I went back to Upper Goose Lake last weekend and explored around the east end. I didn’t see anything interesting. I wasn’t going to post it here, but decided to keep this section active since no one else has been posting recently.
I re-focused the ROV camera lens and it seemed to slightly help, but the video stream quality is still so bad that it’s on the boarder between usable and unusable.
Highlights:
I found a fishing lure at 27:26
I was worried about getting snagged on some fishing line so I tried to keep a little distance from those rocks on my way back in.
Not sure how you’re streaming your footage, but if you’re using the default method from the companion computer then you might want to check out the web interface, where you can adjust several of the camera settings. You should definitely be able to get a clearer video than that. You also might want to try increasing the brightness of your lights, assuming you have some and they’re not already on full.
Thanks for the tips. I stream and record the video the usual way through QGroundControl. I have tried playing with the settings on the web interface multiple times, but I can’t get a usable setting out of it. It’s really annoying how the video stream is usually a green mess (as you can see in my videos), while the GoPro Hero 4 Silver on the front can almost always see everything no problem.
I also do play with the light settings fairly often on dives and it seems like 40% is about the optimum value.
Interesting. If I can find some time I might have a look in the next couple of weeks to see if I can get post-processing settings that help, in case that helps you to determine a working set of parameters while diving. Can you think of a way the settings could be made more intuitive? I’m thinking maybe it would be useful to be able to do some sort of colour calibration somehow, like possibly set an expected average colour to push the settings to something reasonable-ish, and then you tune a bit from that point, and/or maybe even integrate the depth and some indication of water type (possibly manually set?) to auto-adjust the settings as the dive increases. Perhaps worth investigating…
I guess that makes at least some sense - in murky water there can be too much particulate matter to have the lights too bright - they just reflect off the murk in the water and saturate the camera sensor.
My main problem is the low resolution of the camera and not necessarily the color calibration. All cameras are going to have at least some green tint and I always have to do a ton of color grading on my scuba videos with my video editor. The camera is OK when looking at high contrast objects when there is a lot of ambient light (like bigger rocks in the shallows), but becomes unusable when I go deeper and find either a sand or mud plane. I have had to abort a lot of dives because I can’t see anything, but when I go back to the GoPro footage it doesn’t look like too bad of visibility. This video is a good example of how it’s very hard to see anything with the BlueROV2 camera, but the GoPro video looks sharp and can see most of the fine details the whole dive.
The camera does look a littler worse than expected for at 1080p camera when looking at the surface around 0:06 - 0:10 in the video.
I found that the camera needed some fine tuning of the focus. It was a fair effort, as I had to pull the dome port, make a little adjustment, put the dome back on. Dump the unit in a tank of water, test, repeat.
Thanks for the tip. I did play with the focus on the lens in my living room, but it doesn’t help the image quality for me. Focusing just effected how blurry the image is and I couldn’t get it to look ‘sharp’.
This image is the very best I can make the camera look and I set the focus to about 5-8 feet in air. I could try to focus it out farther to maybe 15-20 feet since everything looks closer underwater.
