RE: OT: Birdbox with Colour Camera

["Steve Morgan" <smorgo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I know it's bad form, replying to your own posts, but I just wanted to
add
that I'd highly recommend giving it a go. Watching the females laying,
feeding the chicks, the chicks growing over a couple of weeks and then
leaving the nest is absolutely mesmerising. Even if you do have to
fast-forward through 6 weeks of footage!

Steve Morgan


-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Morgan [mailto:steve@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 16 March 2008 22:42
To: 'ukha_d@xxxxxxx'
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] OT: Birdbox with Colour Camera

Stewart,

I built my own birdbox; a pretty standard design with a hinged lid. The
camera came from Henry's CCTV. It's B/W, not colour:

http://www.henrys.co.uk/cctv/pro240.htm

(I'm not sure if this is exactly the same camera, but it's very similar).

Focus can be an issue, as you've no idea how deep the nest will be in the
box, and these cameras need to be manually focussed. In an ideal world, I'd
build a more sophisticated box with a camera that can be moved fore-and-aft
remotely.

I did try various pieces of motion detection software, but gave up and
moved
to continuous video recording. There are a couple of issues with motion
detection. Firstly, a lot of coming-and-going is very rapid and the
detection software is often too late to capture the most interesting
frames.
Secondly, you get no idea of time period, which I found most frustrating. I
recorded continuously once the birds started nesting and stopped when the
last chick left the box. About 400GB of video which I've still not edited!

Steve Morgan


-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Stewart Berry
Sent: 16 March 2008 18:16
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] OT: Birdbox with Colour Camera

Steve,

Thanks for the feedback.  Did you build your own box and then add a camera
or was it a kit? Either way, where did you get the components?

Also, have you used motion detection to save on recording when nothings
happening?



regards

Stewart Berry



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