Reek tank video recording tips

[raidendex]

I've been documenting my tanks for a while now with DSLR camera and while results for the most part are OK I wish they were better. My main concern with the shots is the overall quality especially on full tank shots. Details of the corals are lost and everything looks rather blurry.
Of course this just may be due to compression happening on the camera and nothing that can really be done to improve quality on such busy scenes that would require quite more higher bit rate that camera allows by default.

Initial quality aside I am looking on other general tips for filming the reef tanks.

Equipment I have at my disposal - Canon T2i, Lenses - Canon 24mm macro f2.8, 40mm f2.8, 50mm f1.4, 100mm macro f2.8, Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod, MH055M0-Q2 head.

From searching online I've found that I should shoot in 24fps setting at at least double the shutter speed if I recall correctly (so 1/50 - 1/60) and Picture Style to be used - Sharpness 0, Contrast -4, Saturation -2, Color Tone 0. Picture Style might not be suited for reef tanks as it was meant for normal DSLR film making.

Other than that using http://www.magiclantern.fm/ I am able to adjust bit rate of the recorded video, although I do not really see much difference in the video quality. Think I've tried -14 for variable bit rate with -16 being max quality. Can also do constant bit rate and simply jack up the size up to x3. Another thing Magic Lantern let me do is shoot HDR video - one frame at say ISO 200 another at ISO 1600. I am not sure how to deal with it in post however as when you play it normally you basically have a flickering going on. I imagine APP has something that can use this, but haven't looked into it.

For post processing I usually do Fast Color Correction in Adobe Premiere Pro. Today I also dropped Auto Color, Contrast, and Tone or something without really changing any of the settings.

Here is the video of my tank from today.



and Auto Fix by YouTube version with color temp +1 (still processing as of right now)


You can visit my channel to see older videos as well.

So to sum up the order of questions I'd like answered
- improve "raw" quality of the video (not likely possible with busy scenes due to encoding).
- Post steps in Adobe PP such as color balancing.
- Camera settings such as Picture Style, frame rate
- Preferred shutter speed/aperture for video (obviously dependent on the desired depth of field).
- Composition Not too concerned with this as I mainly try to document the growth of corals, but shots other than full tank I'm sure can be improved here. Full tank ones just have to deal with what I have for rock work hehe.

Thanks for the help!

 

[bpcardona]

I don't have any answers, but would like to read someone who does. Great questions.

 

[TheSaltySnailer]

Bump/following

 

[JaYbIrD1969]

I started responding before I looked at your videos. my bad. I have a new answer. LOL

With the full tank shots, due to the black sections above and below the tank, the exposure meter is compensating for that. Over exposing the lighted areas. I see that the highly lit areas are blown out. This greatly effects the overall image quality. and with that light dancing from the turbulent surface, I think your metering is confused. Your in tank shots are extremely nice. The first one of the Duncan is excellent quality with very good focus and exposure. I noticed the focus was hunting for the clown fish. Were you doing that or was it auto focusing?
DSLR cameras are built for still images. The video feature is a bit of a novelty, but like everything else, a determined user could make the most of it. With that said, your videos are pretty dang good. If you want to go to the next lever I think youre moving into a High Def Video cam. Something specifically designed to let in lots of light with a very small aperture giving you unlimited depth of field. A great affordable cheater cam is a gopro. I am stunned at the image quality of these little boxes. The other great thing is gopros free software s a VERY good editing software specifically for HD video. There is a learning curve but worth the time.

I cant answer some of your technical questions regarding bit rates and adjusting color tone and saturation, but my instincts would say to leave those alone. I think the problem is with exposure. You might try spot metering so your exposure meter isnt reading the black area? You might consider shutting off the flow. youll lose that pretty swaying but you will eliminate the dancing light thats confusing your exposure

 

[raidendex]

Thanks for the reply.

I shoot videos in manual, so any miss focus or exposure issues are my fault. For one i need to look at histogram more. Focus hunting that's me doing it, i just often forget which way to turn lol, so sometimes it goes in the wrong direction, but usually I can switch from something in foreground to background. Of course having everything in focus may be better at least if i do want to bring different parts of the shoot into the focus throughout the clip.

I'm hoping that with my next camera i will be able to go a bit higher in iso to get deeper depth of field.

I still feel that on full tank shots I'm limited, but the available megapixels and video compression. Compression is likely worst offender here. Video of single color is easy to compress well and keep high quality, as you start adding more and more random patches of color it becomes difficult to compress well and keep high quality so the algorithm basically starts to discard some of the information to keep same compression level, which degrades the image. This is why I tried changing bit rates of the video, but it wasn't enough to see much difference in quality even though file sizes doubled or tripled.

 

[JaYbIrD1969]

It may benefit you to search youtube for videos with the quality youre trying to achieve and ask the poster these questions. I have never been very impressed with DSLR camera video results.

 

[raidendex]

Yeah, I guess that would be a good idea Never really spent much time looking at reef tank videos, and I think the bigger problem is that I am comparing at the moment to videos of different scenes.

Quality wise I think I did see fairly good DSLR videos in general, but of course it may be hard to beat 50k+ video camera.

Another starting point may be to work on the full tank shots quality first. Here is one, it's not particularly good, but decent for what I usually get.

As you can see even from downsized image it is not full of detail on individual corals. I need to play around to figure out how to get these better. Click for a bigger image, although it is still shrunk a bit.


Of course going to video, I'm shooting in an even lower resolution so more detail is lost.

 

[raidendex]

Never can white balance that hippo tang correctly lol, always comes out purple

 

[JaYbIrD1969]

Thats really pretty good. Theres just so many lights and shadows in a reef. Your candy cane in the center is blown as is some areas of sand and spots on the rocks. Are you using MH lighting?

I would try underexposing your images and selectively highlighting it in post. Or do an HDR layering.


My hippo sometimes came out purple too. I think its an actinic phenomenon

 

[raidendex]

I use T5s. Bulbs are ATI Blue+, Coral+, and Actinic.

Imagine all of the sand is overexposed in a way, it's just that one spot on the right gets cleaned or turn over by a pistol shrimp often so remains whiter

I will need to look into HDR and selective highlight, haven't used either, thanks.

 

[woodnaquanut]

Nice job with the videos. You have a very serviceable system now.

Tanks are lit like the worst daylight lighting for photography. It's harsh light with very hard shadows. The best photography lighting is morning and evening followed by cloudy. All with soft light.

Part of your issues come from the camera. A crop sensor just doesn't have the dynamic range for a typically lit aquarium. There is such a large difference in exposure from the sand or a bright lit coral to the dark rock, you are going to loose one or the other. Also video is a cute add on to a still camera but it's not the same as a dedicated video camera.

The FTS showing sand blown out could be helped with a graduated neutral density filter. Use it to darken the sand and you will be able to 'see' into the shadows better. Unfortunately that won't help blown out corals. If you could get some fill light into the shadows that would help.

Getting the correct colors on the tang might be impossible with your lights. Notice in some frames when the tang is not lit from above it is the correct color? I believe the camera cannot deal with the combination of blue tang and lights. Sensors freak out! The camera was not designed for this light source. The only way I know to improve this is to change lights. Something like daylight balanced would be better. Kind of $$ if you are not making money off the video!

When you shoot close ups/macro try to frame so there is no bright sand in the pic. Too much contrast.

Shoot much more than you think you need and be brutal in editing. If it's out of focus, cut it out!

When it comes to compression, capturing it in as uncompressed a format as you can will help. Same for any output from the editor. When it goes to da tube it's going to be compressed. No sense in compressing it twice!

Some of the best video I've seen of reef creatures is by Than at Tidal Gardens. You should check out his YouTube channel. His older stuff is shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, IIRC.