Of course! FCP X is installed via the App Store application, and updates are likely also distributed via this route. –And so it is, I check for available updates in the App Store, and the 10.0.3 update is patiently waiting for me.

I’m happy to have found the update, but am a little surprised how unwieldy¹ the process of finding updates has become. Apparently I need to keep it straight in my head that OS, Safari, iTunes, and some other updates are always delivered via the system’s “Software Update” function, and updates for apps installed via the App Store (should I ever manage to remember their provenance) are to be found only in the App Store app. And then there’s 3rd-party apps that have their own update mechanisms — if I’m lucky they use the Sparkle framework, which informs me of updates as soon as the apps are launched –nice.

If I’m confused about where to look for software updates, other users may be as well. An easy stopgap measure Apple could implement would be to add a line to Software Update when App store App updates are available such as “there are also 32 available updates waiting in the app store for you. Launch app store?”. Here’s an ugly mockup:

I expect Apple will either do something like this, or will come up with some wonderfully elegant way to make this unnecessary, or will release a new Mac Pro². Maybe all of the above. If they make this happen via a Software Update, I hope I can find it.

1. One might say “Windowsy”
2. unrelated, but please please please

Time Bandits [Blu-ray] $7.99

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin [Blu-ray] $6.991

But I also showed some restraint. Here’s something I successfully resisted purchasing today:²

White Aphrodisiac Telephone (Salvador Dali, 1938)

1. features commentary by The RZA
2. probably because none were available for sale

Canon’s discounted the price of some refurbished cameras by 15%. Which brings the T2i down to what must be its record low price.

The Deal:

• Here’s a link to the EOS Rebel T2i Body Refurbished – $475.99.
• They also sell it with a very good, cheap kit lens: EOS Rebel T2i EF-S 18-55mm IS Lens Kit Refurbished – $543.99.

According to the site at which I found the deal, “Shipping is $5 for $150+ purchases with coupon code SHIP11 [Exp 12/11]“.

Shoot right with this camera, and it can look ridiculously good. I bought mine back when the best price for the T2i body alone was $799 about a year-and-a-half ago, and have no regrets. It allows me to shoot video to a large sensor (APS-C size) using my excellent Canon lenses and even old Nikon lenses using an adapter.

A few clips I’ve shot on my T2i can be found here. They’re not best-of-breed, but should give some idea of what video from the T2i can look like:

• my first online DSLR video
• Looong Steadicam Merlin + Canon T2i shot
• On the streets of Hengdian, China

My first video shot on my T2i:

pizza and the dream of not being filmed from ZachFine on Vimeo.

Item	Price	Image	Note
The P+S Technik Skater Mini Camera Dolly	$5400		The one that started it all, I think. Costs a little less than the last used car I bought and undoubtedly moves more smoothly. Out of my price range until I start shooting for Spielberg.
Omni-tracker Slim-Line “LITE”	$495		The Omni-tracker looks a bit like a P+S Technik carved of purest PVC plastic and endowed with a carrying handle. This may be the only item in this list that will float in water1. They make heavier duty models as well, it costs $1500 for their top model.
KONOVA Scaled Rotational Axis Skater Dolly	$125		This looks a lot like what I’d probably build if I were to make my own, but I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. Something about them doesn’t appeal to me, but I can’t put my finger on it. If I put my foot on it I could probably skate. +Who named this thing?
DIY Skater Dolly	$20-$∞ + time		Pictured is dvxuser forum member Texanite’s rather gorgeous acrylic skater dolly, he sells them for around $400 when they’re available. This is an example of the kind of thing one could build with infinite time, materials, and skill.
Cinetics Cineskates	$275		An innovative skater dolly consisting of a set of super-engineered wheels that connect to a “GorillaPod Focus”. It’s a Kickstarter project, so the pricing will change soon. I’ve quoted the cost of a full kit, with tripod and ballhead. The wheels by themselves are $150 for a set of 3. I’m a little curious how rigid it’d be, but 930 kickstarter backers can’t be wrong. My resistance to spending $50 per wheel keeps me a step short of buying, but I’m tempted by its bizarreness and quality.
Pico Flex Table Dolly	$65, or $90 with friction arm extension		I give up. This newcomer looks like it will be too much fun. I’d probably spend $65 or more building my own, and mine would be less well engineered. Check out a video of the item in use here. It’s a very simple-looking item, but it does appear to be flexible enough, small enough, and smooth enough for my purposes. Their price for the friction arm is also very good. Ordered.

Cineskates popped up on the net the last week of August and got me interested in thinking again about skater dollies after more than a year of ignoring the category. The Pico Flex, which appeared on the net a week later, is where I’ve ended my search for now. I’m excited to play with the thing when it arrives.

1. I’ll keep that in mind for nautical use

Don’t let the sizes of these images fool you, the Vado fits in that pouch with room to spare, I kept both my 1st gen Vado HD and the remote for my Canon HV20 in the pouch simultaneously while snorkeling in Hawaii.

Both of these are solid-state video cameras that charge and transfer video to computer over a concealed USB connector and record pretty nice (for the price) 720p HD video at 30 frames per second. The older Vado records to mpeg-2 codec and includes 8Gb of storage space (~2 hours of record time), and the 3rd generation records to mpeg-4 and includes 4Gb of space (also ~2 hours, possibly at the same or better visual quality than the older model due to the more efficient mp4 codec). I haven’t yet used a 3rd gen Vado HD, but it appears to include an improvement that was at the top of my wishlist for the earlier Vado HDs: improved dynamic range and some manual exposure control. These cameras clip highlights³, it’d be nice to be able to minimize that issue and knock the exposure down a peg.

Also available at a discount right now, and possibly of interest to anyone with a small camera or phone, is the Creative Labs Vado HD Underwater Pouch. This item has for some reason⁴ dropped in price to $10. I believe it is a rebranded Aquapac Mini Waterproof Camera Case, an item which normally sells for about $30 (under both the Aquapac and Creative brand names).

This pouch is basically a fancy polyurethane bag, with a strong seal⁵ and very clear vinyl windows on front and back. It can hold small cameras easily, and I’ll probably be using mine next month to keep my iPhone dry while kayaking.

For an example of the 2nd generation Vado HD and this pouch in action together, check out this a Green Sea Turtle video I shot in Hawaii. I also recently loaned out my Vado and pouch to The Perennial Plate, and they used it to shoot some underwater footage of an urchin diver for their web series.

1. such as underwater in a fancy plastic bag
2. last I checked — the price could change any moment due to the way Amazon operates
3. a characteristic of all inexpensive digital cameras
4. momentarily?
5. I trust it more than I would a couple of ziplocs, FWIW, and have had no problems with mine over a couple of years of use.

Welcome to Ai Qi Coffee. Please have a seat over here in the overstuffed booth fringed with tassels. Here is a glass of boiling-hot water and a menu. Your waitress will be with you shortly.

I highly recommend this dish. "Customer get angry"

"Frozen old duck soup" Truth in advertising taken one step too far.

"The cold discolored ears, The cold cow shutter" –Would you like to order an unappetizer?

One of the side-effects of living in China for a while is that "Crispy pigeon" doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. It’s a good translation, and just looks like food. But "Chicken rice spent"? Hilarious.

"Spicy beef noodles, bake butterfly" Braise like a bee?

"Onions detonation small cattle" Onions detonation small cattle!

Hints of lava and surfboard? "Hawaiian scenery pizza". ¹

"Nalco small cattle baked carbon"

Lovely. "Red pink beautifuls woman"

"Coconut amorous feelings" It’s a very emotional drupe.

"Flame hockey" Game on.

"Colocasia esculenta schott pearl milk tea"²

"Enough to give comfort" Dayenu.

"Low because of Columbia coffee" You said it buddy, Columbian politics always gets me down too. Let’s stop listening to NPR for a bit.

I really wish I’d asked if I could buy one of these menus, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Although I think many of these translations are hilarious, it is worth noting that I don’t think badly of whoever put it together –it was extremely courteous of them. Very very few English speakers ever pop into the small town of Hengdian, let alone drop into Ai Qi Coffee. So kudos to that establishment for trying (and largely succeeding) to accomodate the occasional English-speaker.
Customer not really angry.

1. Again, those not accustomed to China might also find "Super cows feet pizza" to be noteworthy
2. I suspect a scientific name crept into their woeful Chinese-English dictionary

These images show the combination of weights used, the span angle setting, the hole in the mounting plate to which the camera was attached (hole N), that the gezornenplatz screw was in place, and the position of the mount plate.

Full setup

middle weight and span setting	end weights	mounting plate
mount plate position

1. i.e., a single message sent to me on Vimeo
2. as opposed to unattached?

Rachel encounters a sidewalk butcher shop on the streets of Hengdian. Hengdian is a 4 hour drive from Shanghai. Many movies and TV shows are filmed on the town’s huge sets, which include a full-scale¹ replica of Beijing’s forbidden city.

Shot with a Canon 550D/T2i running the Magic Lantern firmware. Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens, Steadicam Merlin. Internal mics for audio, one channel without digital gain, one with about 18db.

If you are so inclined, you can download the video and watch it in higher quality from its vimeo page.

1. I’d venture it’s actually 4/5ths scale, but it’s pretty huge

A still from the film "The Prestige". Shot on film, photochemical finish, the entire film looks fantastic. Obviously, film can be awesome. Wally Pfister should be allowed to shoot on film, or sparklevision, or whatever he wants, for the rest of his days. See more stills from "The Prestige" at Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films

Some of this year’s most acclaimed and talked-over movies, for starters, including “The Social Network,” “Black Swan” and “Tiny Furniture,” were either partly or wholly shot in digital. It’s no wonder that more than a third of my 30 favorites this year — because, really, why stop at 10? — were a combination of the two. Does it matter?

Does it matter?

It matters to producers, as digital, used properly, can lower the cost of a shoot.

It matters to telecine and processing facilities, as –telecine? What’s that? Such facilities are quickly diversifying the services they offer, or are closing.

It matters to assistant editors, as they either have to deal with the constantly-changing workflows designed around different digital formats, or have to deal with transfers from film and keeping track of the relationship between the digital clips in the editing system and actual pieces of film.

It matters if you’re a Director of Photography with exacting standards, and you’ve spent your entire career building your knowledge and ability to achieve the images you want on film, surely. That’s probably the person to whom this debate matters the most, from the aesthetic side of the argument. But should it? Would adapting one’s style of shooting to a particular sensor be any different than adapting to a particular film stock? Can one choose particular cameras and sensors based on the needs of a project, as one did film stocks? I think this is already happening. But I can’t speak for DOPs.

But for audiences and cinema enthusiasts, “Does it matter?” was a good question, a year ago. Now it’s an afterthought.

Celluloid film is an amazing technology, and it’s dying, quickly. I’m no purist², but I’m a little sad about this, and hope I can work on a feature film that’s shot on film before it completely disappears.

A still from an as-yet unreleased short film I edited this year. Shot on the Red One with anamorphic lenses.

Dargis continues, and my mood darkens:

Digital images still don’t look as rich and sumptuous as film, which was developed to reproduce the way our eyes see the visible spectrum.

I can’t let either of these sorry old canards⁴ go unexamined.

A still from the film Cyrus. Shot on the Red One. Click to see more screenshots from the film “Cyrus” in blu-ray.com’s review of the disc.

Back to print. Has National Geographic stopped looking sumptuous since they started publishing photos shot on digital cameras? Have people been writing complaints in to Playboy? The shift of the field of still photography from film to digital is relevant to this discussion, as digital sensors for moving imagery and for stills are as closely related as their celluloid counterparts are. The complaints, worries, and about digital for stills seem to have vanished over the past decade as the technology improved to the point that only an engineer could tell the difference.

Regarding Canard #2: So much of the film vs. digital argument has for so long been couched in pseudoscientific mystical pronouncements, and the idea that film is somehow better suited to replicating the way the human eye sees the world than digital is one of such. Both film and sensors designed for photography are designed to create pleasing images for people to stare at. Neither technology really reproduces “the way our eyes see the visible spectrum”, nor would anyone really want that.⁶ What film and sensors can do to reproduce the qualities of the visual spectrum that our eyes can sense, they do. Digital sensors follow film note for note in this regard. Both have the same design goal. The statement that film was designed to reproduce the way our eyes work and the implication that digital sensors are not, is simply wrong from any angle.

Nit picking aside, the article’s worth a read.

The battle that made the question “Does it matter?” relevant, is all but over. But “Will it blend?” –I think celluloid’s got a lock on that one.

1. I nearly put the word “films” in quotes, but if I did that I’d have to start calling the “bins” in Final Cut Pro what they look like: “folders”.
2. That should be obvious, given this blog post.
3. It’ll be all, by the end of 2011
4. Well, if they haven’t achieved canard-status it’s not for lack of trying.
5. It’s also worth noting that many of the digital films shot until recently chose to go digital for reasons of flexibility or cost-containment, and didn’t place a priority on picture quality. The results speak for themselves, and should not be compared to the visual impact of films that put a priority on appearance, such as Lawrence of Arabia, but instead should be compared to similarly oriented uses of celluloid such as 60’s man-on-the-street news footage or Monty Python’s outdoor segments.
6. Human vision is fantastic, but that’s mostly the brain’s doing –in many ways our eyes are surprisingly crappy. The brain creates fantastic imagery out of surprisingly little information, and a lot of what we see is the result of pattern recognition and quick deduction in the visual cortex. Our impressions of color and light are relative to neighboring colors, rather than absolute measurements, and the way we see images is in a sense hallucinatory.

   Though neuroscientists and opthalmologists would love to get together and watch a sequence that actually reproduces the way our eyes see, it’d be jarring to an audience to watch footage that features a tiny, darker circle of very high detail and color saturation in the center with blues that tend to the violet, a larger empty black spot nearby, and all surrounded by an increasingly blurry and warped bright green-blue miasma in which motion is detectable but not details. Of course the view would continuously jitter around at high speed and never hold still so that the tiny spot of clarity can flit from detail to detail and take in enough for the brain to make its assumptions and create what we see.

The greenscreen shoot. That 16:9 frame at right represents the frame of the video player that’s part of the facebook page. Clamps hold breakaway blocks with tracking markers.

A small section of a final result, composited live in a web browser.

All’s well that ends well eh? Now go see the film. How else are you going to see excrement fly at the camera in 3D?⁴

1. Or you might not. There’s no accounting for taste.
2. As far as I know.
3. And far far less annoying. It also doesn’t spam your friends with every smiling sheep you’ve mulesed or smiling automated milking machine you’ve installed or whatever people do in that Farmville thing whose updates drove me from Facebook. And seriously, what’s better, virtual happy farming, or dudes hitting baseballs into each others’ nuts? The world’s answer to that question can be found in the box office receipts for Jackass 3D.
4. Neither a trip to the zoo, nor the blue Navii “tribal bio-expelled tactical paste” seen in the upcoming director’s cut of Avatar count.

A frame from last night’s camera tests. Noise removed and image sharpened with the NeatVideo plugin.

15 hours from now, the noise from my Canon T2i’s ISO6400 footage will have been significantly reduced. 15 hours. 15. This is why I need a 12-core computer ASAP.

Like every DSLR shooter with a slider (the non-professional term for a fixed-length dolly) I’m now constantly fighting the urge to post video clips of slow moving shots cut to ambient music. But the internet’s bandwidth is safe for now, as my hands are tied while the NeatVideo FCP plugin takes its sweet time² to remove noise and sharpen all the footage.

1. @dmcm is a person, but I think he should adopt the DMCM molecule’s diagram as his signature
2. On my quad-core it seems it takes 17 hours to do the denoising on 20 minutes of footage. 17.

What you see above is an example of the beforeAfter jquery plugin in use. If you drag the controls overlaid on the image to the left or right, click anywhere in the image¹, or click the links just below the image, you’ll be able to compare the graded and ungraded looks of a frame from a short film I graded a couple of months ago.²

beforeAfter was written by admin at catchmyfame.com. You can find the original code, see some demonstration images, and read up on his reasons for developing the plugin in his blog post about beforeAfter.

I was very happy to come across this plugin. I’ve wanted for a while to be able to post before-and-after examples like this to my blog to demonstrate film grading and photo editing work, and this was nearly exactly what I needed. I took the code, wrapped it into a Wordpress plugin, and modified it to add a few features. Since I was to benefit from code released freely into the wild by its author, it’s only natural to release the modifications. The beforeAfter wordpress plugin I’ve constructed can be downloaded here:

http://zachfine.com/beforeAfter_wp.tar.gz

I wrote the plugin’s original author to ask for his blessing before releasing this altered version of beforeAfter, and he agreed. Below are excerpts from that email message, which explain my alterations to the code and also contains some instructions on how to use the plugin:

<email message>
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Zach wrote:
Hello there,

I was extremely happy to find your jquery beforeAfter script on the net. I’ve wanted for a while to post before and after images to my blog that help show people how to make adjustments to photos or grade video footage, beforeAfter seems like a fantastic way to do that.

I constructed a wordpress plugin based on your script and installed it on my server. It worked very well, but I realized while testing it that the following additional features would be very useful to me (and possibly to others as well):

• the ability to have an arbitrary number of instances of beforeAfter containers per page
• the ability to set custom “Show only before” and “Show only after” text strings via custom attribute in the container’s html.
• the ability to set a custom initial wipe starting point via custom attribute in the container’s html. The reason for this is that I want the beforeAfter controller and its function to be instantly obvious to visitors, so I want to manually place the initial wipe point over the area of greatest between-image contrast — or I might want to place the wipe point over the area I mean to emphasize.

So I read up on javascript and jquery and made a few modifications. It was only after making these modifications that I noticed the script’s license stipulates “No Derivative Works”. I think this means I can’t use the modifications I’ve made unless you give me approval to use my modified version of your script, though I could be wrong. I was planning on sending you these modifications regardless, thinking that in the best-case scenario you might like the modifications and/or make them available to others.

My mods to the script:

Example of container html:³

<div class="container" data-wipeto="35" data-beforetext="original" data-aftertext="graded" data-animateintro="true" data-introdelay="3000" data-introduration="3000"> <div><img alt="ungraded" src="http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LB-01-00-57-05-original.jpg" height="254" width="450" /></div> <div><img alt="graded" src="http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LB-01-00-57-05-graded.jpg" height="254" width="450" /></div> </div&

Note that I’ve set the user configuration settings above using valid html5 custom attributes. In this manner each container can have its own settings. The html5 spec requires that custom attributes be lowercase and begin with “data-”. Unfortunately this means no camelCasing, which cuts down on the readability of variable names. Maybe underscores are allowed?

Because my goal was to allow an arbitrary number of beforeAfter containers on a page, I’ve changed the jquery selectors in the script to look for divs of class “container”, rather than id “container”. I’ve always used id’s to single out individual design elements on a page, and classes for a class of elements. I could be wrong about this paradigm.

This html produces the following

Redundant image removed –see demo at top of this blog post, it’s a working example of the result of that container’s html.

Any beforeAfter settings not set by the user in the html will get the defaults. The “wipeto” point will be set to “50″ (out of 100), the “beforetext” will be set to “Show only before”, etc.

Here’s the jquery code I use to iterate through each of the the divs of class “container” in the DOM, iterating through each div’s custom attributes to construct an object of options, and then calling the beforeAfter plugin on that div and passing it the set of user-set options:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
   $('div.container').each(function (index) {
      var $div = $(this);

      var userOptions = {};
      $.each(this.attributes, function(i, attrib) {
             if( /^data-/.test(attrib.name) ) {
              userOptions[attrib.name.replace(/data-/g, '')] = attrib.value;
              }
      });

// Adding just one more option to the object of arguments:                      
      userOptions['imagepath'] = '<?php echo WP_PLUGIN_URL . "/beforeafter/js/"; ?>';

      $div.beforeAfter(userOptions);
   });
});
</script>

This bit of script is in my wordpress plugin, with more comments, here: http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/beforeafter/beforeAfter-source.php

I made a few of changes to the jquery.beforeafter.js script to make use of the new “wipeto”, “beforetext”, and “aftertext” vars, and to remove camelCasing from the options/defaults vars to be consistent with the html5 custom attributes. My altered version is available here: http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/beforeafter/js/jquery.beforeafterZ.js
</email message>

I plan to use this plugin quite a bit in the near future. I hope you all enjoy using it as well. Thanks again to admin at catchmyfame.com for writing the original plugin and allowing me to distribute and use this modified version.

1. Clicking rather than dragging the controls works just fine on iPhone/iPad.
2. Yes, I really did track a “power window” to the actress’s face, matte-ing a selective color adjustment, to restore/enhance the blue color of her eyes. Thanks for asking.
3. Yeah, the formatting doesn’t look so hot after it’s wrapped by your web browser, but you should have seen it before! The demo of the plugin at the top of this blog post can serve as a more readable example –see the html code of the post.

The market has gotten pretty crowded since I first started using high-quality earbuds, and this particular pair is one of many I’ve never tried, but the reviews for the SuperFi 4’s look to be promising. For half price or less they may be a good choice if you’ve been considering a set of better earbuds than those which come with the iPod/iPhone/Zune/etc.

I like and recommend using earbuds over headphones when monitoring audio recording in a noisy environment, when watching or listening to a media player on a plane or train, or when listening to media in bed³. I’ve had very good experiences with Shure earbuds and with the Future Sonics Atrios. My Shure e2c’s I bought very cheaply on an earlier deal, and I use them for running⁴. The Atrios are part of my production kit, and I also use them when traveling. The fact that earbuds block a lot of surrounding noise, just as do earplugs, allows me to concentrate on listening at lower volume and without distraction. If you’ve got the need, these might be worth looking into while they’re discounted.⁵

1. My favorite way to determine the going price for an item is to do a search on eBay for completed auctions.
2. The last sale a search turns up for this item was back in July for $59.99.
3. I’ve slept with earbuds in and iPhone alarm on before when traveling or when sharing a room to avoid waking others.
4. Which I really need to get back to doing on a regular basis.
5. Or as Amazon says, “…while supplies last.”

A while back I posted a video of one of my more successful tests flying a Canon T2i DSLR on a Steadicam Merlin. In the Vimeo comment thread, people asked for my recipe¹, and I promised to post it. Time passed². I experimented with other, heavier lenses on my camera, and adjusted the Steadicam to each, erasing the previous settings.

The other day I ran second camera on a commercial shoot, needed to use the kit lens and Rode Videomic, and thus had to dig up my recipe. And there’s the recipe above, that image, taken with a cell phone camera. That’s pretty much all I recorded of my recipe, the rest is easy to derive from there. Here’s how I’ve got it set at the moment:

Another image of that seat-of-the-pants adaptation to steady the Rode Videomic’s shock mount. Click to enlarge photo.

• Stage Mounting Hole: N
• The stage mark is lined up right about at -1.25.
• End Weights: 1 start, 2 full
• Middle Weights: 1 full, 1 finish
• Arc size: if “-” is -1 and “+” is 1, I’m set right around -0.15 –not sure if that’s the same setting as in the photo.
• Gezornenplatz screw is in place, and the arc joint is locked. The setup works best when it is as stiff as possible.

I hope this information is of use to someone.

Edit (2010/08/03): After a day using this reconstructed recipe and reviewing the resulting footage, it’s obviously more bottom heavy than the recipe with which I recorded that clip I’d posted to vimeo. Though this recipe balances the camera, there is sway when changing direction as a result of the bottom’s greater inertia. I think I’m going to try reducing the spar angle and lowering the gimbal so as to better equalize top and bottom. I want to get back to a 3-5 second drop time.⁴

1. A combination of steadicam weights and settings for a particular camera configuration and style of shooting is called a “recipe”, in the parlance of our times.
2. Sorry about that y’all.
3. A slow, but very lightweight and sharp 18-55mm lens, with Image Stabilization
4. Yep, I see that Garrett Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam Merlin, recommends a 1-second drop time in that video. But I think I’ve gotten better results with a markedly less bottom-heavy setup, though it actually does make the device more difficult to balance at first.

I was a first-time visitor to Hawaii recently, and shot a lot of photos and video. I’ll be dribbling it to my blog in bits and pieces as I go through the footage. Here’s a taste: a green sea turtle at Ho’okena Beach in Kona, Hawaii. This turtle popped up as I was snorkeling in deeper waters and swam alongside me all the way back in to shore. A beauty. Perhaps she was amazed to see a film/video editor out in direct sunlight?

Meandering tech notes:
Shot with a Creative Vado HD solid state 720p camcorder (1st generation)¹, in a Creative-branded Aquapac underwater housing.

The Vado HD is very similar to the Flip Mino HD and the Kodak zi8; I like it because it features a much wider-angle lens than its competitors. The Aquapac is basically a $30 very clear plastic bag with a watertight seal. Though this one’s branded for the Creative Vado HD, it’s probably large enough to fit two of them side-by-side². One one of my snorkeling adventures I brought along my Canon HV20 in a dive housing, and its remote control (to start and stop the camera’s recording) in the Aquapac alongside the Vado. I probably could have put my cell phone in there as well but didn’t trust the bag yet and honestly didn’t really want it along.

This turtle clip is from the 2nd day of my trip, before I’d figured out that if I squeezed out all the air in the Aquapac before sealing it, the plastic would remain taut over the lens, resulting in a sharper image. Less air in the bag also would have resulted in a tighter fit against the screen of the Vado HD, which would have given me a fighting chance of seeing the image on the Vado’s screen underwater –most of the footage I shot on the trip, including this turtle clip, was shot by blindly pointing the camera and hoping.

I snorkeled with the Vado in the Aquapac bag all week and had no problem with leaks. I was a little worried about this, but wasn’t risking much as the 1st and 2nd generation Vado HD go for $49 these days (B-stock of the 4Gb versions on Creative’s website as of 7/2010).

1. I’ve written up the Creative Vado HD previously here and here.
2. 3D anyone?