Shooting 4k60 Underwater with the Panasonic GH-5 in a Nauticam housing

Recently we took a trip to Raja Ampat aboard the Raja Ampat Aggressor. On this trip we wanted to shoot 4K video at 60fps and had new cameras along to handle this: a pair of Panasonic GH-5 cameras in Nauticam housings with Nauticam WWL-1 wet mount wide angle lenses. We used Panasonic 14-42 lenses on both cameras. These cameras are the first we know of that can do white balance underwater without needing an orange filter. The results were amazing; super easy to use, great video and photos, great color at just about any depth. Below are the details of how we set up the housings and the settings and control adjustments we made.

Randy uses a Keldan 8X light on a Locline arm. The Locline arm is easy to position in any arrangement and holds fine in current with the Keldan light. He used a Keldan blue filter during the day to add light that was in the same range as the ambient light, avoiding too much red/orange in the added light. We used Backscatter’s AirLock Vacuums system to verify the airtight seals on the housings during the trip.

To be able to take the WWL-1 off underwater, Randy needed a place to store it. Elongating the holes in a Nauticam bayonet lens holder allowed it to be screwed down onto the top of the right tray handle. This makes it very easy to swap the lens from the front of the housing the the holder when switching from wide angle to medium or semi-macro shots. Note that the right hand handle brace was removed; it’s not needed with a rig of this weight. 

We did find that adding two Nauticam floats, one to the Keldan light and one to the housing, made the rig almost perfectly neutrally buoyant and super easy to control with one hand, from either side. The float on top of the housing wasn’t strictly necessary, but it made the housing so close to perfectly neutral, and made setting the free floating “down angle” of the rig  so easy by changing the angle of the top float, that Randy left it attached for most dives

Rick wanted something simpler and was willing to choose wide or regular field fo view before each dive, so we opted not to put the lens holder on his setup. He also did not use a light, opting for ambient light only.

For transport we use two Porter Case mini cases. These awesome cases collapse down to fit on just about any plane (including 2+2 across turbo props) and then flip around into carts that can hold 200lbs each. They allow us to move dive gear and luggage ourselves wherever we go. (We always get approving looks from other passengers and airport personnel, most have never seen these).

Getting the cameras set up so we could focus on diving and shooting without having to mess with them much underwater was key (especially for Rick :-).  Since white balance underwater is (approximately) a constant shift towards blue and reduction in red as you go down, Randy hypothesized that we could get good results by customizing settings for 20ft, 40ft, and 60ft, then choosing one based on the current depth. This would avoid having to constantly white balance underwater. On the first dive Randy performed white balances at these depths, assigning them to custom 1 through 3 on the camera, and then copying them to Rick’s camera. We assigned these depths to the 4 arrows: Left - Auto, Up - 20ft, Right - 40ft, Down - 60ft. This puts the depths arranged in ascending order as you move down the housing, and is a pretty logical way to arrange them. The 4th white balance preset was assigned to the Fn3 button as a “scratchpad” for doing custom white balances manually at a given depth without messing up the 3 presets (but this was never really necessary, more something that Randy experimented with). This worked really well and made it easy to pick a preset by matching the depth and looking at the monitor.

Note: Underwater your eyes adjust to the color of a particular depth so the monitor on the camera will always look redder than it really is. Once you are topside the recordings will be fine.

Fn4 was changed to allow quick access to the AF Mode as we found it useful to be able to select spot focus quickly if there was something small away from the background we wanted to be able to focus on.

The final change was setting Fn5 as a second Record button. We never use the eyepiece viewfinder, but several times when holding the rig with just the left hand (using a pointer in the right hand to hold position in current), it was nice to be able to start recording with the thumb on your left hand.

All of our footage was shot at 4k60, 8-bit, Long GOP, 150Mbps in MP4/LPCM format. We shot in Photo Style “Vivid” as that gave color that we really liked right out of the camera. We chose not to shoot 10-bit because that’s really only necessary if the camera didn’t get the exposure and color correct, and our hypothesis that using a couple of presets for depth would “get it right” turned out to be correct. We shot 7 hours of footage which used about 700GB of storage, including proxies.

We used FCPX 10.4 on a 15” MacBook Pro with 2TB of storage. Using proxy mode was smooth and super efficient (it generates ProRes at 1080p, only adding about 50% disk usage). Playback and editing was no problem for the MacBook Pro, even with color adjustments and transitions The new color controls in 10.4 worked well for tweaking the color, but most of the time it was correct right out of the camera, just needing slight black level or contrast adjustments.

A rough cut of our movie was ready on the last night of the dive. Only some minor additional edits and a re-recording of the voiceover (it’s hard to find a really quiet spot on a dive boat!) was necessary after getting home. The video was output at 2160p60, 1080p60, 540p60, and 360p30. Each version was output in h.264 and h.265 for maximum compatibility with computers, phones, and video players.

Rick wanted to do some photography on this trip, especially of the architectural beauty of the coral we saw. We used frame extraction from the 4k60 video to accomplish this, and were very happy with the 8MP stills that resulted. It made for a really simple way to have a nice selection of frames to choose from, and with the skimming in FCPX, choosing frames was a breeze. These stills were pulled directly from the raw video from the GH-5.

To make sure we had plenty of data redundancy, we had a pair of Sandisk Extreme Pro 256GB memory cards for each camera, labeled accordingly. Every time a housing was opened the battery and memory cards were swapped. We never erased the memory cards so that they provided a backup for all content. FCPX identifies content that’s already been imported and hides it, so the process was seamless. We used a 2TB Glyph Atom SSD RAID, a super compact USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 drive every day or so to do an incremental backup for a third copy of all data. The whole project ended up being about 1.1TB.

We wanted to thank Russ at Backscatter Underwater Photo & Video in Monterrey. He worked with us to spec out the two rigs and got them to us well in advance of the trip.