BIG Owl on my Trail

Mike A.

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That kind of sucks. Must be someone close to know that they're there. Looked like she was on a mission and went right to them.

Yeah, I've learned my lessons about continuous recording too. Never thought that I'd need it on some cams but then ended up wishing that I'd had. Pretty much everything runs continuous now. Storage is cheap. Missing some event that you want to see, you just can't get back.
 

TheWaterbug

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My pumpkin is home!!!!!

The prodigal pumpkin has been returned, along with a deep apology, an explanation, and a small gift. I won't say any more publicly, other than to say that the matter was settled to my satisfaction, and that ultimately, no harm was intended or done.

Any more detail than this I would consider to be private between me and the other party, so I won't be providing it here.

But thank you to everyone out there who helped me get my pumpkin back! Stay watchful, get to know your neighbors, and put up cameras!1635528668750.png
 

TheWaterbug

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In sadder news, here are two coyotes killing a neighborhood cat awhile back. It's graphic, so don't watch unless you really want to. No jokes about this one, please. This hits way too close to home. This isn't my cat, but I lost my favorite cat this way about 20 years ago:

 

sebastiantombs

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We get a group of four raccoons running across the front lawn regularly. Almost every night a pair make the trip, west to east and a return later east to west, across the back yard. They usually make it around the same time, too, DST doesn't seem to mean much to them.
 

TheWaterbug

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I finally got around to replacing the uphill IP5M-B1186EW-28MM (bullet, no audio) with a IP5M-T1179EW-28MM (eyeball w/audio). Now I can mix the uphill audio track into stereo right and downhill into stereo left, and I get some approximation of stereo sound. These coyotes now sound like the they're coming in from the right and leaving to the left:

 

TheWaterbug

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The framing matches a lot better as well! Great job!
Yeah, I angled them a little closer together. I'll do another "crab walk" this evening and see what the gap looks like. It's hard to optimize the camera angles in real-time because there is almost zero WiFi or cellular coverage out there. I do have a spare POE drop out there, on the other fence post where I originally had the "TrailDown" camera, before I moved it; maybe I'll bring my laptop down there and make it a temporary hotspot for my phone.

Now that I have audio in both tracks, I can use DaVinci Resolve's "Auto align by waveform" feature, too, which makes time-alignment a one-click procedure instead of a bunch of fiddling.

But that also reveals that my timestamps are often 1-2 seconds off in the cameras, despite I've pressed "Sync with PC" in the Amcrest app, many times.

I suppose it doesn't really matter, but it's annoying.

I also need to learn about optimizing 3DNR. I have it turned off completely on both cameras right now, because I wasn't happy with the motion blurring at night at the default settings, but now my bit rate is > 3 Mbps on each camera even when there's nothing going on.
 

TheWaterbug

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Ok, much better now! After auto-aligning based on waveform, the motion, sound, and burn-in timestamps all match to within a frame, which is the best I can expect for two asynchronous cameras:


And yes, this dog's human was just a few yards behind (whistling and entering the frame right at the very, very end).
 
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