GoPro Catalina Kelp Forest in B&W

[tye1138]

I love the GoPro for quick dirty shooting, it works fantastic. This video I shot with my new Hero 3 Black +, which has a better sensor then the older Hero 2 I had been using previously. Its my first excursion with this particular camera underwater and I have to admit, with no lights, its pretty darn impressive. Sure, in situations where it automatically stepped up the gain, it got grainy, but it wasn't god awful. I literally threw the camera in its housing and held it between my fingers for the whole dive. My buddy had some extra rope with her, so we tied it off to a bolt so I could attach it to me when not in use.

Having come back with some good material, I just cut together a brief, dark and mysterious video, set to Beck's song Waves. I also put together a color version available on youtube using the link in my sig. Its neat to see the contrast between the two, color vs B&W, even though they're slightly different cuts.

Enjoy!

Catalina in Black and White on Vimeo

 

[havnmonkey]

Excellent! Def glad you went with the BW version. It goes really well with the kelp and the soundtrack.

 

[Incident]

Tyler, aside from the post prod conversion to B&W, which settings did you use on the GoPro? Was this 1080 or 720 and which frame rate?

Thanks!

Very cool video BTW!!

 

[tye1138]

Thanks guys!

I shot everything at 23.98 (24p) 1080p standard mode, not wide mode. The boat shots were shot with my iPhone in 30p, so they were converted to 23.98 automatically in the sequence.

Edited with FCP X. I'm a professional editor by trade, but I wanted to edit with my laptop in h264 natively. It worked well, but its a bit noisier then if I had converted everything to pro res first and edited on my FCP 7 or Avid workstation. After a 10hr day of editing, the last thing you wanna do is sit back in front of your work station! heh

 

[Incident]

Thanks for the info on the settings. I cannot for my life get good images using 1080 on my Hero 2.

I set it to 720/60fps, and the images look great. Not sure why this would be, but I have consistent results this way.

 

[CT-Rich]

Really nice, the music created a great mood.

 

[tye1138]

Yea, the Hero 2 unfortunately doesn't work well. The chip is a 960X720 native sensor, so whenever you set it to 1080 its being scaled. The first true 1080 sensor is on the Hero 3 Black. Its amazing because, my Hero 3 doesn't like the 960x720/60 mode, it LOVES the 1920x1080/30p mode, thats where it shines. I only shoot at 24p because my other cinema grade cameras are 23.98 and its imperative that I can mix the material without having to use a 3:2 pulldown.

You'll see what I'm talking about on my next video in a few weeks, where I'll be mixing footage.