Birds at breakfast

Yesterday I took a little bit of video using my son's little hard drive Sony DCR-SR47 and I was rather disgusted at the quality of the images - especially since I had taken video on a boat cruise last week using the same model camera but belonging to a friend. That video was sharp and well coloured and quite comparable with stuff taken with a tape camera.
Last night I delved into the menu of Steve's camera and found that he had it set on "Standard" quality. Of course I changed it to the high quality setting and immediately the LCD screen showed a marked difference. This camera is "on" when the screen is opened. Of course the screen was open for me to access the menu. Using the menu is by touching the screen.
This morning was warm enough for breakfast on the veranda. There was no wind to give that chill that drives you indoors!
At eight o clock I put out food for the lorikeets and seeds for the finches (all wild birds) so they were all full of excitement as we sat down at the table.
I have not used the Nikon D90 for video very much so I used it today to record this little incident. The video will be added to this post as soon as it has been uploaded to Flickr (it is going to take ages today, for some reason! I suppose it is because the quality is higher than what I had yesterday!)

This seems to have been the mildest winter I can remember. There has been no ground frost this year and although there have been a few days that have been cold - they have not been too difficult to take! One year we had such a severe frost that it killed the leaves on most of the plants in my garden including those on the palm trees. The palms took over 12 months to shed all the brown leaves. I am not sorry that it hasn't happened this year.
Changing the subject!
When I edit my videos I often need to replace sound. Recording the images when the action is interesting does not always coincide with the best sound. For instance, on a recent boat trip my video was taken out on the deck in a strong breeze and the camera microphone picked up that dreadful roar. Even when the wind was not the problem the sound was more of the engine rumble than of the water splashing against the boat. This is why I have always tried to record my own background sounds - this has a strange name "foley". when I edited the video of the boat trip I was able to remove the bad sound from the sound track and replace it with sounds I have recorded and saved. Sometimes this sound was actually recorded with video - my sound recording is done with my video camera - and using "Audition" (in my case - but I think any audio editor will do the same thing) I could locate the file on my computer and click on "extract audio from video" and the sound would appear on the Audition timeline - where I could edit it. When I say "edit" that means I can remove sounds from it that are not wanted, such as shouting, dogs barking, the bang of something being put down heavily, and so forth. Once the sound is edited it can be saved with a new name as either a .wav file or .mp3 file - I usually save as .mp3. Once saved it can be used anywhere, in video or in photo montages.
My bird file is only 6% uploaded after all this time so I will publish this jotting and add the video once it is available.
My Internet connection is so slow, anyone would think that I am on dial up! Anyway, while waiting (and I am still waiting) for the movie to upload to youtube - it is only 45 seconds long!!!! - I have had time to make a batch of marmalade!
I have looked to see if adsl-2 is available but of course it is not for this patch of the Gold Coast! I should move into the country!
The speed of uploading a couple of short clips has put me off trying to put "real" videos in Youtube. The size of the movie I am trying to load is only 105mb on my hd.
AJ