Guam 2010 diving and snorkeling - GoPro HD test

Scuba diving at Blue Hole, Barracuda Rock, and snorkeling in Tumon Bay. Guam, USA. May 2010.

Quick test edit of footage from GoPro HD video camera.
The camera comes with an underwater housing rated to 180', but the dome port is not properly calculated for underwater use and results in blurry video.

A homemade flat port in front of the dome fixes the focus problem. Details about the fix below.

Didn't actually go into the Blue Hole, but swam around the nearby area at about 65 feet. Barracuda rock was about 50 feet down. Visibility was about 100' which, I'm told, was "really bad" for these sites.

Snorkeling in Tumon Bay on a sunny day presented many small fish swimming around the coral. The 1080p footage out of the GoPro HD had a hard time keeping up with all the motion from camera movement (from me bobbing around on the surface), reflections of sunlight, and all the fish moving around. Compression artifacts are very evident in the original footage.

The GoPro HD is incredibly small and was mounted on top of my main Ikelite housing. It doesn't have a viewfinder, but its lens is very wideangle -- so basically you just "point and pray". I was mainly composing for the Ikelite housing, so composition with the GoPro is a bit strange due to parallax on closer shots.

Footage was originally recorded on R5 mode (1080p 29.97 H.264 15Mbit/s) but my Core i7 2.8GHz running Premiere CS4 was struggling to edit the video, so I converted it to 720p MPEG-2 as an intermediate codec. Still need to find a better solution for editing.

Housing modification to correct underwater focus:
I used pieces of 8mm black acrylic and 3mm clear acrylic cut to 50mm square. The black acrylic had a 38mm hole drilled in its center, which I then flared out with a file to prevent vignetting the GoPro's very wideangle lens.

Everything was assembled with acrylic cement, then coated with silicone aquarium sealant to prevent leaks between the dome and the flat port.