Captain_Caveman

Welcome to the heady world of filming on a 5D! If I may suggest a few things. The opening shot is way way too long, over a minute. Then it cuts to... another angle of the same coral mound which then cuts to another angle of the same coral mound. To be honest, I got a bit bored looking at the same thing and FFW a couple of minutes and we still had the same coral mound. You have more excellent shots. You need to be a bit more savage with your cutting. You don't want the viewer to get bored. I think overall you've got maybe 2-3 mins of footage there, max. Take a look around the web on editing and when to cut. There's the general rule that a cut shouldn't be longer than 7 seconds, but it's all depending on what's happening and what you have to show the viewer. There's all sorts of tips and suggestions from cut only on movement, cut when you blink... but I generally think you should be paying some attention to this editing process because your footage is excellent, well exposed, the WB is good, nice colours. It's very difficult properly exposing a 15mm FI on a full frame especially in these conditions, and I think you did a good job (was it on Auto?) If you just trim up the footage and more pay attention to the Why, Where, When, Who and How (ie. show some supporting stuff.. the boat, getting ready, some of the divers etc...) it'll be a good compelling film. You've tackled the difficult part and that's getting this setup to work and processing the end result. Well done and keep it up! We're a rare breed.

Sounds great! looking forward to seeing the result! I've never done this, but the following would come to mind. You'd need to try get as close to 50mm to try avoid barrel distortion, so I'd aim for a focal length on your T2i of 24mm (24*1.6 crop)=38 * (33% UW magnification) = ~50mm If you have LR3 you can maybe correct for barrel distortion, but I think the better you get it in camera the easier it'll be. Obviously you will need to keep the exposure locked the same throughout the segments. I've only every used Photoshop and it does a pretty decent job of it. Good luck!

This is not my bag really, but have you tried doing a log and transfer direct from the cam into FCP?

There's nothing going to better a full frame sensor camera for low light, so if that's your concern the 5d, no contest. In the current guise, the 7d offers more lens choice and 60fps, and cost. I use a 5d. For what I use it for, dark, wide angle footage, I would still choose this. But for Ocean, daytime stuff, I'd probably chose a 7d just for lens choice. If I were to go for the 5D, I'd wait for the III. Also, I wouldn't get too excited about continuous AF on HDSLRs for a while yet, I think we'd have to lose the mirror before we get a workable solution.

I shoot wide angle and trust the AF. I also dive in haloclines also, so the murky water makes it almost impossible, so I have to trust AF. I sometimes have problems seeing the menu items. To check sharpness I magnify the image I've stopped being able to read my Dive Comp which is even more of a worry

Yeah love it! Wish I had a fast computer I tried Twixtor, but the renders were just ridiculous.

Excellent!

Could it have been overheating? That's definitely not right.

Loving that one mate! Music was spot on!

The nice fellas over in Macintosh sell proper ones. What NLE are you going to be using? Generally, the machine looks OK. You'll benefit from a faster HD, try ramp it up to 7200rpm, max out the memory. The GPU isn't Mercury compatible if you are intending on using Premiere Pro CS5.5 though. But it's 64bit (make sure you use an NLE that is 64bit for the best performance.), i7 with a fast drive it should be steaming.

I remember back in the day when I used to have to mess around with my computers to get them to work properly. That was before the enlightenment

Really nice!

In my view you need to be paid for this. It's far too much work.

I use the 5d, but have conditioned myself to switch off live view whenever I'm not recording. I've never had a problem with overheating and I use mine everyday, two dives a day, but in an ali housing. As for file size, 25-30 mins of footage takes up about 8-10Gb. It really depends on the amount of data you have in each frame. Black/darker frames carry more digital data than lighter frames and mainly black dark shots come out a lot larger.

If all the buttons on the back stop working it sounds like one of them isn't springing back and locking the rest up. Speak to Jean (on here), he's usually very quick to sort this sort of stuff out. My Live View button sometimes stuck so they sent me out stronger springs and a new button assembly within a couple of days.