Some D300s Bald Eagle Videos

I've had the camera a few weeks now, the Nikon D300s, and I think it is very similar to the D300 for still images, and that's fine. I haven't noticed any big differences, and just remembered one thing I want to do is take another custom white balance reading with an expo disc, and then set my normal fine tune to that. I do shoot RAW, but often still set the WB to custom because it looks closer to accurate color on the back of the camera.

The 2nd memory card slot is neat, I've got a 16GB compact flash card, and an 8GB SD card with the video going to the SD card and still images to the CF card.

Read on for more and for the 2 new videos.







One thing I am not immediately happy about is the format (720p AVI) is not recognized properly by my normal (old) fav video edit app (Video Vegas). These are edited in Windows Live Movie Maker.

I'm going to try to convert in movie maker to WMV and then use Video Vegas. So far that appears to be working, but I've yet to view the output video. I suspect it is going to be lower quality/ smaller video.

I do have Nero from my DVD player and will try that, but in the past I've found VV to be the most intuitive app to use, and it has some nice overlay features for text, images, and the transitions are easy to do. Nero has seemed pretty clunky or required multiple isolated areas of work to put something together.

By comparison, the Canon HD video camera I have produces some strange format for the video, and the version of Nero that came with it crashes not just the app, but reboots my computer completely. And the update/uninstall and reinstall process is horrible. If only that camera came with a simple tool to convert the video to something standard, doing just that, I'd be much happier with the camera.

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Back to the D300s's video, I don't see how it can be very useful for moving scenes/subjects without autofocus that works well.

One plus about the size of the D300s's sensor and the resulting video is that teleconverters really don't degrade the video quality as far as I can tell. I've been setting focus in still image mode, turning on live view, then adjusting exposure (play button held down + multi-selector UP or DOWN), and then hitting record (center button of multi-selector).

Also, I use the Azden SMX-10 mic for stereo audio. In windy conditions it still picks up a LOT of wind noise, so I need to add a sock or two or something...

-Jon

Some D300s Bald Eagle Videos