Squirlz

I was removing a couple of programs from the PC. Looking through the long list of those I had installed I spotted the name Squirlz. Whatever is that? I thought. It had been on the machine, unused, for so long I had quite forgotten what it did. I ended up having to Google it to see. Aha! - a free morphing program. (Squirlz Morph) I don't remember ever trying it out so decided to have a go.

One way to use it is to load two or more pictures and let the program morph between them. On a quick search I settled on two photos of the Great Spotted Woodpecker. The program can attempt to morph without any further help and did a fair job with these two but it does better if control points are placed on both pictures. They are placed on one and the program puts copies in the same place on the other. Then you move those on the second photo so they are on the same features on both.



The control points are little circles so you may have to enlarge the picture to see them clearly.

Once checked on the rough animated preview there is a choice of saving the morphed animation as an animated GIF, an SWF file or an AVI movie file. I tried them all and the results were much the same. The main difference was file size. The first two made files between 11 and 14MB whereas for the .avi there is a choice of compression codecs. I chose mp4 which made a tidy 505KB movie file. Animated GIF and SWF files play the animation repeatedly whereas the AVI plays through once then stops.



Other choices before or during processing and saving are the number of frames and the frame rate. For this example I ended up using 300 frames and a rate of 20fps.

Food for the Kids

Mr or Mrs GT on the way home with a tasty morsel for the youngsters:

Live Streaming Glitch

Anyone trying to watch the live stream from the Great Tit nestbox earlier today would have found a missing connection. Not my fault this time. I had noticed a couple of pop up messages from the PC saying it was re-connecting to the router. What I hadn't realized was it had changed its IP address thus breaking the link. It took a while to sort that out but I think I have found a permanent solution so all should be active again now.

At least one youngster is very active with the wing flapping exercises and seems to be wanting to reach the exit hole so it won't be too long before they begin to fledge.

Two Robins For the Price of One + Nestbox News

Just before I took this photo the Robin on the right had brought a seed from another feeder and gave it to the other:



Two possibilities here. This can happen in the mating season where the male feeds the female as part of the bonding process. Alternatively it could be an adult feeding a fledgling. I lean towards the latter. Either way it is not very often two Robins can be seen so close together without a vicious fight starting.

* As Adrian reminded me, a juvenile Robin would have been speckled and not bright red so this must have been a pair.  *

Great Tit Nestbox

The babies have grown really fast these past few days and the way they are climbing out of the nest and exercising their wings means it won't be very long before they fledge:






It is getting crowded in there even with only four youngsters.

Even more so when mum joins them for the night:

 

Friday at the Flicks - Song Thrush, Grey Squirrel, Nestbox

No apologies for another Song Thrush video. Every day as the light begins to fade a Song Thrush sits at the top of a tree close to my back door and tries to drown out the song from the Blackbirds:



A Grey Squirrel has become a regular early morning visitor trying to find any left over seeds from the previous day:



The remaining four chicks in the Great Tit nestbox continue to thrive and are growing rapily:



Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

Panolapse - Part 2

It is possible to make a video from one still photo with Panolapse. The main thing is that Panolapse requires a series of photos to work on. How to get round that? Make many copies of the same photo - copy the original image to a new folder, click on it, Ctrl-C to copy, hold Ctrl-V to keep making copies. They will be numbered and I found Panolapse seemed to get confused with numbers less than 100 so I made around 600 copies of a panorama image and deleted the first 100 to end up with around 500.

Choosing the sections of the image to start and end with is done in the same way as with time lapse photos.

Original stitched panorama photo:

 

End result using Panolapse (Trial edition) and Image to Video:




BTW - I seem to have cured my uploading problems with YouTube. I now copy the video to a memory stick and use the laptop. Whether it's Windozy 7 which handles things better than XP I don't know. The main thing is it works.

Sorry I had to switch off the streaming video from the nestbox a few times - my processor was struggling with the load while Panolapse was strutting its stuff.

Panolapse

A first test of producing a time lapse moving panorama without moving the camera.

Basically a normal time lapse sequence of images are taken with any camera. Best effect is with a wide angle lens. These are then loaded in Panolapse (available for PC and Mac) and the chosen area of the start and end of the sequence are chosen. The program then produces a new set of still images rendered from the originals. These are then turned into a moving panoramic time lapse using your favourite program, in my case that was the simple PC program Images To Video.

Not the most inspiring of views but it was the only set of time lapse images I could find. Panolapse is not the fastest of programs as it took around 40 minutes to render 788 photos taken with the 350D with a lens set at 50mm. The free version of Panolapse can create high quality renders, up to 1280x720 in the free version.

This is the first of the 788 stills:

 

The final moving panorama produced using Panolapse and Images to Video.



If interested in downloading and experimenting with Panolapse then go to their web site. On the PC you get a zipped file which needs unzipping in a folder of your choice. No installing needed. It runs straight from that folder. It may well be the same for a Mac.