Underwater housing for JVC HDV

Bobby Grant · October 14th, 2003, 06:21 PM

Hi all,

Just came back from DEMA and we saw the new Gates housing for the camera, very nice. Now I STILL haven't seen output from the camera, but I'm going to remain neutral on the benefits of the camera till I see it for myself. the housing however is very nice, I find that a monitor is essential for UW work, and also an on off switch. We use DV start stop detection as a way of not having to slog through 15 tapes worth of dives (5 dives a day X 6 days). The turn time on the edits that we're doing is a mere ten days, so we are pre-editing on the boats (live aboards mostly). Anyways, I'm very interested in seeing any UW footage anyone has, and also any advice on getting HDV into FCP 4.0 on Mac OSX....enough alphabet soup !

There is a possibility that we'll have the JVC camera and the Gates housing for some cage diving with great white's in early november. If this happens, I'd love some advice on how this camera reacts UW etc. We'll be in 15 ft of water, in a cage, off of isla guadalope...chumming for big guys. I'm going t have enough daylight filtering through to not really need the red filter, and I prefer to color correct in post when shallow depths are involved. This leads to the inevitable question about exposure control, I have it on my pd-150 and it's absolutely crucial to getting good footage...what options do I have on the JVC camera? Can anyone post some still frames from the camera? Or give me a hint about the lattitude of this medium in a UW situation?

Oh, and BTW, my wife easily outlasts a 42 min DVCAM tape on any given dive, we know because occasionally her housing will get stuck in the ON position, and we have to shoot through it. She can beat the tape on an aluminum 60! It's not fair at all... I need to look into mortgaging my firstborn for a Megalodon rebreather or something.

cheers
bobby

Darren Kelly · October 14th, 2003, 07:07 PM

Well,

You can use an entire mini dv tape, you will have 60 minutes, so that helps.

I am producing a How2 dvd on this camera and hope to have the use of an UW housing from Ikelite in a few days and some footage shot in the water off the Florida coast. You might have seen some in their booth at DEMA.

If I get something, it will be on the DVD as sample footage.

Cheers

Bobby Grant · October 15th, 2003, 12:01 AM

Hey Darren,

We'd love to use DV tapes, but we have to use dv-cam for the component recording capability... coming out of a dsr-85 in sdi into any machine (mac, sgi, immix sphere) in uncompressed 10 bit gives you slightly better color rendition, especially if you're compressing for dvd. We've A/B'd dv vs dvcam and there is definitely a quality difference. Looking forward to seeing your dvd, when's it shipping?...before nov.4?

peace
bobby

p.s went by the ike booth twice on wednesday and thursday, the hd setup was not up and running, just an empty table with brochures... the other days i was chained to my booth..is there a place i can check out frames shot on the jvc hdv camera ?

Darren Kelly · October 15th, 2003, 12:09 AM

This camera uses mini dv.

If you really seea difference in the two formats, mini dv and dvcam, you better tell sony because they can't see a difference. Statistically there is no difference.

You can still leave a DSR85 component with a mini dv tape. Yes, component out does make a difference if you have a capture card.

The DVD ships Novemeber 1 at the latest.

Bobby Grant · October 15th, 2003, 01:09 AM

I may be blind in one eye but....we se a diff. There is another issue: reliability, we see a lot more dropouts in dv. Back in the days of the vx-1000 i used to cry sometimes when catastrophic errors caused job-loss, a strange and critical disease that one gets, and one cannot make the payments on the flame in ones studio....but, I think it's the old fuji gives you nicer reds and kodak doesn't screw up the greens arg that we had back when people still had the budget to shoot super 16 and 35 for a living... some still do. I'm happy with dv-cam.
getting back to the REAL topic, how do you edit with the HDV camera, Steve mullen's osx techniques, the pc->AE way...is it possible to upconvert the mpeg-2 so that it's uncompressed and can live on an HD-CAM tape? One "onion chopping with a chainsaw" solution to all the editing fuss is: upconvert th HD out of this camera to a panasonic or sony? (i don't think they make a 720p recorder...may be wrong) deck. Use a kona-HD or an HD flame to bring in the footage, and then do whatever you want... Output to HD on a panasonic, save it off to play on a big HDscreen...or bury it as a time capsule...call your friends and see if you can see the matrix buried in the bits... i dunno. It just seems like: If you want to use the camera in a real HD setting, like playing on to a real HD screen, you do your cutting/compositing/efx in as high a res as possible and then downconvert if necessary. I mean, can this camera be "second camera" to a varicam? Will it cut?If so, I have a job or three for it.

On th UW side, well...perhaps the limitations of shooting UW are not exacerbated by the JVC HD camera.
I'm really dying to get an a-minima housing that lets you take down zeiss primes, but that's stupid expensive. I have yet to shoot motion film underwater in an uncontrolled situation i.e. open ocean, any thoughts/experience on that? THat's what really interests me... all this tape stuff is for the meals...film is for the reel. Anyways, i digress. Looking forward to seeing your dvd darren. Hey Jay, how's the footage from your housing?

peace
bobby

ps we're using sdi, not component...blacks are nicer in sdi for some reason, always loved the digi-beta decks.. but very flaky...AJA makes nice stuff, we use their converters to take the old beta-sp deck and give it sdi ins and outs to and from component. and the dsr-85 has sdi out.

pps i'd love to talk with you offline about ordering a dvd. we are in tobago for a week at the end of october, then we go shark diving, hopefully with the gates housing.on nov.4

Jay Nemeth · October 15th, 2003, 06:12 PM

I just got back from Hawaii, did some dives off the west shore of Oahu. Visibility was not that great because of the surf picking up, but I got some footage of white tipped reef sharks and some other marine life. I'm shooting a pilot to see if this camera can hold up for a broadcast show. Our guest expert was an Oceangraphic Researcher from University of Hawaii.

I'm still finishing up the new computer so I can import the m2t files for all to see. I don't even have USB 2.0 on my current computer to import a still image from the memory card.

In a couple of weeks I'm going to dump some JVC footage through an analog HD to HD-SDI converter onto D5 or DVCPro-HD. Then we are going to cross convert some to 1080/60i to HDCam and see how that holds up. This camera has gotten so much bad press, that the broadcasters have pretty much written it off already. I feel I have been able to squeeze as much as is possible out of it, so we'll see how these tests look.

Also, the downconverted component 480i straight to a DigiBeta deck looks extremely good. Some people are saying it looks better than material that originated on a DigiBeta camera. It really all depends on who is shooting, what the conditions are, and the settings on the camera.

Jay

October 14th, 2003, 06:21 PM	#16
Bobby Grant Tourist Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Santa Monica, CA Posts: 3	JVC Camera UnderWater Hi all, Just came back from DEMA and we saw the new Gates housing for the camera, very nice. Now I STILL haven't seen output from the camera, but I'm going to remain neutral on the benefits of the camera till I see it for myself. the housing however is very nice, I find that a monitor is essential for UW work, and also an on off switch. We use DV start stop detection as a way of not having to slog through 15 tapes worth of dives (5 dives a day X 6 days). The turn time on the edits that we're doing is a mere ten days, so we are pre-editing on the boats (live aboards mostly). Anyways, I'm very interested in seeing any UW footage anyone has, and also any advice on getting HDV into FCP 4.0 on Mac OSX....enough alphabet soup ! There is a possibility that we'll have the JVC camera and the Gates housing for some cage diving with great white's in early november. If this happens, I'd love some advice on how this camera reacts UW etc. We'll be in 15 ft of water, in a cage, off of isla guadalope...chumming for big guys. I'm going t have enough daylight filtering through to not really need the red filter, and I prefer to color correct in post when shallow depths are involved. This leads to the inevitable question about exposure control, I have it on my pd-150 and it's absolutely crucial to getting good footage...what options do I have on the JVC camera? Can anyone post some still frames from the camera? Or give me a hint about the lattitude of this medium in a UW situation? Oh, and BTW, my wife easily outlasts a 42 min DVCAM tape on any given dive, we know because occasionally her housing will get stuck in the ON position, and we have to shoot through it. She can beat the tape on an aluminum 60! It's not fair at all... I need to look into mortgaging my firstborn for a Megalodon rebreather or something. cheers bobby

October 14th, 2003, 07:07 PM	#17
Darren Kelly Major Player Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Vancouver Posts: 351	Well, You can use an entire mini dv tape, you will have 60 minutes, so that helps. I am producing a How2 dvd on this camera and hope to have the use of an UW housing from Ikelite in a few days and some footage shot in the water off the Florida coast. You might have seen some in their booth at DEMA. If I get something, it will be on the DVD as sample footage. Cheers __________________ Darren Kelly

October 15th, 2003, 12:01 AM	#18
Bobby Grant Tourist Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Santa Monica, CA Posts: 3	60 min tapes Hey Darren, We'd love to use DV tapes, but we have to use dv-cam for the component recording capability... coming out of a dsr-85 in sdi into any machine (mac, sgi, immix sphere) in uncompressed 10 bit gives you slightly better color rendition, especially if you're compressing for dvd. We've A/B'd dv vs dvcam and there is definitely a quality difference. Looking forward to seeing your dvd, when's it shipping?...before nov.4? peace bobby p.s went by the ike booth twice on wednesday and thursday, the hd setup was not up and running, just an empty table with brochures... the other days i was chained to my booth..is there a place i can check out frames shot on the jvc hdv camera ?

October 15th, 2003, 12:09 AM	#19
Darren Kelly Major Player Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Vancouver Posts: 351	This camera uses mini dv. If you really seea difference in the two formats, mini dv and dvcam, you better tell sony because they can't see a difference. Statistically there is no difference. You can still leave a DSR85 component with a mini dv tape. Yes, component out does make a difference if you have a capture card. The DVD ships Novemeber 1 at the latest. __________________ Darren Kelly

October 15th, 2003, 01:09 AM	#20
Bobby Grant Tourist Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Santa Monica, CA Posts: 3	DV and dvcam I may be blind in one eye but....we se a diff. There is another issue: reliability, we see a lot more dropouts in dv. Back in the days of the vx-1000 i used to cry sometimes when catastrophic errors caused job-loss, a strange and critical disease that one gets, and one cannot make the payments on the flame in ones studio....but, I think it's the old fuji gives you nicer reds and kodak doesn't screw up the greens arg that we had back when people still had the budget to shoot super 16 and 35 for a living... some still do. I'm happy with dv-cam. getting back to the REAL topic, how do you edit with the HDV camera, Steve mullen's osx techniques, the pc->AE way...is it possible to upconvert the mpeg-2 so that it's uncompressed and can live on an HD-CAM tape? One "onion chopping with a chainsaw" solution to all the editing fuss is: upconvert th HD out of this camera to a panasonic or sony? (i don't think they make a 720p recorder...may be wrong) deck. Use a kona-HD or an HD flame to bring in the footage, and then do whatever you want... Output to HD on a panasonic, save it off to play on a big HDscreen...or bury it as a time capsule...call your friends and see if you can see the matrix buried in the bits... i dunno. It just seems like: If you want to use the camera in a real HD setting, like playing on to a real HD screen, you do your cutting/compositing/efx in as high a res as possible and then downconvert if necessary. I mean, can this camera be "second camera" to a varicam? Will it cut?If so, I have a job or three for it. On th UW side, well...perhaps the limitations of shooting UW are not exacerbated by the JVC HD camera. I'm really dying to get an a-minima housing that lets you take down zeiss primes, but that's stupid expensive. I have yet to shoot motion film underwater in an uncontrolled situation i.e. open ocean, any thoughts/experience on that? THat's what really interests me... all this tape stuff is for the meals...film is for the reel. Anyways, i digress. Looking forward to seeing your dvd darren. Hey Jay, how's the footage from your housing? peace bobby ps we're using sdi, not component...blacks are nicer in sdi for some reason, always loved the digi-beta decks.. but very flaky...AJA makes nice stuff, we use their converters to take the old beta-sp deck and give it sdi ins and outs to and from component. and the dsr-85 has sdi out. pps i'd love to talk with you offline about ordering a dvd. we are in tobago for a week at the end of october, then we go shark diving, hopefully with the gates housing.on nov.4

October 15th, 2003, 06:12 PM	#21
Jay Nemeth Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Las Vegas, NV Posts: 64	I just got back from Hawaii, did some dives off the west shore of Oahu. Visibility was not that great because of the surf picking up, but I got some footage of white tipped reef sharks and some other marine life. I'm shooting a pilot to see if this camera can hold up for a broadcast show. Our guest expert was an Oceangraphic Researcher from University of Hawaii. I'm still finishing up the new computer so I can import the m2t files for all to see. I don't even have USB 2.0 on my current computer to import a still image from the memory card. In a couple of weeks I'm going to dump some JVC footage through an analog HD to HD-SDI converter onto D5 or DVCPro-HD. Then we are going to cross convert some to 1080/60i to HDCam and see how that holds up. This camera has gotten so much bad press, that the broadcasters have pretty much written it off already. I feel I have been able to squeeze as much as is possible out of it, so we'll see how these tests look. Also, the downconverted component 480i straight to a DigiBeta deck looks extremely good. Some people are saying it looks better than material that originated on a DigiBeta camera. It really all depends on who is shooting, what the conditions are, and the settings on the camera. Jay