Scuba diving
Also known as: diving, SCUBA
Diving with compressed air, which gives time underwater and takes away colour, contrast, sound and any ability to move quickly.
Updated
What it means
Scuba trades away mobility in exchange for duration. A diver can stay down for an hour, which is the opposite of breath-hold diving, and everything about filming follows from having time and not having speed.
The water removes the image before the camera does. Red disappears in the first few metres, contrast falls away with distance, and particles in the water scatter whatever light there is.
Nothing in it is fast. The action, such as it is, is slow and deliberate, which makes the footage closer to a Travel montage than to anything in an action sports edit.
How it works in practice
Lighting is not optional below a certain depth. An Underwater video light puts real colour back rather than correcting what survived, and beyond fifteen metres it is the only thing that works.
Getting close is the whole technique. Every metre of water between the lens and the subject removes contrast and adds haze, so the shot gets better by swimming closer rather than by zooming in on it.
Buoyancy control is camera technique here. A diver who cannot hold position produces drifting, unstable footage, and no amount of stabilisation substitutes for simply being still in the water.
What to watch out for
Backscatter ruins clips with a light fitted badly. A lamp close to the lens illuminates the particles between the camera and the subject, which produces a snowstorm rather than a lit scene.
Housings fog when equipment moves between temperatures. Warm air sealed in at the surface condenses on the way down, and Housing fog ruins everything shot after it appears.
Automatic white balance chases a colour that is not there. A camera guessing underwater corrects toward blue and makes it worse, which is why a fixed value or a Red filter is the standard answer.
How RawClip handles it
Underwater material is graded for the colour shift during assembly, which handles the ordinary blue cast without anybody asking. Footage shot deep with no light is missing information that no grading step recovers, so the lamp matters more than anything afterwards.