John Doe

@John E, Some nice lenses on that list ! That Optimo 15-40 is a VERY nice lens. J.D

So, this is quite a challenge then. As Ryan noted, i wonder how the 14-24mm Ruby performs given that lens in Nikon dress was difficult to setup and did not offer great results. Will the lens being reworked take away some or all of these issues (that this lens had behind a dome)? The Dulcos is a Tokina 11-16mm - i remember reading many posts about this lens being excellent but as Drew mentions it is an APS-C lens and wont do 5K. Might be that the 16-35L is the lens that ends up being the best choice. At least the mount on the Red is covered. Luckily in my situation i do not have to travel other then get in the boat. I have no airplanes to catch to go dive my area of interest. So a big Dome is no issue at all. Can one have a custom dome done? What is practical in terms of size? what is the biggest dome ever done? (if i am understanding this correctly a bigger dome is better?) Acrylic Vs Glass - i have no idea on which way to go here. Anyone care to throw their thoughts out there on the matter for us less informed souls? Sounds like the dome is as important if not more so then the lens itself. Perhaps more rightly, each is as important as the other? J.D

Sounds like there is little love for cine lenses with the underwater crowd........ sounds like it is going to be a challenge to setup a cine lenses behind a dome. Seems a shame to use a cine above and something else below water but that's the way its looking to me. So then how do we go about finding a nice lens for underwater use on the Red's? Possibly start a new thread on lens suggestions? Will that even get any traction? It would be tragic to spend many $$$ on a cine lens then find its of little use underwater behind a dome. J.D

John E - thanks for the insight! Do you have a list of lenses that you have put behind your best dome that worked extremely well? I still prefer the cine approach if a choice lens can be made to perform. What is the highest performing dome available? Are you saying you can custom work a dome to suit the chosen lens? In general which cine lens do you recommend? or to put it another way ( so that no one can hold you to a "recommendation") which lenses have you seen housed in a Gates that are/were stellar performers? I really appreciate your input in this discussion. (I'm sure many others do to!) J.D

Well Done Paul Kay! You've put into words what i sorta knew but could not explain clearly.............. "No matter how good the lens being used is, it still has the problems associated with shooting simple ports (lenses)." And that's the point really. No matter how good the lens, even all the way up to Cooke lenses, we still shoot through a curved complex lenses that degrades the corners no matter what you do or which lens it is! So the exotic glass is going to have to stay topside and stick to the more common lenses for underwater. I've been looking at the Dulcos 11-16mm and the Ruby 14-24mm. I still would like a Cooke but it really doesn't seem to make sense other then the satisfaction of owning a legend and playing around with it trying to kid myself that my footage is definitely better now........ It will be interesting to see what others do. I'm on the end of the Scarlet line so don't expect a camera for quite a long time. By then perhaps others will have taken the plunge and worked out whats working well. Is there any chance that better domes will be developed? With the new age of RAW acquisition and such lens choices open to us now, is it realistic that domes can be improved any further? J.D

Thanks Drew I guess the first thing to do is to talk to Gates and get a "short" list of whats possible. No use drooling over a lens that cant "practically" be housed. There is so much excitement over the L lens setup for the Scarlet and Epic that i guess there must be a reason for this. The performance cant be that far behind a cine lens with so many people going the Canon route. To be honest I've never seen any footage (that i know about) from a Cooke or an Angie but i love those big front elements and as you said many chose a lens on size, weight and speed. For me its speed. I am leaning towards a zoom and the Cooke looks to be the fastest around in the cine world. As for the light meter - get the exposure close enough and RAW will let us do the rest in the office. Once you get beyond the hype this whole RED thing really is a game changer. Just need deep pockets. J.D

Hi Simon, Yes some of those cine lenses have an eye watering price - very nice lenses though. Looks like Cooke is about the best cine zoom out there, but man oh man what a price! I'm quite interested in getting a Leica M to try out. Thing is, as i said, when you consider that these setups are primarily for underwater use behind a dome- well I'm not sure the extra quality is really worth it over a more common lens setup. Are we going to "really" see the difference? I mean, yes up to a point we will but are the finer nuances going to be seen in the footage after the image has passed through water and a dome? Then there is the whole drama of setting up the lens to perform. For the more popular lenses this will be solved, but with say a Cooke or a Leica C lens there might be a lot of arrows to be taken in the back of the head. I'm sure this is going to be debated over and over as the Scarlet's start arriving in peoples hands and eventually start going underwater. I know there are some talented people who visit this forum so their opinion on this would be very insightful to say the least! You will most certainly get your Scarlet underwater before me so it will be extremely interesting to see what sort of results you get. J.D

20K for a lens?!?!?! crikey....... I couldn't agree more. However it is what it is and what it is, is $$$$$ to go top end. Whether we need that underwater or not is another question. I'm only going to get one chance to put this series together, and yes yes i know equipment does not make the talent etc etc, but i want to do the best i can. Besides Scarlet has been soooooo long coming that I've had years to save for this ;-) This lens looks good about half the price of the big guns..... http://www.focusoptics.com/newruby.htm any thoughts ? J.D

Along with quite a few others i am going Scarlet. Been waiting and waiting and now its here it brings a number of questions. I plan to use a gates housing but am not going to order that right now as i want to play with this camera for some time to get a good feel of it so to speak. Other housings may come out that suit me better...who knows. I am not anxious to get the camera underwater at this stage, so waiting for a while on a housing may be prudent. Dont know for sure (when i do want the housing will i be on a waiting list for a year?). What i do need off the bat is a lens. Ultimately i will house the camera and am targeting fish portraits. These fish are not particularly large and there are no sharks, whales etc i am ever going to run into so no need to think about that. There are no reefs although backing off a bit to get habitat shots is very important to me. What lens would you suggest? There are so many options. Can a good deal of the lenses available be housed? I am thinking PL mount, cine lenses. Probably Zoom but realize the best quality is always going to come from a prime lens so not ruled out anything just yet. I do want to go beyond a Canon still lens though. The idea of a Leica lens is appealing as is Zeiss. Then there are the cooke's, Angenieux's, Schneider and Red lenses themselves. Is going for a high end Angenieux a waste of money given it will spend a good deal of its time underwater? (Is shooting through the water layer behind a dome the great leveler of lenses?). Of course there needs to be topside footage to tell the story but in general the focus is the fish. I would not invest 20K in a Angenieux lens that will shoot about 10 or 15% topside footage for example. However if that high end lens is really going to perform even behind a dome it must be considered. I am only after your general thoughts here - when it comes to purchase time i will of course spend a great deal of time talking to vendors to work it all out. Would you go beyond a Canon still lens and if money were no object but you wanted quality for your money instead of snob factor which way would you go and why? And yeah, this is adding up fast........ 20K for a *working* camera, 20K for a housing, 10K for lighting, ????k for a lens and goodness knows how much for a workstation to edit all this. But hey its only money right and you cant take it with you! J.D

Pheww that's a relief ! For me its only Scarlet and only Gates - nothing else will do! To answer my own question in my last post, yep a quick Google brings up tons of info.....to be honest I'd given up on Scarlet ever arriving so have not been following any of this - you can only get hyped so many times! Anyway, its real and its here. If Gates come through we are all set to go. Good thing is i have had long enough to save up the money ;-) J.D

I don't see any reference to a deep epic on the gates site. Is there anything on the web anywhere about the epic housing from Gates? I've been waiting for Scarlet for a loooong time now - now its finally here and no mention of an housing from any manufacturer. I sure hope they start coming out soon. I don't want to pull the trigger on the Scarlet until i know housings are available for it. I reckon this is going to run 50+ K for the camera/lens/housing/lights

I'm a bit worried that Gates had no announcement of a housing for Scarlet. You would have thought given all the hype leading up the Scarlet announcement that *IF* gates had a housing for it they would have been shouting from the rooftops about it. Anyone have a link to the gates Epic housing because i can see no reference to it on the Gates webs site. It would so cruel if Scarlet gets no housing! J.D

Well as you say the point of forums is debate and information sharing. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one :-) As i said we are well and truly entrenched in the Internet age now so it looks like a new way of working is upon us like it or not! I think the lesson learnt here is becareful what you put in an email because it can (and sometime does) appear anywhere. Thanks for the level headed discussion. JD anxiously awaiting Scarlet

Drew/Steve, I also strongly agree that good/bad service needs to be yelled about from the roof tops. If company X provides lousy service and/or bad service they deserve to be "outed" as it were. If company Y provides an excellent service and/or product then they deserve the high praise that will be generated by talking about it on a public Internet forum. Its all good in that respect. However......... to publicly post emails on the Internet that a person has sent you in private in good faith is just not right. Whether it has a disclaimer attached or not is not the point. One may argue the legalities of the situation but life is not all about "legalese". In my book its all about the spirit of the agreement.... a gentleman's agreement if you will. Those emails are private correspondence between 2 parties and should be given the respect due as such. If L&M wanted to publicly discuss problems and issues with clients i am sure they would probably post everything here. Clients can be difficult and unreasonable. I am not saying that is the case here at all so dont misunderstand me here on this point. We haven't heard L&M's side of all this so perhaps we shouldn't be so hasty to make a judgement. Things go wrong. No one wants things to go wrong but they do. The real crux of the issue is how they are dealt with and in this case it "appears" that L&M have been a bit tardy. SO they got the bad press they "may" deserve. But to go posting emails sent in private between the parties is a form of retribution from the frustrated client. How can that be right? Two wrongs never made a right. It appears that L&M slipped. From information we have it looks like the client tried to sort it out with L&M. Things dragged on and the client does not get his idea of satisfaction - so he thinks to himself ...... "I'll shaft these guys.... I'll go post all their correspondence to me about this whole thing on the Internet....that should screw em" which in my book makes the client worse then the company who has dropped the ball. Its not black and white however, many shades of grey in there. But plastering private correspondence all over the Internet is just plain crude. YMMV I've been reading Wetpixel since 2002 and find it a valuable resource. I hope this forum sticks to the moral high ground and does not get down in the gutter. Face it - some forums on the net are really friendly and a great place to "hang out" on the net. Other forums are horrible places to be with all the nastiness that goes on. I only raise this issue that we are discussing in the hope that we all decide that we want to keep WP a really great friendly place and the forum does not degrade into questionable ethics. I am all for free speech ......i'll probably get bagged for this post, but that's your right and if that's how an individual wants to approach it then so be it, but to go post email conversations on here that we had in private is just not something i can accept as "fair play" and the fact that those posts are still here 3 years later tells me the mods here have no issue with anyone posting their "dirty laundry". If i am wrong on that last point then why are the posts still up? I want to come here and read about all things video underwater. Its valuable to hear about a manufacturer that seems to be under performing - they certainly wont get my business - but i find it disturbing that individuals can get a bit pee'd off with company X or Y then start posting all the correspondence sent in private between the parties and then we all start putting in the knife. The Internet age is well and truly upon us and it looks like all the etiquette we learnt in the 20th century is out the window and we can hide behind our screen names on line and do things that most of us know is probably not right. John Doe.

Several things strike me here..... 1/ This thread reminds why i am going to buy gates once the Scarlet is out and available to mere mortals 2/ If this is the best we can expect from L&M then they are best avoided like the plague But what really really cracks me up here is the people moaning about the "BAD" service and attitude they are receiving yet they seem to think nothing of breaching confidentiality by reproducing private emails sent in confidence to them from L&M, on the Internet. I don't get how you can moan about "how badly you've been treated" when you do bad yourself....... does no one else here think its really bad manners to post those email replies received from L&M all over the Internet? double standard at work here.

No sorry guys - in my hands - oh how i wish !! Some guy in the US has No 6 and is out and about with it - this time its for real. For anyone who has followed this saga closely they will be ecstatic that finally the Epics are out and Scarlet's not far behind by all reports. Wont be too long before someone gets a Scarlet underwater. I wonder which manufactures are already working on a housing? I guess there's no way to know that but i bet someone somewhere is poring over their Autocad program!

At last...... at long long last! Epic No 00006 is in the wild and out shooting. In the hands of a real customer who waited in line to get one...... NOT some testing rig in the hands of some one close to the RED Clique JD

Yes all good points Drew. There's a lot to consider which is why i am seeking the advice of those who know. I dont mind the manual focus and exposure - i worked a Cannon New F1 in full manual mode (focus and exposure) for 14 years before i left photography so quite used to it. But as you say storing the footage. !2 mins clips are no problem - forces you to really THINK about what you are shooting. I dont know about you but in the film days with a roll of 36 frames i always had a real look at what i was shooting before i pressed the trigger - these days i tend to just fire away and take the attitude if i shoot it 10 different ways I'll get what i want and sort it out later. Does this lead to less precise shooting? I dont know. Anyway the camera is not even out yet. Looks Scarlet will beat them to it and it will have a much bigger user base and support behind it and almost certainly will have housings produced for it. Interesting times as i said before. I think i am going to go MAC pro. But what is apple up too? What is it now 445 days since an update? In the MAC forums lots of debate about apple maybe ditching MAC pro - who knows. Certainly apple seem focused on phones and small devices and that seems to be their profit driver - would they dare disgruntle their professional creative user base???

Solar panels and batteries + Genset for days when need equalizing charge to batteries and overcast wet days = very stable power. We run on batteries and inverter now to get stable power- its the only way out here. Could never ever ever put sensitive equipment on the local grid - yikes!

Drew, To be honest i was leaning towards FCP on a MAC Pro (waiting for new one to be released though). However i've been doing WAY WAY too much reading on this - losing my perspective on it i think - and i am now leaning more towards Avid. The new MC5 has just been announced at NAB as you would most likely know and it addresses a lot of Avid short comings. Very interesting to say the least. It does Red better now as well. I am way more interested in the editing/production side then the actual shooting. To me the cam is just a tool to get the footage back on the desktop. Having said that, its important to capture the best image you can of course. Rubbish in , rubbish out, right? That Ikonoskope is so appealing - the size is insane. Makes it easier to be covert which is really important where i live. I want to go up the Congo coast line and the place is rife with unpaid soldiers, bandits everywhere and there are pirates on the lake. Small is good. Small cam, raw capture, S16mm lenses widely available (lusting after Zeiss) whats not to love? - downside - processing power to actually use the footage as you note, storage ( but hey its getting so cheap now ) Now if they would just release the darn thing. J.D

Thanks for replies. Yep lots to consider and good points made. I do understand comments about starting lower down the scale and learning the ropes to know more about what you actually want in a high end package. Makes perfect sense. But then again............, its all money at the end of the day and equipment that is old tech these days is a dead end, and what do i do with it a little ways down the track?. It will just sit unused after a year or so. How many of you have a mini DV cam sitting around that cost good money in its day but has not seen the light of day for a looooong time now. I'd rather put my money into current raw acquisition cams and learn the ropes on that. At least i learn the pitfalls of raw capture etc and at the end of the day if the cam is not what i want i can sell it on really easy for the next year or two. Still what do i know - this is all hypothetical to me. Just trying to think it all through logically and not make a rash decision one way or the other. In any case we are still some time out for actually delivery for any of these cams, but they are coming and nothing is going to hold back the flood gates once they start to leak. Look at the new Panny 4/3 sensor thing. And Sony with their new announcement. So why go HDV now? I think the thing that is not changing is editing. The computer may change, the programs can become 64 bit etc, bu the basic skill of editing is never going to change. So i'm looking at turning my attention to learning that craft first. Its not going to be quick i should think , so it gives time for the cameras to come out, and hopefully housing manufacturers to start producing housings for them. Now MAC or PC? FCP or AVID? Adobe's latest PP has some amazing new tech on-board (if you believe the hype) and the Ikonoskope supports the DNG format. hmmmm. Bottom line, we live in amazing times. Regards J.D

More updates - this thing is looking more and more sexy! http://www.freshdv.com/category/news ........ scroll down to the second video clip. This is a very interesting interview from NAB 2010 this one is a bit older i think but i've not seen it before - still interesting even if a bit older. ....http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/features/index.cfm?articleid=104645 The single biggest thing to me for a raw recording device is the size. I want small. Capturing raw uncompressed footage in such a small unobtrusive form factor opens up lots of possibilities. Housing it will be a problem of course. Who would make a housing for it? Still there is a lot more to making a film then just underwater and even if we only used this cam above water for all the lead in/out of dive sites etc .....makes life easy to not have to lug a huge cam around getting all the atmosphere shots etc. Well what do i know....but thats my thinking on it anyway. J.D

Edited.

Hello Wetpixelers, Trying to make some baseline decisions on which way to start off setting up. I would really appreciate some observations from some of you very experienced editors. I do not intend this to a be a what is best type question - i dont think there is a best - it depends on ones own needs and desires and what is best for you may not be best for me etc. Having said that i would really like to hear why you prefer your setup and if you had the chance to start from zero which way would you do it today. Back Ground ; At this stage i have no Video camera at all. I was going to go the 7D route but all the reports i read say its somewhat limiting at this stage so not going that way now. I am therefore going to go either Scarlet or Ikonoskope. I know it could be a long wait but the appeal of shooting raw is too much to pass over. I was going to go ahead with an EX1 but i dont think that makes sense now given so much time has passed on that tech and the fact Scarlet is edging closer.I realize the cost of setting up for scarlet and am prepared for it including housing etc. Given i think we are still in for quite a wait for Scarlet i want to go ahead and setup an editing machine over the coming summer. I will use this workstation for photoshop etc while waiting for scarlet and to start learning my chosen editing software , whatever that turns out to be. Note i dont have Photoshop either at this stage so i need to decide whether to be Mac based or PC based - so many implications to all this. But before i even get to PC Vs Mac i need to decide on a platform to edit on. I have never edited before on any platform so i have no bias in any direction. I will have sufficent time to learn all this in the coming year and i live right next to the water where i dive so i can dive everyday at my whim - have a dive compressor and equipment at my beach shack etc - so plenty of time to experiment and hone skills - i am very determined to produce some UW video of my niche interest area and i want to do it to the highest standard i can - the only limiting factor should be my ability , not the equipment or platform i chose to work on. So all that said i see my choices as ; 1 FCP - seems this is the one to go for but having no direct experience i dont know. Supports Redcode 2 Premier Pro - I dont see many posts about anyone using this software - has advantage of being 64 bit and ties in with CS4 (5) well - Supports Redcode 3 Avid - even less info around - know little about it other then it is high end - no redcode support as far a s i know so it seems to be out for me given my Scarlet bias 4 Vegas - seems a bit lower end but supports Red code. Should i go PC or Mac ? I am starting from scratch here so either platform is fine and i intend to spec out a high end workstation which ever way i go. Money is always an issue but its not the limiting factor to get all this setup - it will be in the future though when i stop work so i cant afford a massive platform change in the next few years. So if you were starting with a blank canvas which way would you do it today and why ? Thanks for any suggestions on issues i need to carefully consider before i start of down this road. JD

looking promising indeed and its real - not vapourware! I suppose Scarlet will come one fine day, but gee they're stringing it out somewhat! (perhaps the understatement of the first 10 years of the new millennium) Anyway back to Ikonoskop - this thing is small! http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=42454 http://www.ikonoskop.com/blog/back-on-track/ http://www.vimeo.com/7126893