Juhanis Blog

This was interesting. Snake River Prototyping release rig to underwater filming. The tray is machined aluminum and it has several connection points.

There are in the market other also. Some of them have lights like Sartek, Noctural lights, Tecdiving

I made post from Snake River Prototyping flat lens fix, although there are now similar ones like Backscatter, the snake river is still the one of the most interesting ones. I currently own two snake river flat ports and have been very happy with them. Actually I participated to the Eilat Red Sea Underwater competition only using GoPro cameras. Well, I did not won anything, I was still very happy to the quality of the pictures that I got from there. In all those pictures I used Snake River Prototyping BlurFix flat port with attached SWCY or CY filters. The color filters makes big difference in underwater because otherwise the it will easily clip the red from the video material totally and no post prosessing will get that back.

What I find interesting in the the tray as the called is there are so many possibilities to attach the camera. The only worry I have is that as the camera is attached front of the handles is similar as you would hold the camera with stick, even with both hands. I hope that I will have a change to test it. I would like to make some comparison then between the rigs that I have and theirs. For travellers like me this will be at least very interesting because of the simple design and as it very light(1.7 lbs/0.8kg) and that is including the camera.

The introductory price is 129.99 $, and it seems that the final price will be 150$

Here is their example video using the tray and some color filters

Information from the tray

I have had the new housing for just couple months and did small test in June.

I have had very busy with work so not much doing blog, let’s try do more of that.

Anyway I had change to make small 3D video during my workshop with Philip Bloom, Nino Leitner and
Sebastian Wiegärtner.

The camera still seems to be skipping some frames in timelapse mode so it means that it goes out of sync in longer timelapses.
I had to manually remove these extra frames to get them somehow sync. Still there remains a few frames that are not in sync between left and right.

The conversion to 3D footage is not easiest to use, and sometimes crashes, it still relative easy.

This film was edited using Adobe Premiere CS5 and I actually was using the Cineform plugin that comes with the Neo SW.

In the end, very nice housing, but lacking underwater possibility because of the out of focus problem that is actually now in the 3D housing as well.

My Athens trip turned out very nicely, although I do feel bit sad of economic situation of Greece. So I do feel that There is something that I can do. For my it was no nice to see good people struggling on several jobs just to get so income. Special thanks goes to  Aqua Divers Club that picked me up from the center of Athens and took me to their dive center just to make two dive and I was the only customer diving. The dive center is located about 35km from center of Athens. We ended up misunderstanding of the second day scuba diving and I missed the underwater car cemetery, but then again that day was raining all day so somehow I don’t think missing so much. Also special thanks to Virve who lives currently there and showed me the city.

Scuba diving was actually very nice in the Greece. The equipment’s were very good shape and the water was clear. Although there are not so much live in the sea as like red sea has but at least comparing to Finland, well almost everything is better There are parts of my video from it. They are filmed with GoPro HD heroes, I’m starting to love these small cameras.

In the city there are lot of cultural activities but somehow I didn’t end up watching those, because somehow I have learn that where ever I go. I’m more interested of the people and what they do. Athens is a big city, people are very busy. Day to day jumping from bus to metro is not for me in long term but for a while it’s ok.

Nowadays it seems that where ever I go, I end up shooting pictures and video. They are different way of expressing oneself and don’t exclude each other.

You can find my portfolio from Athens here.

And what comes to video, It’s filmed mostly with GoPro cameras, but there are used Canon 5Dmk2 with Canon 100/2.8L Is macro as well. You just can’t do all with GoPro cameras.

I was traveling in Australia and New Zealand for a month, taking pictures and shooting 3D videos with my rig. This started my project to get one short film from every city I visited. This is the video I made in Sydney.

After the airplane, next scenes are filmed in Hyde Park and in there I met Michael from Germany. He is the bicyclist that told me that where ever he goes, bike comes with him.

After Hyde Park the next scene are from shopping mall and another park following scenes.

Just next to Sydney Opera house there was these music artist with didgeridoo. I really liked his music, bough one CD and filmed him a bit. I also got permission to use his music in my video.

After that scene there is the strange person that I don’t know what he was doing, but as far as I understand he tried to earn some money to start some kind of religion. He had lost his foots in somehow.

The beach is Bondi beach.

In the end Sydney was kind of nice place for as a metropolis.

You can also buy modified housing for Gopro with 100 dollars from Sartek Industries

GOPRO original vs. Sartek Housing from Dustin Mcintyre on Vimeo.

GoPro knows about this and in their support pages is said that they are currently developing a solution, when this comes is a mystery. In the mean time we just need to hope that it’s coming soon.

I love 3d movies and as soon as I figured out that I could start shooting 3d video I started to study how to do it. As many know, I also shoot underwater stills and videos so my need was of course underwater possibility. So as I had already one GoPro HD Hero camera and I noticed that GoPro had announced a 3d-housing for their camera, it was time to buy a second camera.(Please check NAB 2010) After many failures with different types of rigs I soon figured out that the simplest solution is the best. Until I really have a 3d-housing I need to use something else, this is what I made. I just connected the two cameras with iron barn.

First I used Cineform NeoHD program with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 to edit my 3d videos. I did get some nice videos with this solution but because of some odd software problem(NeoHD crashing), it was really difficult to get any good example file.

I had to gave up from Cineform because I got info from them that it’s known bug. Cineform was able to pinpoint my problem in their software and provided me an update where this problem was fixed. I need to test it separately.

I found easy way to watch my 3d movies. First I open them in QuickTime, edit the file so that it will start from my sync point and then I save as reference file. I can play them directly in Nvidia Vision 3D Player just by opening two videos, though FullHD was too much for my hard drive, now I need to update my computer

I will update the workflow of editing 3d footage into here

Anyway I found much more simpler solution. I edited the video directly in Premiere Pro CS5. I made an sequence that is double the wide of my footage and imported all video in there. Then I just offset right video to the left side and left to right side, YouTube wants it in this format. After this I edited it, added sound and exported it. Here is the final solution.

I just got another GoPro Hero HD camera and will be using both of these in filming 3d footage. Made some test and looks promising. Will keep you posted.