New owner of Canon HF200 and have a couple questions

[nutsmagoo]

I am eagerly anticipating the arrival of my WP-V1 underwater housing so I can start using my new camera. One of the things I will be doing with this setup is recording our fishing trips. I will be using a polecam setup and capturing video above the water and up to a couple feet below the surface of the water. I also plan on buying an Ikelite W-20 wide angle lens. A couple questions:

1) Given that I will be capturing footage above and below the surface of the water in the same scene should I have the camera in underwater mode? Or maybe it wont make much of a difference since the camera wont be deep when it is under water?

2) I thought I read something about water getting in between the wide angle lens and the camera housing. Will this be a problem with what I want to do with the camera going in and out of the water?

3) I also like taking stills from the video footage. Should I record in 60i or 30p to get the best results? It seems 60i is higher quality for video, but not sure what will produce the best stills.

Thanks.

 

[nutsmagoo]

Here is an example of what I want to do with the camera going in and out of the water:

Wahoo 4-22-09 on Vimeo

 

[gunsrunner]

Hi,
1) I would not use underwater mode, you will find your topside video to be pink and your not going deep enough to need the filtering.

2)Yes there are slots cut in the lens mounting ring at the bottom and top that let the water in between the housing port and the wide angle lens. I found that if you hold the housing in the right position the filling and unfilling happens fast enough to work, BUT!. After doing this a few times, if the water is dirty you may have problems. If so the thread about the canon wp-v1 shows how to mode the port to give better flow.

3)From what i have read they are both recorded onto the SDHC card the same, only during playback the interlaced frames are converted to progressive to give a smoother/softer image (video only). If i have this wrong can someone please correct me!!