Why not remove/edit out the thruster motor noise before posting the video? To me it really detracts from the ambience and from the beauty of the dive. I understand it being there if the video is for technical observation of the ROV operation.
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Interesting point/topic
I personally prefer to leave the thruster noise in but drop the volume slightly because I like the sense of being onboard with the ROV and feel the thruster sound can add to that. Maybe not for all videos though.
I get that for some people it’s just unnecessary.
I’d be interested to hear more opinions on this too 
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I like it because it lets me know what the ROV is doing. How is removing it different than just muting the video player? To me it’s annoying when there’s no thruster noise since it feels like part of the video is missing.
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Fair enough. When I view your videos, I am enjoying the scenery, so the noise detracts from that. Your right though, I can just hit the mute button.
Depends on the audience and what’s trying to be conveyed. Including audio can make the experience more immersive (as @Russ mentioned), and can help to form a more complete technical understanding of a situation (as you alluded to).
If the video’s purpose is to be a display of the best views that were found during a dive then a short edit (e.g. some ‘slides’/snippets with background music or something) may make sense, but that’s less well suited to sharing what it’s like to actually be there, or what the experience of piloting that ROV dive was like.
Perhaps worth noting that as a marine robotics forum the community here is likely skewed towards being interested in more raw and technical videos relevant to marine robotics, rather than only the kind of entertaining highlight videos that might get shown e.g. during a conversation or as promotional material
That summarizes a lot of my intent with my videos. Anyone who watches my videos should have the exact same experience as I did when flying the ROV.
Another possible reason for my video style is that Blue Robotics doesn’t seem to be interested in making any product demonstration videos, so I try to show off the products that I do have in order for people to be able to have the information in making a good decision if they are worth the money for them. I know a lot of people in this community have a tight budget so they need to know if it’s worth saving up the hundereds/thousands or trying to DIY their own solution. I wish that I had some full length videos to watch when I was considering buying the BlueROV2.
I completely disagree with editing the videos. It’s super easy to mute the audio and listen to your own music if you want. It’s also super easy to skip though youtube videos, and I usually add timestamps of interesting things in most of my recent ones, so there’s no benefit in shortening the video length. Replacing the audio and editing down the length only take things away from the video.
I usually don’t bother watching videos that are under 10 minutes because it’s likely that its going to be a bunch of disjointed clips with terrible music, but I understand that a lot of people like those.
I could theoretically make both a full version and a quick highlight version of my videos, but I doubt that the quick version would have enough views to be worth my editing time since my usual videos don’t get very many views as it is. I actually was seriously considering making a montage video of all of the fish that I saw last year and my 2021 highlights but I never got around to doing it and it’s getting late for a 2021 recap.
Hi @btrue! We always appreciate your videos and value humans like you in our community that are able to help share opinions and feedback on our products.
Although we do not have full-length video demonstrations of all of our products, we make efforts to expose how others are utilizing our technology and make technical information open and available by including models and drawings on all of our product pages, sharing on our social media accounts, through BlueROV2 user video playlists on our YouTube channel, and through these community forums. We have intentions to share more about our products in lots of different ways, but we can only work on so many things at once!
As with everything, we’re always working to improve and be better than the day before. Thanks for your contributions! Cheers
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How does one enable audio on video, or do you refer to an off-board cameras audio?
Hi @3dMB,
If I’m remembering correctly this post was partially in response to some external camera footage, from a GoPro attached to an ROV, but it was posed as an open question so presumably it applies equally to any recorded videos.
If you have an audio stream available it might be possible to record with a program like OBS Studio, which could also potentially mux that together with an incoming video stream.
There’s some additional discussion and historical context in this thread, which I’ll summarise as:
- There used to be audio streaming support in our old Companion Software, and the old ArduSub-focused fork of QGroundControl, which made use of the microphone that comes onboard our Low Light HD Camera.
- That support was rigidly defined to a specific audio source and encoding, which isn’t ideal for a more general multimedia manager like the BlueOS camera manager, and we haven’t yet developed the robust audio handling we want for BlueOS.
- When we rejoined with the upstream QGroundControl the audio handling functionality didn’t end up getting ported across, and is currently still not available.
- We’re definitely planning to add audio streaming and recording support in Cockpit once there’s a source for it, and we’ve also discussed being able to record surface microphone audio (e.g. for live commentary) but there are currently some technological issues holding that back.
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Hi all, yeah im with you on that, no thruster sound reminds me of having to watch an Indy car race with no volume. Doesn’t have the same appeal in my opinion. I can appreciate a suttle background sound of the thrusters to trick my mind im on board. Maybe its just me.
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Totally agree and sound would also provides some useful feedback for thruster output particularly when using depth/input hold, stablise etc, as well as sea state and even water craft heading for your ROV tether. Also easy to turn off sound if annoying.
Main benefit though is the aquatic environment is not silent - not only do all aquatic mammals communicate with sound but so do most fish and even shell fish make sounds depending on what they are doing (see here for a youtube classic relevant to this).
Sound travels 5 times faster in water than in air and can travel vast distances as in the case of whale calls (global?). Any underwater video on coral with sound you can easily hear the clatter of sea urchins dragging their spines as they move around (quite loud). Although only relatively recent understood there is a vast amount of research on this.
Understandable bluerobotics still have this on the back burner with so much else going on but kills me that the capacity is already there so planning to incorporate a DIY hydrophone soon as think its essential to have.
We’re currently planning to add audio support to BlueOS and Cockpit within this year
I’m unsure about when/whether QGC will add support, but that’s less likely to come from us given Cockpit is officially released.
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Great news - will keep an eye out for that.
I’m using BR since 4 more or less, now we have 6 BR…using all software version…newer recorder sound, where I can check it?