Kaitsu

Hi, Latest HD-video; ca 8-minutes teaser combined from my shots during 9-days liveboard trip @ Red sea / close to Sudan border. EDIT- Embedded Video For You http://www.youtube.com/user/Dive2video#p/u/0/SiDOv7joBoI This video include nice shot of silky shark, close picture of turtle, color-changing octopus, etc. / Kai

We have a team of 20 divers, and we use to rent whole liveboard for 7-11 days dive safari every year. Now our fifth safari is coming, after 4 weeks from now... Our safaris have so far covered divesites in south, wrecks in north, Brothers and deadalus in mid, etc. Based to these experiences during last five years, I'm happy to give some recommendations for you, so that you will get best value out of your trip. Especially for yo as very experienced divers, I definetly propose to avoid bulky tourist shore diving, as you would see just "standard reef scenes" with some amount of dead corals. No, you need more. Our experience has been, that the absolutely best choice is to go for Liveboard. And there are very many of those, with very wide quality difference. Therefore, my recommendation for you is following: - Operator: take Emperor Divers. They are very professional, high quality, and prices are ok compared to value you get. (www.emperordivers.com). And if possible, select either gold or platinum class boat. - Especially I recommed routes, which normally start from Marsa Alam (or even from Hamata in south), but sometimes also from Hurghada. Emperor provides transfers you from Hurghada airport to these harbours as a part of package. - My favorite routes are northern "Get wrecked!" route; those wrecks are great even if you have seen many wrecks before... Another extremely nice is "South & St John's" with really nice reefs with caves/cavern diving and big fish. On the another hand, very often I see that Brothers and Daedalys are praised, but in my mind those were the most boring places. Just very similar walls with every dive. If you want to see some videoclips from our last trip, please have a look to my video channel (link here). Those videos are from divesites via route "South & St John's". Hope this helps! Cheers, Kai

Technically - if we mean quality of the video - it does not matter if you burn at first to HD and then to blu-ray, or directly to blu-ray. However, your procedure has a point: writing to HD at first might be faster way to get the first touch to the video, and go back to editing if tuning is needed. Alternatively, I often leave my PC to build blu-ray over night, and I use re-writable blu-ray (which costs ca 13-14 eur). This allows me to do testing also in "real environment" in addition to PC. So this is another way to avoid burning of test copies to expensive blu-ray discs.

Nice video! What bitrate you are using? / Kai

I have similar experience. DVD Architect 5.0b (build 180) which is the latest available version, seems to have surprisingly many and fatal bugs. However, for editing the Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 is really good. Unfortunately Sony has not had interest to develop these product to same quality level. In my project, I have tried to compose a blu-ray, containing ca 24 videoclips, with total lengt of close to two hours. This seems to be too much for DVDA; it freezes in menu building phase. This is very frustrating. I tried also blu-ray authoring feature in Nero -package (Neero Vision), but it is also very unflexible - you are allowed just to use existing layouts. Thereforee I'm also currently looking for better authoring software. I see there already some tips - have too take a look at those. / Kai

Hi, Please find a selection of my UW videos here. Most of these are from our liveboard trips at Red Sea; our team use to rent a whole boat "just for us" from Emperor for a week every spring. These videos include e.g.: - diving at wreck "S.S. Turbo" - diving at reefs: St John's caves, Habili Ali, Gota Kebir, and Habili Gafar Jaffa (...where a oceanic white tip shark was too curious; have a look to that video) All feedback, comments and suggestions to improve are welcome! Enjoy! / Kai

I'm planning to go for underwater video, but I wouldn't like to spend too much time for surfing in hundreds of websites (...or shops) looking for the most price/quality competitive camera + housing + aseccories combination. Thus, all good opinions (well justified, I hope :-) are apprecieated, and the question is: which videocamera + housing provides best value for money, is not "too expensive" for hobbyist, and also represents a brand which will be on the market for some time (e.g. to get spare parts etc.). - Kai