Shark Feeding at Chuuk Lagoon

[Paul Russell]

100 seconds of fishy feeding frenzy.
Shot this is January this year at about 20 metres, natural light, 3K 48fps, 14mm Canon prime in Gates Deep Epic.
Edited in Premiere CS6 with Neat Video noise filtering, and graded by sending to DPX and colouring in Photoshop.

 

[Peter Matthes]

Awesome. :thumbsup:

 

[paulherrin]

nice. any particular reason why you chose photoshop over after effects or premiere? in any case, what was your workflow for coloring in photoshop? did you just use actions/batch processing or what?

anyways, cool stuff!

 

[Paul Russell]

Thanks for watching, guys.

@Paul, I used Photoshop CS6 to pull in the video because I couldn't get speedgrade to do what I wanted with the DPXs. Mostly my lack of skill with it as that was a first time effort with it. I'm new to grading video, but I've been doing photoshop since 1993, so there's a slight advantage

It only took a couple of minutes to add levels, curves and saturation adjustment layers in Photoshop and then render out to DPX again. The results were much nicer than using Colorista or MB Looks as they produced a lot of banding, which really showed up nasty in the final H.264 render.

 

[paulherrin]

that's cool. whatever works. there are levels, curves and saturation in premiere... not sure if they are slightly different implementations or not. anyway, maybe i'll have to try that out sometime. i haven't done anything with video in photoshop, what's it like?

we had some trouble here getting speedgrade to work with premiere... :/ couldn't get the edl through properly with our cut, haven't had time to trouble shoot, had to get started. next time...

also, did you have to do a lot of work on skintones, or were they pretty okay as shot? seems like you weren't too deep, and the sand is really bright, so that helps

 

[Paul Russell]

Skintones, LOL We were at 20 metres, so everything there is mainly blue. But working the individual RGB levels a bit helps to bring out the other colours. Easy to go overboard, though.

Photoshop CS6 still needs a bit of work for all the filters to happen. I couldn't get Nik Color FX 4 to work properly - it insisted on adding to the timeline rather than another layer, or processing just one frame and no others. But adjustment layers work fine. Rendering out to DPX again and letting Photoshop do the colour management going from calibrated screen LUT back to RGB DPX for Premiere worked well and gradual changes in shade/colour were much better than the 8bit Magic Bullet FX in Premiere. I'm going to have to spend more time on Speedgrade, but when you can do this kind of stuff in a program that you've been working for decades it's much easier.

 

[Gunnar Nimpuno]

What was the ISO rate?. Looks very bright and clean, well done!

 

[Paul Russell]

I always leave the ISO at 800 and expose the sensor appropriately. In post I pushed it up to 1600.
Unfortunately the exposure details are not in the metadata and we did so many that week that I can't remember the details. It was a fairly bright day with good vis, as you can see, so we were probably at 1/96 sec f5.6 or f8

 

[Gunnar Nimpuno]

Very nice, I would like to test it too. Before I was shooting commercial underwater,at 25m depth. Using RedOne MX, rate it at ISO 800. But, didn't have any luck for the bright day. Keep up the good work...!

 

[Paul Russell]

Thx, Gunnar. Great to hear from you.

 

[Paul Russell]

Correction: I checked the original metadata and apparently these shots were all at f16 with a 288 degree shutter.