What's a low-budget underwater video and audio setup? And high budget. Are you taking your podcast to the bottom of the pool?

15:23pool uh paul i'm not sure what you want here but go ahead corny and take a crack at this you know nobody else raised their hands i did a little bit of research you know for underwater It depends on whether you're talking about just recording something and, you know, pulling it out of the underwater environment and then playing it back later. Or if you're trying to do live streaming, that could be much more difficult because then you've got to get wires out of the camera and audio.

15:52You know, of course, there's been the GoPro, the perennial underwater housing on the GoPro, and they just saved themselves from bankruptcy by selling 90% of their stock to some holding company. So they're still around. So that's the lower end. If you have a micro four thirds camera, there's solutions like several underwater housings that are available for various MFTs. Here's some for the Panasonic Lumix.

16:20And you generally have to get one of these underwater housings designed for your specific camera because it has to interface to the controls in a method that lets you operate the controls without violating the integrity of the waterproof housing. Here's one from Neymar. These are around $300 a piece, which is pretty cheap. Underwater housings used to be close to $1,000. Here's one that's really cheap.

16:46It's more of a glorified Ziploc bag with a piece of hard glass in the front. I would not want to use that anything deeper than about three feet. And it depends on the depth rating that you're looking at. As far as sound goes, sound off the GoPros, underwater sound really sucks. So you need your hydrophone of some sort. Here's some lower priced hydrophones I've found.

17:11This is designed for pool people to detect underwater pool leaks. But there are others here with the supposedly professional hydrophone. I haven't tried any one of these for, you know, under $200. And here's one for $97. This ETS makes one, here it is down here, that's a pre-amplifier that's built in. It's a phantom-powered hydrophone output. So you've got things like that that are under $100.

17:39Then you've got the more expensive ones. Here's the ambience for $417. So depending upon what your budget is, how deep you're going to go, and whether you need to just record or if you need to get a live image out. Getting a live image out is more difficult because then the wires that go in and out of the housing have to be waterproofed and sealed up really good and you know it depends on that's an obvious

18:01form of leakage so you want to test everything make sure it's leak proof before you stick your camera in there that is very very good advice i'm sure some people that were just getting into this the first time have probably been bitten by that and bought uh bought cheap uh enclosures that did not work properly uh just mentioned a couple of things in the chat here jason robertshaw

18:23is recommending you check out seaview.com. It looks like they have a bunch of products. They have something called the Explorer Adventure Kit. And also, there was someone else, Mickey McChore in the chat saying, low budget, a camera in an acrylic fish tank, Cinema Alexa 35 and Gates Underwater Housing, broadcast barless or deep vision camera systems and sound ambient ASF1 hydrophones. And there's a bunch of links in there.

18:53So Paul, if you are in the live chat, I would recommend grabbing some of those links and checking out those resources that Mickey pointed you to. Also, Ike Potter in Hanover, Germany suggested notacam.com has some stuff to look at as well. Just a reminder, if you want to ask questions on this show, if you are tuning in live or just coming in the door now, we call you the producers.

19:18So you are the ones that dictate the direction of the show. And you can use our Q&A system. It's called Makana. If you don't know how to do that, you got to be part of our community and you need to sign up for that. So I'm going to tell you how to do that. Just go to officehours.global slash join. That's officehours.global slash join.