimed to have lost one, it is an awesome site and even in poorer conditions its still pretty cool. I was a bit shattered having dived it at its best before lucking out as we did but there is only so much you can do, I needed more then a weeks notice to plan the trip up but forecasts are only good for 7 days. I could see ahead of the trip earlier in the week we were going to get the only 2 days with rougher conditions. But these "poorer" conditions were still equal to what we would class as good at home and we have been far from that over the last 2 months lol.

Next time I go I will leave a few cameras behind at the shallow exit between dives and let them roll where there should be plenty more sharks as the divers wont scare them off. On my last club dive there were a couple of re-breather guys who said they had twice as many sharks as us around them as they didn't have any bubbles to scare them off. Back then we had 30+ at the shallow exit each dive in 30m vis so twice as many would have been impressive for those guys.

We have a club dive here planned for early Feb next year and I will stay longer then 2 days then so should get at least one day with great conditions hopefully.

---------- Post Merged on September 19th, 2012 at 02:11 AM ---------- Previous Post was on September 18th, 2012 at 10:30 PM ----------

Added the third dive to the first post, which should be up once it finishes uploading and encoding in a few minutes.

 

[Deva]

Great thread Marty,
was talking to Bill @ SRP and he brought up your name and said that you have some really cool videos of there products.
so quick question what do you like more the gopro dive housing with the new dome filter or the blurfix with the filter. really having a hard time deciding.
I think I might go with the blurfix so that I can get some filter for out of water too.
anyway hope I did not hickjack the thread.
cheers
Deva

 

[Interceptor121]

Uhm 500 lumens a bit too little to do anything they look like spot lights in the video I would have sworn that was a dive light not a flood
That's probably why sola start at 1200 for video!
I have a single 1200 and for close up works great except dealing with shadows
For big subjects like your shark you never have enough light and 30 meters is too deep for filters
I find that after 20-24 it is actually better with nothing and try to rebalance later in editing but still very green

 

[Marty Cerven]

I didnt use the lights much outside the cave and really your not going to do much amongst the sharks. Even sola 4000s would work to a max 2 meters from the light which is pretty hard to get that close to the nurses for long enough. My 500s made them freak out a little too so more power would just scare them off quicker. If you look at videos in daylight using sola 1200s there isnt much of an improvement over my daytime results, there just still arent enough lumens to fill the wide fov of the gopro. Daytime lights are only best for macro or very close to subject shots, gopro doesnt do macro and you would likely need 4 powerfull wide video lights to fill a full wide frame of any camera in daytime.

Im happy with the lights at night time and caves or wrecks but spending $4000 on lights that may give me 75cm more range in daytime seems not quite worth it lol.

Once I post some side by sides it will show how the filters went vs no filter but at beyond 25m no filter was almost a full green image and software cant recover anything. The filters especially the urpro and occulus stil captured a bit of colour and more was recoverble in post, the oculus is alittle darker and lost more detail then the urpro. The bs did ok but its sweet spot is more like 10m for it and its probably best at shallower then this but then it lost out to the others as soon as you get much past 10m.

In conditions like I had the gopros struggled beyond 25m with each filter and no filter altogether, if there was 30m vis it would have done ok to that depth but here lots of my dives early were at 25-30m. Still the urpro filters did best at the deepest level in most cases here.

---------- Post Merged at 10:36 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 09:58 AM ----------

Great thread Marty,
was talking to Bill @ SRP and he brought up your name and said that you have some really cool videos of there products.
so quick question what do you like more the gopro dive housing with the new dome filter or the blurfix with the filter. really having a hard time deciding.
I think I might go with the blurfix so that I can get some filter for out of water too.
anyway hope I did not hickjack the thread.
cheers
Deva

Main difference between the 2 is the GoPro dive is a little wider, on land this causes some strange warping on the frames edges and the main reason GoPro have used the round lens with a slight magnification to get rid of this I think. Underwater you do get the wider image with the GoPro dive but Im not sure if you need it to go that wide, the option of screw in filters and also a soon to be released wet filter are great for the Blurfix and I wont stop using this housing thats for sure. I really wont be taking filters off a great deal in regular use unless in dives like the cave here, but as I have a few gopros I can easier just record with and without a filter at once then get to choose which worked best for my final videos. I know many have been wanting wet filters and for the GoPro dive there is no other way really other then an external wet filter. The Blurfix for out of water use cant be beat and I have got my hands on 250GB of snow footage using the Blurfix with and without a CP filter so will post some of this at some point too. The CP in the snow I think is almost a must have as much as a dive filter for underwater use going by the results between the 2.

I havent properly checked these side by side yet but will post a raw comparison between them both to give an idea, I did have most issues with bubbles in the blurfix wet filter but mostly due to the camera being kind of out of reach and I didn't have an LCD bacpac on it so at times didn't realize a bubble was there until a long way into the dive. This isnt an issue with normal use but with 4 or 5 cameras in pretty rough conditions I was pretty heavily task loaded at most times lol. The first day I also had some minor issue with my ive gear which didn't help make things any easier and this made me do less then I intended to in the end. The poor conditions on day one meant I had to redo the comparison tests on day 2 as I wasn't sure if I quite got good enough results, I was hoping to go out and just use one or 2 cams on day 2 and focus just on shooting cool video but I didn't get the chance.

The main aim of using all the cams in this setup was to get a true comparison of each filter at all depth levels, I kept the cameras running throughout all the dives so I can easily sync all footage and also overlay my dive computers depth data. I also wanted to see if I could find what depth limits the filters will end up losing to a clear lens. This however is determined but the water and light conditions, the better the vis and light the deeper you will get with a filter. I dont think you would want to be using a filter beyond 30m in any case and in poor vis like here 20-25m will give best results with the URPro's.

With so much footage I still haven't watched all of it properly but I have made each dive showing each camera synced and it shows a few things. I have found that using a filter also gives much more scope in post using wb correction with my slate for reference and with the clear lens or BS at deeper depths this just doesnt work well. Even the URPro's were a battle in the deepest shark footage as the light was far from ideal for filter use.

 

[Interceptor121]

I didnt use the lights much outside the cave and really your not going to do much amongst the sharks. Even sola 4000s would work to a max 2 meters from the light which is pretty hard to get that close to the nurses for long enough. My 500s made them freak out a little too so more power would just scare them off quicker. If you look at videos in daylight using sola 1200s there isnt much of an improvement over my daytime results, there just still arent enough lumens to fill the wide fov of the gopro. Daytime lights are only best for macro or very close to subject shots, gopro doesnt do macro and you would likely need 4 powerfull wide video lights to fill a full wide frame of any camera in daytime.

Im happy with the lights at night time and caves or wrecks but spending $4000 on lights that may give me 75cm more range in daytime seems not quite worth it lol.

Once I post some side by sides it will show how the filters went vs no filter but at beyond 25m no filter was almost a full green image and software cant recover anything. The filters especially the urpro and occulus stil captured a bit of colour and more was recoverble in post, the oculus is alittle darker and lost more detail then the urpro. The bs did ok but its sweet spot is more like 10m for it and its probably best at shallower then this but then it lost out to the others as soon as you get much past 10m.

In conditions like I had the gopros struggled beyond 25m with each filter and no filter altogether, if there was 30m vis it would have done ok to that depth but here lots of my dives early were at 25-30m. Still the urpro filters did best at the deepest level in most cases here.

---------- Post Merged at 10:36 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 09:58 AM ----------

I was not suggesting using the lights for sharks in fact as you have experienced they don't like it. Sharks are typically shot with filters the lights even two are for shots at around 1-2 meters distance. Two Sola 1200 cost $1200 I would think this is a lot of money for a GoPro but 2,400 lumens total do allow some good shots of reef scenes still a hell of a lot of money

For what concerns the recovery of color in a clear day, not like you had there!, my UR/PRO works down to 26 meters max with a subject really close. Below that the additional light absorption of the filter means going from ISO200 to 400 on a bright day and something like from 400 to 800 on a day like you had. This can get the footage to be grainy so if you can shoot a white slate and use to rebalance and then play with the RGB gains you might have more success than shooting at higher ISO in terms of noise. Not sure if you have tried that?