Comments on how to improve the videoing of a bird out my window. I have a little Panasonic NV-GS60 Handy-cam style camera. 30X optical zoom, no three colour channel, set to Automatic focus and Automatic White balance most of the time. It is practically impossible to change focus using the manual slide, then setting manual focus via the menu and joy-stick when you only get a short time to film, like when filming birds. There are scene settings like Bright (Ski/Beach), Portrait, Sport that I could change to. Also you can set the Backlight Compensations (which brightens up subjects in front of backlight), and when the camera is set to Manual then the White Balance can be changed to (Sun, Indoor, AWB, Manually set with joystick), and Iris and Shutter Speed altered.
However normally I have the camera set to Automatic Focus and hence Automatic White Balance and No Back-light Compensation.
This is the Original footage:
[quicktime]http://muvipix.com/cpg/albums/userpics/11022/lewins_noshadow.mov[/quicktime]
Compensated out my study window and when the bird flew to the kitchen window with Shadow/Highlight in PE 4.0
[quicktime]http://muvipix.com/cpg/albums/userpics/11022/lewins_shadow.mov[/quicktime]
Is there anything that I could try - setting wise on my Camera, if the bird comes back today or on the weekend, so I can try filming it again. Or is there any improved processing I could do with the original footage ala the Second video that I have tried to use Shadow/Highlight? Obviously my Automatic focus could not cope when the bird came onto the window sill (which gave me an absolute shock - I think he wanted to be on my video and was trying to help me out with my bird IDing
). This bird is quite unusual around here, which is why I am interested to see if it comes back again today, to get improved footage of it. Has not been reported since 2003 and before that in the 1990's. It is a common bird at the coast and in wet forests, but not around here inland and over the dividing range. They do occur in the State Forest about 40-50km away from here. We have reported it to the rarieties panel of the Bird group we are in, and I have mentioned I have some footage to back up my claim. We sent them a still taken from the video.
The bird is a Lewins Honeyeater. (The radio is on in the background in both the study and kitchen, not sure why you can hear it some of the time and not others).
Robyn
