Well, the day finally came. One of my cameras, a staple in my project for the last few years, finally just decided to die on me. It lost all zoom control, zooming the entire way out in the middle of a shot, and would not respond to LANC control. It would not respond to physical movement of the zoom lever! It would not respond… at all! Now, I’ve been forseeing this for some time - I’ve had shots during the last few days of 2004 where the camera would, you know, just decide to zoom all the way in… cool, huh? Not when a squirrel decides to do something as a back-shot on another camera and it’s sitting there looking at a blade of grass! Not only that, but one day during the summer of 2004, the camera turned on with an OSD overlay (on-screen display) that would NOT turn off… and this overlay was all garbage characters (imagine this going on for an entire day - if you de-interlace the picture, you’ll see one version of the screw-up, which means the video is not only unusable, but flickering too!) … Pseudo-Japanese text, blocks of text that showed 2 numbers on top of each other, etc… and that took 2 days to fix - not a good thing to use as a feed camera! And now it’s dead… totally dead. Well, I gave it a respectable burial (think of it as hazing, but the other way around), but that’s not after spending about an hour trying to fix it. The project day itself is a pretty good day! The squirrels find the food inside of the bag, almost all of it, and towards the end when the camera does die, you can see a shot of both angles, the good angle and and the angle caught by the bad camera at the same time! Note on that - the little window of the other camera was not resized at all - that’s the natural size of the video when it was zoomed out all the way. Yes, it sucks that much that the camera died… and that’s the only camera I used that had night shot! It will truly be missed…
Oh, and yes, that is muh somewhat fat #$% in the beginning… I’m, uh, working on that… 
BFP 3-25-05 (Demo) [0:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 3-25-05 (High Quality 800Kbps Version) [13:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 3-25-05 (Low Quality 300Kbps Version) [13:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
Between the mic tests earlier in March and this day (this was actually done as an actual project day, not just a mic-test) I returned both the Audio-Technica mic and the mixer… Yeah, the sound was cool - but it wasn’t worth the money I spent on the mic! In that time, I found a similar, much cheaper mic, similar characteristics that could be driven by a 1/8″ jack, so I could plug it into the camcorder and control the level that way instead of using a mixer… Awesome! The bad thing about that is… I didn’t have the mic at this point yet. So this particular edit isn’t the best audio-wise - I didn’t even wire up the computer mic at this point, because I didn’t really think there was a chance of getting anything interested in my food (I had the project inside since the last mic test, so at least a week or 2 have gone by since then — that makes quite a difference in interest among the “regulars” that visit the setup - now that it’s not a fixture in the yard, they’ve found other ways of getting food) but I was proven wrong! A squirrel came, came back and continued to come back to get all (or at least most) of the food out of the project! One problem with that though came at the end of the night… The squirrel kept coming, and I didn’t want to disturb it by walking outside and fotzing with the camera, so I didn’t change the exposure setting on the good camera - it gets much darker much earlier in the night because it had a neutral-density filter (it cuts the amount of light to the camera for bright daytime shots) on that it didn’t need - so the end of the clip is a little… dark-ish…
One more Audio-Technica mic test - this time, I used a piece of styrofoam behind the mic to deflect even more of the traffic sounds from the side… which makes perfect sense, since the house is right in front of the mic and will deflect the traffic back into the mic anyway! Another fairly minimalistic project, (at least I have the right white balance setting on this time!) once-again edited to show how good the mic can do compared to the on-cam mic (the AT mic is on the left channel)… One interesting thing (that the thumbnail shows) at the very end of the video - the squirrel jumps from the project on to the piece of styrofoam the mic is sitting on and then off of that… apparently squirrels don’t fear the big sound barrier!
To start the year off right, I got a new absolutely essential device (special thanks to Eric Green for advice - I’m sorry I haven’t written back since then!) that should help me out somewhat with the sound issue - a shotgun microphone… The new microphone will let me get much better recording of what’s happening within the vicinity of the project itself (instead of the cheapo computer mic I used before, which was much better than the on-cam mic, but not by much…) This project, the first time I ran a project test in the 2005 season was only set up to test the mic… I got an Audio-Technica mic and a mixer, which gave me good sound, but the price of the whole thing seemed a little steep… to test the setup out (to see if the mic was really worth what I paid for it), I set up this sample test (using the piece of cardboard to protect the mic) and let the recorder run… The video is ALL on the wrong white balance setting, the project day isn’t really that exciting… It’s all a test of the mic - and the mic didn’t fail me! But… man is it expensive! “Man! I wish there was a mic with a 1/8″ jack that I could use that wouldn’t need a mixer…! But what mic could that be…” I would find that out in a few weeks… but for now…