Glued a GoPro to a Bluefin housing

[stphnmartin]

I have a trip to Raja Ampat coming up in March and was thinking of ways to basically cover every scenario I could encounter with my video camera. It's tough to be ready for everything, but since I'll probably only get to this destination once in my life, I want to stack the odds in my favor.

I usually have my video camera setup for macro and I manually white balance against my video lights. This works really well until something larger comes along. While I can pan back the camera I have no time to adjust the white balance so creatures at a distance come out really badly. I do have a wide angle lens, but I have to choose either wide or macro for the dive.

Long story short, I decided to get a GoPro and glue it onto the top of my Bluefin housing. I've never used a GoPro before and my initial attempts were really bad! Anyway, today I think I finally got it dialed in a bit more and I wanted to share in case others think it's a useful setup. It looks like this:

Bluefin and gopro

At sunrise today I filmed a GPO in the open with a Sony CX550 in the Bluefin housing and a GoPro 4 black on top. Back at home I looked at the GoPro video and threw up in my mouth. It looked like this:

Raw GoPro footage

I imported the video into Final Cut and tweaked on the GoPro footage for 25 minutes and managed to get it in line and now am a bit excited about the creative possibilities. The GoPro can film wide angle while I'm in tighter with the sony camera for the same scene. (Of course, I have to figure out how to get better GoPro footage that doesn't require massive grading).

So, here's a quick test of the same scene shot with both cameras simultaneously. You can see the sony is in tight while the GoPro is at a different angle and wide. I thought it was kinda cool.

phpBB [video]

[ljjames]

Beautiful footage!!

This is something I've done a lot, mostly because there are dives, like you say, that you can't miss. For me its usually a work gig and even though I trust my cameras it never hurts to have a backup especially as they have improved. Also you can put a mount facing backwards and get the cool 'looking at diver view' which can be fun at times to mix in, especially if it catches your buddy doing stuff behind you

That footage just looks like you are using protune, meaning it spits out that very flat image which is ready and waiting for a color grade. You can come up with a correction profile specifically for them (basically contrast, saturation, blahblablah, looks like you figured it out) and then fine tune it. For the most part if you shoot it the way you are describing (with your lights controlling a lot of the variables) you should just be able to drop it on most footage with good results, or even simpler for now, just copy the attributes from the octopus shot and paste them on to new clips shot out here in similar situations.

[Jan K]

Impressive. It seems to eliminate the age old dilemma, "macro or wide" before every dive

[Scubie Doo]

Very nice video, I really like to see the contrast of the two systems. great stuff.

[Tangfish]

Impressive. It seems to eliminate the age old dilemma, "macro or wide" before every dive

One of my least favorite dilemmas!

[stphnmartin]

Thanks all and thanks for the tips ljjames. I hadn't thought of turning the gopro around mainly because I don't want to see my face. :-) But catching a buddy up to something or an approaching tiger shark is a good idea. I read online I should use protune but didn't really know what to expect. I'm also finding 4k to be overkill and slow to process! Though the 8 year old mac could be the bottleneck.

[ljjames]

Yeah, i'm in same boat re: 4K and old computer. Jurassicmac is an early 2009 mac pro. The only real benefit of it is the ability to crop and stabilize without loosing resolution so to speak, since everything is viewed in 720p on vimeo or youtube for most part (stats on my 4k videos on youtube show that I'm probably the only one who ups the res to max - ok and there was the dancing stormtroopers video, i did watch that in 4K too)

Protune is flavor of week if you want maximum dynamic range out of the gopro and it HAS to be graded as you found out. You can even download a LUT (Look Up Table) to make grading it faster (assuming you like the look of the grade) if you have some LUT loader plugin. That will get you to rec. 709 which is a color space you'll recognize (similar to your primary camera) https://www.groundcontrolcolor.com/free-gopro-lut.html https://vimeo.com/127903489 is a good example of grading with a LUT.

When I do edit 4K I always edit Proxy files, otherwise trying to actually edit 4K brings jurassicmac to its knees I've got too much editing to do to bog things down, but very few deliverables in 4k (only 2 to date) so I can't quite justify a new(used) 2013 mac pro spittoon.

[stphnmartin]

I'm still rendering at 1080p but wanted the flexibility 4k offered for the benefits you mentioned.

I had snagged a different LUT I found online after looking into gopro 4k workflows with FCP. I've yet to use it. Thanks for the link. I'll check it out. Same with proxy media. I didn't have a need for it yet. And, now, even more footage to not doing anything with! My dive buddy always says, I don't know why you always bring your camera because I never get to see any of it!