shooting video underwater - turning on the camcorder and letting it run the whole dive is not the way to make good video. I see this (posted on YouTube) alot and it isn't something worthwhile. By doing this you defeat the purpose of "standby" and you waste battery. Plus editing one long clip into a usable video is painful, to say the least. You want to turn on camcorder and get in water, then shoot when you see something interesting and then put in standby, swim around and when you see something else interesting you hit button again and record... repeat throughout the dive. That way you end up with dozens of shorter clips (maybe 15 seconds to a minute each, sometimes longer) and have used only 15-20 minutes of battery time at most, even on an hour long dive.
I find that on my dives I shoot maybe 10 minutes of footage, even on long, fantastic dives! No wasted blurry video of me swimming around, camera moving around, etc. Then at end of day, after doing 3-4 dives, I download my footage and change battery (I am not using one of these small camcorders so YMMV.) This also means that I am not taking the camcorder in and out of housing all day long, risking floods and fogging of lens.
When I first got my camcorder, I took it on my first liveaboard trip.
I learned most of what I know now from that trip. I made a huge mistake on the first shark dive by letting the camcorder run for 15 minutes straight. When I got home and tried to edit, I couldn't find where this happened or that happened ... I had to watch that whole long clip over and over and over to edit out the usuable portions. It was tedious and made me want to pull my hair out. :shocked2: Plus the editing software gives you nice little preview pictures of each clip so when editing you can immediately find those clips to put in your finished video. It is really so easy and soooooo cool once you have done it right.
robin