Freedive video/photos on a budget

[pdabill]

Been playing around with my digital camera, here is the pic of it with the underwater case:

Got the refurbished camera for $170 and the case for $200. It is rated for use up to 40m.

Found a couple parts around the garage and made this to attach the camera to my line:

Tried it out today in the Florida gulf stream and took some video. I like this camera because it records in HD and you can get decent stills from the video if you like. I have a couple problems to work out with lens flare (put on a filter afterwards, should help for next time) and need to make a couple more changes to reduce shaking. But still got some decent still shots from the video clips in the meantime:

any feedback welcome!

 

[ny_er]

i have the same camera setup

the stills from video suck compared to actually taking a photo using the the underwater settings

for the price that little setup takes some kick-ass video and stills, plus its small

the videos will look better if you play with the levels in a video editor though

 

[pdabill]

I have a macbook and use iMovie for video editing. What video editor do you use and what levels do you tweak?

 

[ny_er]

When i first started taking pics and vids I tired using auto levels, but that only works good when there is a lot of light, usually there is a way to turn the transparency of the auto-leveled layer down , and this works some times

but usually now I find just bringing up the darks colors usually works pretty good without screwing everything else up

I don't know about imovie but there should be something under filters or effects called "levels" , which bring up a screen shot (hopefully) or a graph of the distribution of the levels and some sliders you can play with

I don't know if I can explain it, google something like "imovie levels tutorial"