Thursday 8 November 2018

New Lamps For Old

Either side of the front doors I had a pair of traditional looking lanterns. Not for the amount of light they gave out but for their effect. Each contained an artificial candle illuminated by flickering LEDs. The batteries were solar charged. After surviving quite a few storms and torrential downpours they were becoming erratic in their performance.

A grotty video grab:
 vlcsnap-2018-11-07-22h22m32s124

Recently I spotted a new type. A cylinder containing several LEDs which give a more realistic flickering flame effect. These are also solar charged and have more modern higher capacity batteries.

As one of my security cameras caught much of the action of me installing them I decided to make a video. That took more effort than I anticipated as there are 13 short video captures. Not too much of a problem except the camera is 16:9. When the videos were copied from the recorder they ended up the wrong shape and iMovie refused to recognise them. Eventually I found MovieMator Pro would not only load the files but also allowed me to restore them to 16:9 and adjust the speed to 10x. Each clip had to be altered individually.

The resulting movie file was saved and loaded in iMovie where I added a sound track and title.



Of course most of the time the four legged supervisor kept an eye on what I was doing.

6 comments:

  1. I don't know why but I found this very entertaining. The new lamps are perfect.

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    1. Adrian: They are more effective than I expected.

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  2. Great vid and 10 x makes it very watchable. We have a solar light and its very effective. Icidentally what security cameras do you use as I'm thinking of installing some, are yours wireless. Thanks.

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    1. Dave: I have a mix of various security cameras as I have added to them over the years. They are all wired. Even if they are wireless they still need power so you can't eliminate cables altogether. Power (12V) and video signal wires are bonded in a single cable. When choosing a camera take into account how much coverage you want. For example I used to have one covering the front door which has an 8mm lens but that could only see half of the driveway. I think the present one (which is adjustable) is set to 4mm. Another thing to look at when choosing is the TVL (TV lines). More lines give sharper pictures. Hope this helps a bit.

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  3. I like those lights! Penny sure sure likes to stay right with you. She's a good companion, er, I mean supervisor.

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    1. Wilma: So far I am very pleased with them. Only time will tell how resilient they are to weather though they reside under the overhanging roof so get reasonable protection. Greyhounds, in general, like to be with company. They don't like being left alone for long periods. Penny is super inquisitive. When she was at the rescue centre there was a man making repairs and Penny would keep helping herself to tools from his tool chest.

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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