Rob Swale, owner and skipper of "The Fiordland Jewel" charter boat (http://www.fiordlanddiscovery.co.nz), has recently purchased a 600m depth rated Hi-Def ROV to offer his clients a live view of the underwater life found in the Fiorldands of New Zealand.

Rob wanted to provide Blu-Ray quality live video footage from the ROV directly to 3 large screen, curved 4K ultra high definition screens located around his vessels so all of his clients could see the sea-life underneath them. As the Fiords are quite deep, Rob also needed an ROV that could easily view the midnight depths of the deepest fiords, some 550m deep.

The solution was a Seamor 600F 2/4 Hi definition ROV with 4 additional LED floodlights, a manipulator, 670m fibre optic tether on an electric reel, video enhancement, and state of the art high definition recorders and components from ATOMOS.

Training for Rob and Jack was completed over 3 days within the Fiordlands Doubtfull sound, where we were lucky enough to view some spectacular scenery above the water, and an abundance of life below the water. Rob is currently building a custom designed live-aboard Catamaran for guests to explore the magnificent scenery of the Fiordlands, with Jack piloting the ROV to show the action beneath the deep, clear water.

Below is some footage that we recorded during the training trip to the Fiordlands. It has been reduced in quality for faster streaming, however you can still appreciate the clarity of the Sony 1080p High Definition Camera, and the benefits of the zoom capabilities.

CP International contacted ROV Innovations to provide high definition underwater footage of the northern tip of Australia's Fraser Island for a Japanese wildlife documentary. Filming needed to be completed at depths far deeper than commercial divers could penetrate, therefore ROV Innovations High Definition 300F Seamor ROV needed to be utilised to obtain the necessary vision needed by the director.

ROV operations were conducted from a chartered live aboard catamaran from Freedom Whale Watching (http://freedomwhalewatch.com.au) over the course of 2 days, anchoring off the tip of Fraser Island overnight. Despite the sea conditions being unfavourable due to a cyclone passing just a week before shooting began, ROV Innovations were able to capture fantastic high definition footage (1080i50) of unknown coral reefs at depths greater than 200m. The ROV handled the 3m swell a lot better than most of the crew, with "travel calm" having to be taken by all onboard just to get the job completed on schedule.

Due to our high definition recording device able to capture footage in a wide variety of codecs, once the 2 days worth of footage was recorded, it could then be transferred from the 2 500Gb external hard drives directly into the editing suite of the documentaries Director. Once imported, he could then very easily and quickly sort, cut and past relevant video sequences.

An exerpt from the final documentary can be seen below.