Sounds bad doesn’t it…CFWA..but it isn’t..close focus wide angle!

I was going to write an email to Gudge and show him my first efforts at CFWA with a 1.4x added to my 17-40 but then I decided I’ll just do it as a blog post and tell the world (hello…anyone read this?).

Well, Gudge sent me a couple of CFWA shots he took in Exmouth that I thought were pretty cool and it got me thinking about doing something similar here. The concept is not at all new but a good CFWA shot is not the easiest to get and being a slack-ass I try and go for the glory shots and give the harder stuff a miss.

I gave it a go today, at Bare Island and you can see three shots that came out of it, and lets face it, none of them are really CFWA at all.

So lesson one for Aengus, for CFWA have half decent viz, not a suspended sand hazy3 metres viz, and then have something interesting in the background to give the “wide” feel.

Thank God for the Canon raw processing and photoshop which “saved” the attached pics and Gudge, wow, depth of field was great!

P.S. Yes we do have critters besides Weedy Sea Dragon’s in Sydney!

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It is hard work getting a decent shot when you are deep.

I have a little project where I’m trying to take a nice portrait shot of the skipper of Magnolia Thunderpussy, Peter Fields.

However, it is much harder than it sounds particularly as the dives I do with him are deepish (40 + metre) and not only is time limited but I’m usually a bit slow since I’m narc’d.

The solution of course is to persist and that what I’m doing, I’ll get the perfect shot of him….some day.

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Now that he has a 7D, Gudge was asking me what editing software I used for my 5DII video’s.

So here I am writing an email to Gudge that I’m going to cut and paste into a blog post.

I was given a copy of the Adobe Creative Suite CS4 to check out. The main video editing software in the suite is Premier but there are other components of the suite which contribute, for example After-Effects is used to add in filters.

Aside from the price I found Premiere offered me too much and it didn’t feel right for me, way too complex, it also was incredibly heavy and clunky on the PC.

Let me take a sec to talk about the PC because regardless of which package you go with, for HD video editing you will need a reasonable amount of grunt. Premier was so clunky I was motivated to replace my existing PC so I looked at the spec requirements (Windows) for a number of editing suites and spent a few extra bucks to try and future proof myself. My new box has a gamer case i.e. extra power and cooling, an Intel Core i7, 4GB of 1600Mhz Ram, a SATA Raid 1 set for my OS disks (redundancy) and a SATA Raid 0 / striped set (performance) for my video disks and a good video card (I went with a Gigayte GTX260/896Mb).

So that is 4 disks in total (2 recycled from my old machine) and 8 Cores with HT in the i7. Most editing packages like Hyper Threading (HT), you don’t get HT with the i5 processor, and most packages also like (perform better) a 64 bit operating system, in my case Windows 7.

Right, back to the software or should I say the NLE software, non-linear editing software. I looked at all the Mac software and the software that was originally designed for Mac but ported to windows and then, I came across Edius.

Grass Valley Edius Neo 2 looked like a consumer/prosumer product with origins in a broadcast product. That appealed immediately, and I also noted it being mentioned frequently on the video forums of Wetpixel, mainly being pushed by a Western Australian called Wagsy. It is also relatively cheap, under US$200 from B+H, about half of what it costs in Australia and I do like the idea of not using a pirated copy.

So why did I like it? I just found it simple and easy to understand yet powerful. Don’t get me wrong, the video learning curve for a newbie like me is massive and I’m still on the first step, but I found some parts of this package instinctive, in Premiere I had to do lots of searching and lots of googling.

It also offered me everything I needed. I can do nice simple yet effective Titles, its easy to mix music, cut video’s and when my pieces are converted to the CanopusHQ codec (I think Grass Roots bought out Canopus some time ago) its easy to add in filters like a red filter or a touch more blue.

And then when I go to compile the video my PC’s processor doesn’t flat line for an hour with several overheating alerts, in fact it generally outputs one for one, one minute to output one minutes video.

So I have waffled on heaps now, here are a few links that will prove helpful and get you started; The Edius Neo 2 homepage which has a link for the trial download (should only need the basic Neo2 version unless producing BlueRay etc); http://desktop.grassvalley.com/products/EDIUSNeo

Some clips from Wagsy’s site showing how to use Edius; http://www.hdvundersea.com/tag/edius/

The Edius Training page, well worth a visit; http://ediustraining.grassvalley.com/

Some posts on Wetpixel where Wagsy outlines some settings; http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=31501&hl

Ok, I think that’s it for the moment other than to say, make sure and keep the correct ratio (16:9), try all the different outputs for size and quality (if you have a crap video card the output at full HD maybe jittery).

Also unlike a 5D (but coming next year), the 7D will do 25p and the way I understand it 25p is better for compatibility reasons, so maybe record in 25P?

I hope I’m right in all my facts above, that is my initial experience any which way….Good luck!

The two pics above are from Clifton Garden’s last week.

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