FEATURE
Broadcast TECH SEARCHING FOR SQUID
Purpose-built: Valentine uses an underwater camera housing he designed himself
used were Zeiss Ultraprimes. They have a very slight amount of con- trast but that helps to counteract the softness of shooting underwater. When you shoot underwater, red is the first colour to be absorbed, so to stop actors looking drowned and washed out, you have to light under- water to replace the lost colour.” As well as Kino Flo lights adapted for underwater use, six computer-
controlled Mac lights were posi- tioned above the water tank to help give Strictly Underwater a light- entertainment look. “It was the first time I’d used them. They allow you to change the colour and angle of the lights, and you can set up various special effects and program them to interact with the soundtrack,” says Valentine.
When natural history production company Ammonite went looking for a giant squid for National Geographic, it designed its own camera to capture footage from the deep-sea search. The Colour Starlight Cam- era, which works at the equivalent of 2 million ASA, only has two col- our channels – blue and red – with the green portion of the spectrum split between the blue and red channels. Ammonite has been working with its own design of image- intensified, monochrome Starlight cameras for almost 20 years, having used them to shoot Crossroads Of Nancite (BBC, 1995) and Creatures Of The Black Lagoon (Anglia, 1999). But Hunt For The Giant Squid was the first time the Bristol-based company had the resources and the reason to build a colour version. Naturalist and wildlife film-maker – and Ammonite managing director – Martin Dohrn describes shooting 500m underwater as “enormously difficult”. He says: “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, so without the ability to react to things we would have just got endless footage of nothingness. We needed live viewing but in order to get an HD signal over distance, we needed to use a fibre- optic cable to connect the camera with the surface.” The glass housing for the camera is ground out of glass and cost “thousands”. “We had three housings made: two for the Starlight cam- eras and one for the Colour Starlight,” says Dohrn. “We also had to engineer a craft to hold the thing, and it had to glide and keep the camera stable and not respond to cables being yanked as the boat on the surface rolled.”
Fix it in post
Each channel of the colour version of the Starlight camera is treated as a separate monochrome layer for noise reduction, before the lay- ers are combined, when another level of noise reduction takes place. “For the colour and monochrome Starlight cameras, we use combi- nations of layering, compositing and off-the-shelf noise-reduction software, depending on the shot,” says Dohrn. Ammonite uses Boris Effects, Motion, plug-ins for Final Cut Pro and, on occasion, footage is exported to Adobe Photoshop. “It all depends on the shot itself,” says Dohrn. “There doesn’t seem to be a single solution. The layering is simple but adds motion blur, and the noise-reduction software requires huge processing times and can make images look like plastic if it is over-used, so we use them both in varying degrees.”
‘It’s essential to be able to do everything underwater that you
38 | Broadcast TECH | March/April 2012
can do on the surface’ Mike Valentine
www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52