I spent half of Sunday helping Adam and Rae film the largest scene in their upcoming documentary on Qui Jin.

Li Jing flies above the Women’s Army (photo: Adam Tow)

Although my allergies made it a painful few hours, I enjoyed manning the second camera at Tilden Park and taking stills of the production. 34 extras put up with bitterly-cold wind, filling out the “army” and learning martial arts moves for the training session scene. It was fun to meet Li Jing; she was really funny.

Flickr is now allowing the uploading of videos. The video quality is really good, but they limit your videos to 90 seconds (a mistake, I think). In any case, I just just found a replacement for Veoh for videos under 90 seconds! YouTube’s video quality is subpar when compared to Flickr’s, and YouTube’s community is terrible (for comments, I mean).

Check out the video in fullscreen. It’s not bad. It also isn’t obvious how to break out of fullscreen mode if you don’t read the instructions :) (hit ESC to return).

I’ve posted a teaser video from the Shark Angels project. (read more »)

Norb let me try out his Panasonic HVX200. I didn’t really know what I was doing and set it to record 720/60P instead of setting it for 720/24P overcranked to 60 fps, so I had to use Motion to re-time the footage (which may not have been necessary). (read more »)

This is quite random. I was watching the behind the scenes video of Paul Steward’s experience in Tari (Papua New Guinea), capturing video footage of birds of paradise for BBC’s Planet Earth. I met and befriended him while we were both there.

Anyway, in the footage, they show Huli men dancing, which reminded me that I have a bunch of (crappy) video from Mt. Hagen and Tari taken with my old point & shoot camera (mostly shot to capture an audio track).

So here’s one of the videos. It’s footage of the Chimbu’s dead child “dance”, which they performed continuously at the Mt. Hagen Cultural Festival. (read more »)

I played a lot with infrared time-lapse during the trip to Tanzania. Here’s a sample video of dramatic clouds (in near-infrared) rolling in over the plains of the Serengeti. (read more »)

the new iMovie

I saw the prototype of this app last year while on a dive trip with the “video engineer” at Apple that Steve Jobs referred to in the announcement (signed a NDA). I was really excited about it back then, and am glad to see that it made a major product!

I frequently whip up short videos using iMovie, and hope that the new version doesn’t have a generic “H.264″ project setting that automatically crappifies all incoming video from small compact still cameras. There is no way to get good video quality in the prior versions because the video gets transcoded so poorly on the way in.

Dearest Lazyweb and Final Cut Pro / Compressor gurus — I have a question for you. Let’s say I have a bunch of clips in a timeline. Is there any way to automatically overlay text from metadata values onto a video clip? Let’s say I want to embed:

1. a copyright overlay
2. the clip name
3. the timecode

What would be ideal is to be able to overlay the text onto each clip and render out special, watermarked versions for layout in a timeline. This must be a standard thing — I’ve seen it done. I’m just not sure how to do it. :)

Right now, I am doing #1 and #2 by hand, and it’s … tiresome. I have no idea how to do #3, and some some old(er) film types tell me that they use some sort of hardware box to do it. That seems lame.

Just over a year ago, I posted the results of my first time with a video camera underwater. While in the Bahamas, I took footage of tiger sharks, great hammerhead sharks, lemon sharks, bull sharks, oceanic blacktip sharks, and Caribbean reef sharks.

I gave a talk on big animals at the 53rd Boston Sea Rovers Clinic last month, which became the perfect excuse to edit down all of that video footage into a 2:25 montage. Enjoy! :)

Tony Wu has posted a short video of some of our whale encounters last week. Video footage was taken by both Tony and his wife, Emiko, using a Sony HC3 in a Seatool housing.

Mary Lynn Price has put together an interview of me in her latest DiveFilm Podcast. It features some of my still photos and video footage as well. Um… check it out, if you’re interested. :) [DiveFilm @ iTunes]

Eric was a busy boy while away in the Bahamas.

oceanic white-tips	bahamas 2006	rajah ampat 2004
bonaire 2005	grenada 2005	kona 2005
	bluefin tuna pens

I just finished watching part I (”From Pole to Pole”) of the BBC’s new series called Planet Earth (co-produced by BBC/Discovery Channel/NHK), and so far, it has been the most awe-inspiring wildlife documentary I have ever seen. Luckily, I have a 150″ screen and projector here at home, which turned out to be the perfect way to experience the scenes presented in the show. It was beautiful, incredible, and inspiring. I’m nearly beyond words… (read more »)

I spent the last week as one of the four photo pro at the Kona Classic 2006 (sponsored by Sport Diver Magazine, PADI, Body Glove, and others). As part of the event, we dove the manta ray night dive at Garden Eel Cove, which was absolutely amazing! Our dive operators ID’ed 17 mantas that night, and just before we jumped into the water, we were treated to a bright green flash at sunset. It was as perfect a night dive as one could imagine.

Here’s are two videos or raw footage I shot that evening (updated with 2nd video): (read more »)

After posting the tiger shark videos last month, Stephen Frink asked me if I would answer some questions for Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2006 PMA Report. The results are online as part of ScubaDiving.com’s SNAP Exclusive.

fill ‘er up! a tiger shark gets a taste to eat.

- Updated: March 25 - I’ve posted ten eleven videos of our time on the Shear Water in the Bahamas to give you an idea of what diving with large sharks is really like. We spent a lot of time in the water with seven different shark species: tiger sharks, bull sharks, great hammerheads, lemon sharks, caribbean reef sharks, black-tip reef sharks, and nurse sharks. (read more »)

*UPDATE* If you are looking for tiger shark videos, I have posted a medley of the best footage I have, compiled from longer clips.

This is my first trip shooting video (trip details), and while we’re docked here at West End for the evening (running away from bad weather), I thought I’d try uploading a little video snippet. The uploaded video looks pretty bad and it almost pains me to share it this way, but… what the hell. :) (read more »)