9 Foot Wing Span
 

Griffon Vulture is still my favourite bird in flight but compression from 69Mbs to 1.78Mb has removed the best out of this clip and I mean the image quality has suffered (the deleted audio was not important) ...

Brendan,

I really want to see that footage in full quality. I notice that you film the same pair of vultures. Curiously, do you go there for holidays and optimize what is there??? I love the overhead perspective.

My golden eagles seemed to have failed. My wife sees them most days but they have abandoned the nest site. In this country, if raptors leave their eyasses when small, horned owls slide in and kill them. I have found owl killed prairie falcons and swainsons. It is like they know where all the easy food is.

I think I as well as yourself, need to establish a web site so we can display any fine footage one finds, or one UWOL in full resolution.

Hello Dale
Original .avi file after editing is 69Mbs @ Bit Rate 1536kbps and Dimensions 720 x 576. If you really want that size file I'll try to attach it to an email.

Before posting the compressed clip above I tried 14 different settings in Quicktime but could not get the file size below 2Mbs. On top of that please note that the uncompressed .avi file plays noticeably sharper with Windows Media Player than with Quicktime. I'm assuming perhaps wrongly that you only use Quicktime so I've razored the clip in 2 halves and compressed them with Lg_Prog in Quicktime (@ Bit Rate 896 & Dimensions 480 x 360). I don't know whether Attachments will accept 2 items which add up to exceed 2Mbs but here goes ... if it only accepts one half per post I'll send the other half in next post!!

Brendan,

How about posting a HQ version on the IBC site

Bob

I'll give that a try Bob after posting some info on the location of vulture clips from Monfrague in Spain in which Dale seems to be interested.

Monfrague, spelt correctly, has 2 dots on the "u" so the National Park can't be found directly on Google Earth ... the nearest town is Serradilla and that comes up on Google Earth pronto ... just drag the map slightly to the left and you get 5 references to Monfrague within the National Park. The river Tagus nearby you can compare with this still from a helicopter and you'll see a sierra cut in 2 by the river. On the left flank there's a resident population of 130+ griffon vultures and about 30 roost to the right. Most of my vulture clips are taken from near the top of the right cliff ... over quarter of a million Europeans p.a. visit this spot with photographic/videographic/digiscopic gear ... there's no easy access to the left side of the sierra but the birds glide and soar obligingly across the river every morning and evening ... a great spectacle of graceful flight ... in the second still the nest is hidden in a large crevice on a ledge ...

Bob
I'm getting clips together to DVD to IBC including vulture & eagle flight.

In the meantime I followed your prompt and downloaded their HQ player, VLC media player 0.8.6b. I also upgraded my Quicktime Player to 7.1.6. When I played the original .avi 69Mb file on all 3 players I made the following observations:

Qt 7.1.6 All images slightly washed out. Noticeable blurring when cam. seemed to be adjusting focus because of sudden change in speed of flight.
VLC 0.8.6b All images slightly richer in colour than on Qt. Blurring less noticeable than on Qt.
Windows MP 11.0.5721 All images slightly sharper than on VLC. No blurring noticeable.

My wife's observation on the 3 playback versions without knowing my views was "The last one was clearer and steadier."

I tried out the Bee-eater .avi clip on the 3 players and found the colours on VLC to be as good if not richer than WMP; Qt showed images a bit washed out. Of course it may have to do with whatever settings (probably default) are controlling the 3 players; I don't know yet what to do about that.

Bendan,

I upload all my shots to "Rapidshare" and IBC download them and converted them. My photo jpeg files work out to be about 100mb for 20 seconds.

Waiting to view you HQ clips

Bob

If anyone sees a clip that shows under-wing as beautiful as this please let me know ...

Here is Bob Thompson's edition of the same photo ... I wonder how he brightened it up so well? My version looks dull by comparison; yet his version looks natural!

Brendan,

If you have photoshop cs2 the job is not difficult. What are you using?


goto Image control Adjust saturation, Hue Image below took 30 seconds to alter.

Nice job Dale, not having ever seen the bird in the flesh I wasn't game to touch the hue control as I know Brendan would pick any change in color immediately. I used Shadow/Highlight together with History brush. The history brush in conjunction with Snapshot is my most widely used tool.

Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool and it provides many ways to arrive at the same goal

Bob

So, what would you do with this much smaller raptor?

Here's Bob's version ... anyone dare to improve on this, please?

Not trying to make any excuses for my shot but it should be better but I am only running a 13" Macbook at home and it is difficult to judge the halo around the bird's wings when the shot is larger than my screen.

I just used an early version of Photoshop CS and shadow/highlights and the history brush.

Bob

Great kestrel shot!! really nice and colors look great.

Halo around the wings, couldn't you zoom it and smoooth out the pixels if that was an issue??

how would you work on that?