Filming Underwater and Editing
 

Is there anyone out there who is using a VX2100 for underwater filming and Final Cut Studio on the Mac for editing?

Steve

Hi Steve,

I hope to try some underwater stuff in the distant future. Just been looking at your youtube stuff - have you dived around Lundy Island?

Grant

Lundy isn't a place I have been to. Would love to try it but I haven't had the opportunity. Being originally a Londoner I dived mainly the south coast and then I moved to Scotland and spent a lot of time in Scapa. I have just moved to Wales though so a trip to Lundy is now more of a realitiy.

Steve

The diving's meant to be pretty good around here. I don't dive myself, but a few of the staff do. It would be nice to see some footage of the wrecks and seals etc. if you're in the area...

I just had a look at your website and it looks great. I would love to come and get some video of the Lundy area, as I said, it's a place I have always wanted to go and visit but there has always been a logistical problem.

Steve

Yeah it's a bit of problem getting out here. Both Ilfracombe and Appledore sub-aqua clubs have regular trips in the summer. And I think that the Pride of Bristol does live-aboards. Other boats will do special charters from Ilfracombe or Clovelly. I'm not sure about the Welsh side of the Channel, we quite often get yachts from Swansea and Mumbles.

Away, this is getting away from your thread. Is the VX2100 a good/easy camera to use underwater? What sort of housing do you use?

Almost, but not quite!

I film U/W with a

- Sony PC-350 in Light and motion Mako housing
- Sony FX1 in Light and Motion Bluefin HD housing
- Dual 24W HID video lights (depending on conditions)

Editing is done in Final Cut Express, but I still feel like I am wrestling a 9-armed octopus with this piece of S/W. it seems to make every operation un-necessarily complex and fiddly (In my opinion)

The VX2100 is quite an easy camera underwater. I have an Ikelite housing rated at 60m with the Ikelite 100w Pro Light system on it.

Steve

I agree with what you say about Final Cut. It's designed for recording studios with editors who do a college degree in film editing. What software did you use before going to Final Cut?

Steve

iMovie, which meets a lot of my needs really, but I thought I'd get more benefit in color correction/fixing up footage with FCE.

However, what i really discovered was

- Import of DV (not HDV) is really annoying in FCE. I end up with 1 12G file per tape which is just ugly.
- The UI is "fiddly" I try to move something and a clip accidentally gets resized (usually to a single frame so it's hard to delete/see later)
- If I do nested sequences, then remove footage from a sub-sequence, I get a gap of black frames in the master squence (sometimes)
- clips dont seem to snap together well (maybe there is a preference for this) and so I often get 1-2 black frames between clips. Sometimes Close Gap works, mostly it's greyed out
- Changing volume level of clips (fade etc.) seems un-necessarily complex (although it might be easier on the timeline)
- The whole Viewer/Canvas view is weird. When i go to the viewer, and say want to lighten the footage, I have to go to another tab to apply the video filter. Of course, I then cannot see the footage I am modifying !!(without opening another window or moving the play head)
- FCE does not act like a real application (same for Photoshop) -- I cannot see how to easily minimize it etc.
- I dont think I can do subtitles/Credits in FCE, so I go back to iMovie for those
- I have not yet figured out transitions (but I dont use them anyway)
- It's impossible to easily tell which (and how much) of each clip from the storage bins are used in timelines (iMovie has similar but not as bad issues).
- when i add chapter markers and then edit the movie, I need to re-add all the markers?

i guess I could go on. Admittedly some/all of it could be my stupidity, as I am only just learning.

the way i see this is that the workflow of the application does not match the way I want to use it.

I would like to break the process into phases/modes

1- Acquisition -- SD, HD, audio, MPEG etc. from tapes, files on disk, capture cards -- whatever. Then you log each clip, describe it, and store a database of each one. At this point, you should be able to "erase" a bad clip and reclaim the storage.

2- Storyline -- here you kind of select clips into timelines as a basic 'story' but dont edit the clips yet maybe. timelines/sequences then can be nested etc.

3- Edit -- here you trim clips etc, maybe add audio etc.

and so on through filtering/color correct, special effects maybe, followed by 'finishing' -- setting a bunch of params for export that you can save for later, chapter/compression markers etc.

EDIT: And dont even get me started about the pain of exporting SD 4:3 movies and stills with the correct 16:9 aspect ratio and the correct flags set for iDVD (I have now become much friendlier with Calculator than I'd really like to be)

Not sure I can answer all of that but I am a newbie with FCS but I must agree it's rather unfriendly. I'm going to try the iMovie option as I bought the iMac as it's a better computer for video processing than my PC so I will let you know how I get on.

Steve

iMovie has some really nice features and I think is pretty easy to use.

it also has the benefit of when I export a still frame in 16:9 format ... hey! the JPEG is actually 16:9 instead of squashed 4:3 that I have to resize in photoshop. Now there's a concept!

I need to review iMovie and see if it has enough color-correction options for me so that I can go back to it. FCE is killing me.