Rufous Songlark downtime on a warm day - film

[David Rees <>]

Folks

Re an artifact of 'video frame rate'. No, I was there and what you see was what happened!!

One of the things you learn to do when trying to get good at taking video with gear that allows full manual control is how to avoid the problem Philip alluded to with the chopper.  The issue also occurs filming birds like black-shouldered kites and kestrels when hovering.  Scrubwrens are hard things to film well because of this problem because they are so jerky. 

Photographers, more often than not, will try to get the shutter speed as high as possible within reason, so as to get a sharp image.  If you do that with video you will get the effect that Philip was talking about.  Footage taken this way can be sharp but unwatchable and jerky and have artifacts. The settings I would use to photograph and video the same thing with the same camera at the same time will be quite different.  

I try to manage this problem carefully and there is an art in getting it right and I am still learning.  The way you deal with this is to add a bit of blur by using a slower shutter speed, taking into account the frame rate (50 frames a sec in the original footage in this case, traditional cinema film is 24 frames a second). Not too slow or it will be blurry but enough that the moving image will appear smooth and in focus even if the individual frames are themselves a bit soft. Unlike looking at a still image, a moving one is very much an optical illusion and you are playing tricks with the brain to see it moving.

Hope that helps

David

On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 7:07 PM, Nick Payne <> wrote:

On 19/01/2017 2:31 PM, Con Boekel wrote:
> David
>
> The ripples are interesting. They appear to be being generated far
> more rapidly than the bird's body is moving. Are the ripples caused by
> breaths in and out and/or the heart beat?

Maybe it's just an artifact of the frame rate of the video...

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