GoPro Hero 3 Black and Pro-Tune

[amnesia]

Hi All;

I'm new to underwater photography (but not diving).

Heading out to Jamaica for a couple of weeks and picked up a GoPro Hero 3 Black edition and Polar Red Filter as well as an Intova tray and a couple of small Intova lights.

I understand the lack of colors due to light absorption and the need for color correction all that. I plan to use the lights when deep (90 ft) and nothing above 15 feet. I plant to shoot at 2.7K, 30 fps, Pro-Tune WB "camera raw" and edit afterwards.

What I'm wondering is at 15-75 feet should I also be using my red filter, or will I be better off filming without the filter (thereby letting in the most light possible) and correcting the color afterwards:

Thanks for the advice

 

[AdventurePlus]

I have been using the GoPro for a while and haven't really liked pro-tune. Admittedly I'm not terribly savvy on color correcting videos. I used a red filter from Snake River Prototyping in Honduras last winter and was very happy with the results without having to color correct. Without the filter the video looked very blue and I'm not sure how well if would correct. Here is the video from Honduras

[video=youtube_share;fZtWXH1j6T8]http://youtu.be/fZtWXH1j6T8[/video]

 

[amnesia]

WOW! I love your video. That's exactly what I hope to get.

I don't want to be experimenting too much and wasting great opportunities.

What settings did you use? (frame rate, resolution, etc). And what sort of mount did you use? Any lights? Your video is very smooth and well framed.

It looks like the water was very clear there. It's similar in Jamaica so I should be ok. Were you pretty shallow?

 

[AdventurePlus]

WOW! I love your video. That's exactly what I hope to get.

I don't want to be experimenting too much and wasting great opportunities.

What settings did you use? (frame rate, resolution, etc). And what sort of mount did you use? Any lights? Your video is very smooth and well framed.

It looks like the water was very clear there. It's similar in Jamaica so I should be ok. Were you pretty shallow?

This video was shot in 720p and I believe it was 60fps. I was using the Snake River Prototyping red dome filter and mostly without lights. You can see which shots a light was used on because the light wasn't as wide as the video giving it a ring of light in the center. I was also carrying a Sealife DC1400 Pro Duo for still shots and I rigged an attachment for the GoPro on the bottom of it. It basically gave me two handles to hold onto helping with the steadiness. If I was just carrying the gopro I would go for the SRP Tray Shop SRP Tray

The video was shot anywhere from 15' down to 80' and I used the filter the entire time regardless of depth. Hope this helps.

 

[amnesia]

AdventurePlus;

Very Helpful indeed.

Just out of curiosity, why did you choose 720p over 1080p?

 

[AliM]

I was literally about to post a new thread with similar questions, but since you already made the thread, I'll just add to the discussion. It seems to me that since the Black Edition Hero 3 lets you have near RAW data, then there is no need to use a filter as long as you color correct in post. I would imagine that it's better to take in all colors instead of filtering out a pre-determined wave length. This is essentially what happens when you shoot in RAW with any DSLR. You can do the same exact editing with video as you can with photographs. Granted, it's much more work to edit videos in post than to just have some decent looking video straight from the camera by using a filter, but that doesn't seem to justify the $40-120 price tag of filters. Not to mention you can be much more precise with the color correcting than a filter.

Anyone else have any thoughts or counter-arguments to what I said? I'm really curious to hear people's experience as I'm going to Maui soon (first time diving with a GoPro) and would like to know my chances of capturing solid video without filters.

 

[AdventurePlus]

AdventurePlus;

Very Helpful indeed.

Just out of curiosity, why did you choose 720p over 1080p?

This particular video was on a hero 2 and 720p had 60fps where 1080p only had 30fps. With the Hero 3 that I am shooting now I use the 1080p 60fps, and I've also been toying with the 1440p settings and cropping them back down to 1080p (gives me more room for poor aim).

---------- Post added July 9th, 2013 at 12:31 PM ----------

I was literally about to post a new thread with similar questions, but since you already made the thread, I'll just add to the discussion. It seems to me that since the Black Edition Hero 3 lets you have near RAW data, then there is no need to use a filter as long as you color correct in post. I would imagine that it's better to take in all colors instead of filtering out a pre-determined wave length. This is essentially what happens when you shoot in RAW with any DSLR. You can do the same exact editing with video as you can with photographs. Granted, it's much more work to edit videos in post than to just have some decent looking video straight from the camera by using a filter, but that doesn't seem to justify the $40-120 price tag of filters. Not to mention you can be much more precise with the color correcting than a filter.

Anyone else have any thoughts or counter-arguments to what I said? I'm really curious to hear people's experience as I'm going to Maui soon (first time diving with a GoPro) and would like to know my chances of capturing solid video without filters.

What program are you using to color correct with? I do most of my video editing in iMovie which seems very limited in the area of color correction so I generally just take what I can get off the camera.

 

[amnesia]

This particular video was on a hero 2 and 720p had 60fps where 1080p only had 30fps. With the Hero 3 that I am shooting now I use the 1080p 60fps, and I've also been toying with the 1440p settings and cropping them back down to 1080p (gives me more room for poor aim).

AdventurePlus;

If you want to "re-frame" why not shoot at 2.7K That would give you much more ability to crop down to 1080p. You could even use ProTune to supposedly get higher quality (due to higher bit rate) and still shoot with auto WB.

On a completely different note, when I was deciding on which camera's to buy, I looked at a lot of footage posted by people using Hedro 2's and Hero 3's, and quite honestly, I felt that the footage from the Hero 2's was much more pleasing to my eye than the 3's. They seemed brighter, and more colorful (much like yours above). The 3's looked darker and colors were not as vibrant. In the end I decided on the Hero 3 due to the included dive housing and other features like the remote, but all my favorite video posts were done with 2's. Anyone else noticed this?

 

[AliM]

What program are you using to color correct with? I do most of my video editing in iMovie which seems very limited in the area of color correction so I generally just take what I can get off the camera.

I'm a photographer, so I normally edit photos and not videos. With that said, I know that color correction on videos can be done rather easily in Adobe Premier Pro and slightly more painfully in Adobe Photoshop (almost all Photoshop adjustments made to images can be done to videos).

 

[amnesia]

I'm a photographer, so I normally edit photos and not videos. With that said, I know that color correction on videos can be done rather easily in Adobe Premier Pro and slightly more painfully in Adobe Photoshop (almost all Photoshop adjustments made to images can be done to videos).

You can color correct with GoPro's free software:

Cineform Studio

I'm not sure how good it is, but it seems fairly easy to use. As I see it, It's much easier to color correct in a static jpeg. In video things are constantly changing so you would have to be changing the correction all the time. Very time consuming I would think.

---------- Post added July 9th, 2013 at 01:15 PM ----------

BTW AdventurePlus;

A bit off topic, but how do you find the "fogging" problem? I bought a bunch of those moisture absorbers as I didn't want to be stuck in the Jungle with foggy videos, but I wonder how much of an issue it really is?