These are two frames pulled from a video of water bears. This part showed the specimen under crossed polarization. The two piercing stylets (used to puncture the cell wall so it can suck out the contents) are quite birefringent as are the particles in the intestine. The sucking pharynx and the muscles that control the stylets also show some birefringence as well, but are much less intense. With crossed polarizers even the 100watt halogen bulb illuminator is barely adequate, so ISO settings needed for this segment were unfortunately quite high.
I'm still playing with the video on the T3i. Below is the link to a "wmv" version. It's a large file (40 meg), but it should "stream". (Windows Explorer should do it. With Firefox you need to have the Microsoft Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in installed.
Super stuff, Charlie! And how did you do that zoom-in? I have always wondered why there are hardly any documentaries on television about microorganisms but I think it is because there is not enough good footage. I think this will change soon.
Very simple and easy to do in the video editing software (even for someone like myself who is pretty new to video).
If anyone checks out the video I would be appreciative if you could tell me it it "streamed", or if it was necessary to download the full file ( ) before you could see it.
Rogelio... can you tell me which browser you use? (and is it on a PC or Mac?)
As I said, this is all pretty new to me, and I think the HD video is much nicer to watch than the old 640x480. But I sure don't want people to need to download the huge files. I know there is a procedure I need to do on my end to stream "mov" file videos to Mac users (or other Quicktime users), and I have not done that yet. But I'm not sure if there is any procedure I need to do for Windows and "wmv" files. I had the impression that it may be some setting in the viewers browser that determines whether it will stream or not.
If anyone is knowledgeable on this issue I would love to learn more about it. In my case the Windows Explorer browser that came with Windows 7 steams it "automatically" (after a little buffereing, like Mitch's experience). With Firefox I needed to add the plug-in mentioned above. Before installing that plug-in, Firefox would only do a full download.
Rik,
It is a very inexpensive program called Serif MoviePlus X5. (I use another Serif program called PagePlus that I like a great deal, and I got a "user" discount for this. Cost me about $50) I played around with a demo of Adobe Premier a few years back, but that was too overwhelming for a novice. (As was the price!). If I stick with the video I may eventually need to look at more "sophisticated" software, but this suits me for now.
Terrific video. I am just experimenting with interfacing a simple consumer HD camcorder to the microscope, but I have a way to got to get images anything like as good as yours.
) before you could see it.
