I can’t wait to try it. ;)

A timelapse video of the intersection in front of the Kyoto Tower Hotel taken from a room at the Hotel Granvia Kyoto. Shot with Canon EOS 7D. Individual frames processed / exported in Lightroom and lens-blurred with alpha channel depth map in Photoshop. Timelapse video created in Quicktime 7 Pro. Shot and processed to emulate tilt-shift miniaturization videos.

I took this timelapse from my window at the Hotel Granvia Kyoto. There was an excellent elevated walkway above the train station as well, but I didn’t have time to shoot it.

Frames captured with Canon EOS 7D, processed/exported in Adobe Lightroom, and built into a video using Quicktime 7 Pro.

A Russian TV station used my GoPro Underwater Shark Experiment in a news piece about a shark attack.

It’s no wonder videographers use huge watermarks in the middle of their videos (like I do with my stock video).

I hooked my MacBook Pro to a Panasonic 58″ 3D plasma display today and fed it a 3D video in the form of side-by-side video content. The good news is that the display showed a perfectly good 3D image when told to expect side-by-side content (yay!). However, there was a problem with my stereo 3D video: for some reason, all of the 3D content was pushed way back past the stereo window. The only way this would happen is if the left and right video content were diverged; upon closer inspection, it was obvious that this was the case. (read more »)

My recent video featuring sharks biting a GoPro HD Hero camera in an Eye of Mine underwater housing has just been released on DiveFilm HD. It is similar to one of the videos I posted earlier, but now has a “making of” section and a voice-over description of what is going on.

DiveFilm is an underwater video podcast put out by Mary Lynn Price and sponsored by Wetpixel. We are very excited because it is currently (as of today) the #1 Sports & Recreation Podcast on iTunes! Since the iTunes ranking is based on downloads, I encourage you to watch the video through iTunes even if you streamed it from this post. Support DiveFilm! :)

I just returned from a trip to the Bahamas, where I shot and posted a bunch of 3D underwater video encoded for viewing with red/cyan anaglyph 3D glasses. When I arrived at home, I opened one of the 3D videos on my calibrated 30″ Dell 3008WFP LCD (connected to a Mac Pro)… and discovered that I could not see any 3D effect. It was quite strange because I could see the 3D effect perfectly when I streamed the same videos from my Vimeo page (on the same machine/display), and everything looks good when played from my MacBook Pro (even when it is attached to an external monitor). I even tried playing the videos back on my 50″ plasma display, and the 3D was fine.

What I discovered is that if you have a properly calibrated video card / monitor, you may not be able see anaglyph 3D-encoded images and video correctly. When trying to render colors “correctly,” ColorSync can change the colors enough to destroy the effect. (read more »)

I’ve listed my Light & Motion Z1u/FX1 Bluefin housing and travel package for sale through Backscatter (located in Monterey, CA, but will ship).

Description: Used Light & Motion Bluefin Z1U/FX1 housing for the Sony Z1U or Sony FX1 camera. The housing comes with the stock flat port and when used with the internal flip down macro diopter gives you the option for extreme macro. Also included is the 80 Super Wide angle lens that allows full zoom through on the camera. This housing is in good condition and comes with the incredible Sunray 2000 light system, two chargers, four batteries and a Pelican 1620 case that holds everything. [more information]

Emma the tiger shark and a bunch of reef sharks and lemon sharks feed on a bit of fish bait (bones, mostly) in the Bahamas.

This is probably the most effective blue-water 3D video I’ve posted to date. It is a bit bright, but it’s hard to do color correction for anaglyph 3D. I need to find a way to preview my work on proper 3D displays!

UPDATE: I just looked at this video, and the Vimeo upload’s compression has made the 3D anaglyph effect much less pronounced. At 1080p pre-Vimeo compression, the 3D effect is tremendous. I need to upload a better version…

Reef sharks, lemon sharks and nurse sharks investigate a gorgonian, where an injured fish must be hiding. Bahamas.

3D anaglyph (red/cyan) video of a school of Atlantic spadefish (Chaetodipterus faber). Jupiter, Florida. September 11, 2010.

This particular video looks great at 1080p full screen on a 17″ monitor, but suffers greatly when reduced in resolution and viewed as a postage stamp-sized video.

The Eye of Mine underwater housing for GoPro cameras is simple: it’s a stock GoPro housing with a replacement flat port. Although the standard GoPro housing is waterproof and rated to 60 meters, it won’t focus underwater because of its tiny little dome port. Eye of Mine’s simple solution lets you capture sharp images underwater using a GoPro Hero HD camera.

I took an Eye of Mine-housed GoPro Hero HD camera to the Bahamas a few days ago and played with sharks:

Although I’m used to cameras many times the cost of a GoPro, and I was really impressed by the footage I managed to capture. Specifically, I can’t imagine putting any other camera inside a shark’s mouth! (Also, the footage does actually look pretty good.)

Special thanks to Russell Latimer of Eye of Mine for the loaner housing (which is still in relatively good shape, considering the abuse I put it through); to Jim Abernethy, my good friend and shark guide in the Bahamas for 9 years now; to Sterling Zumbrunn for providing third-party camera footage, and to Ultralight Control Systems for providing the AD-GO ball adapter to connect the GoPro housing to my rig.

A spawning aggregation of goliath groupers (Epinephelus itajara) off of Jupiter, Florida, taken just before sunset (hence, the noisy video).

People are starting to do HDR video using beam splitters (which are normally used to shoot in 3D). The video above was posted yesterday and was made with two Canon 5D Mark II cameras by the folks at Soviet Montage.

4 months ago, E3D Creative posted an HDR video shot with two RED cameras (again, using a beam splitter):

Fun stuff! I want a beam splitter.

I recently acquired a Fuji FinePix REAL 3D W3 point & shoot camera, which is the only (proper) 3D point & shoot camera on the market (Mark Blum showed me the W1, its predecessor, some time ago). The camera stores still images in MPO format, which is essentially two JPGs, thumbnails and metadata crammed into a single file. It stores video files in a stacked AVI format called 3D-AVI.

New file formats are always challenging to deal with, especially if you’re on a Mac. Fuji ships the camera with its FinePix software, and after installing it, I realized that it has no 3D support because the Mac version is two major revisions behind the Windows version!

I went online looking around for MPO and 3D-AVI support for the Mac. Things aren’t looking so good. (read more »)

3D video (anaglyph red/cyan) of a moral eel hunting at night in the Maldives. Shot underwater with a custom BS Kinetics underwater housing for dual Sony CX550V camcorders.

If you would rather see a side-by-side format or row interleaved, check out the YouTube version of the video.

If you don’t have anaglyph 3D glasses and want to see the footage, click through for the left eye view. (read more »)

12 hyperthreaded cores!

My new 12-core Mac Pro is almost ready (it’s been copying files from my other machine for nearly 24 hours now). I re-ran a MPEG Streamclip vs. Compressor test and was pleased to discover Compressor is now insanely fast because it can be configured to use all of the cores. MPEG Streamclip doesn’t seem to multithread properly to use all 24 virtual cores when only batching up a few clips. I set it to 4 instances, and combined processor usage was around 270% (out of 2400%). Running the Compressor job against a local QuickCluster resulted in CPU usage illustrated in the screenshot above.

A rather unscientific comparison of MPEG Streamclip and Compressor speed during transcoding shows that MPG Streamclip is about 2x the speed of Compressor during transcode of H.264 to ProRes. I’ve not tested against Compressor with a virtual cluster on my quad-core Mac Pro because I have had problems with Compressor jobs hanging every once in awhile when I target clusters.

Source clips are 1080p clips from a GoPro camera. Video is sped up 20x.

Compressor is rather disappointing these days. I feel like it hasn’t changed for years.

Aerial footage of the whale shark aggregation that takes place each summer off of Isla Mujeres, Mexico. echeng100804_026166

Inspired by Rob Stewart’s self-cam footage in Sharkwater, I turned my camera around and took some footage of me swimming with whale sharks off of Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Shot with Canon 5D Mark II, Tokina 17mm/3.5 lens. 0260619

Rob was in Isla Mujeres the week before I was, and shot similar footage (although he dove down, whereas I stayed on the surface).