A Paramecium Showing His Internal Parts - Video

Mitch640 · Post by **Mitch640** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 6:07 pm

This paramecium is feeding, making new food vacuoles, expelling waste and showing us how he does all that. It's an amazing lucky find and I was lucky to be ready with the camera.

Watch as his cell mouth, anal pore and gullet work and food vacuoles are formed and distributed about the body.

The video link.

RogelioMoreno · Post by **RogelioMoreno** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 7:21 pm

Mitch,

Very nice video with details.

Rogelio

Cactusdave · Post by **Cactusdave** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 1:13 am

Super video with a very obliging star performer. Very informative. Don't know if this has been asked before, but can I ask what software you are using to edit, compress for You Tube, and add captions to your excellent video?

Litonotus · Post by **Litonotus** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 1:29 am

very nice video and your commentary is just great (:

Mitch640 · Post by **Mitch640** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 3:36 am

Thanks for looking Rogelio, Dave and Litonotus. I'm glad you enjoyed it. The trick is to catch them at lunch, not always the easiest thing to do.

Dave, I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. I have been using Adobe Photoshop since the late 90's and even had Premiere back then, but this latest version is just fantastic to use. The final render is butter smooth and the sound is awesome. I do record sound in the camera as I record, but I live near a busy road and you can hear trucks rumble by, and the birds in my yard, so I started deleting the audio track after I had edited the timeline, and with a nice set of earphones and boom mic, I do a voiceover track to replace it.

The animated text I learned to do just yesterday. It's fairly easy and fast to do. The downside with Premiere is, it's expensive and you need a fast Windows 7 64 bit computer. However, it comes with an excellent help file, lots of video tutorials built in and a search pane to find other text help online and like all Photoshop based stuff, people have already made a million of their own tutorial websites.

Starshade · Post by **Starshade** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 3:41 am

Amazing that you get all those details with such basic illumination, I should have tried it in my video...

I am guessing you applied some contrast during video editing.

Mitch640 · Post by **Mitch640** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 3:50 am

Thanks Starshade. I recently found a Nikon Fluophot Phase Condenser on E-bay and made the guy an offer, which he accepted. I do not have any PH lenses for it yet, but in the brightfield position, if you off center it a little bit, it produces a very nice Oblique lighting effect. I used that trick during recording.

Then in post processing in Premiere Pro CS5, I added brightness, contrast and sharpening to taste before rendering the track. Even with the oblique lighting, some thing just don't show up as well as they could. Many times I have to add some color correction too, since the White Balance never seems to come through the same as I had set it before recording. I hope to fix that with a Camera upgrade soon.

Bruce Taylor · Post by **Bruce Taylor** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 5:31 am

Mitch, is it easy to add the labels? When I do it with Windows Moviemaker it's a cumbersome process.

Essentially, I have to cut a sequence, take a still photo from it, alter the still with Paint.net, adding text & arrows, insert the new still to the footage with a fade transition. Like so...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU_vASFqCyQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a9PPBFM8YM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUq_H9qHj0A

I started doing it with that Homalozoon video, to help others avoid a mistake I'd made earlier: identifying a Homalozoon vermiculaire as a Spirostomum).

Adding those labels is kind of tedious...maybe I should have a look at some of the more sophisticated editing programs.

Mitch640 · Post by **Mitch640** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 6:16 am

Bruce, Premiere Pro CS5 has a fairly robust text editor built in. In fact, the program can do a lot of things the old Premiere only dreamed of.

I also have 5 years experience using Flash to build animation on a timeline, so that helped. But essentially, it takes about 5 minutes from start to finish, to create the title clip, [a fancy word for text boxes], add it to a layer in the timeline, position it at the first keyframe, stretch it out over the amount of time you want it to run, then add position keyframes to fine tune the animation throughout, then close it out.

Premiere is an object oriented program, and there are layers on a timeline, like most animation programs, and now video editing programs too. Everything is an object, the video footage, the titles, text, even the audio layer is an object. And objects have properties, sometimes only one, others have a bewildering number or properties, and sometimes, even a property has sub-properties. And of course, properties can be manipulated.

For instance, the text box objects all have a position property and you manipulate that in the effects panel, which has a timeline of it's own. You add or remove keyframes in the effects panel, which when saved, make the object move from one keyframe to the next in a predictable, smooth fashion.

Luckily, for me and you, all this is almost completely automated or it wouldn't be worth doing. Since I spent so many years working with flash when it was owned by Macromedia, and I have used Premiere since version 6, 1999, I can see the influence Macromedia has had on Adobe, just by looking at how it all works.

Cactusdave · Post by **Cactusdave** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 8:34 am

Thanks Mitch. I don't have the computer to run CS5, nor the budget for it I'm afraid. I was hoping to find something a little cheaper and less demanding. I can't imagine you need to upgrade your camera just for video. The results you are getting are enviable. I have just bought a secondhand Canon 550D (Rebel 2Ti) body in the hope of getting something like what you are achieving.

Mitch640 · Post by **Mitch640** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 8:45 am

Now I am the envious one. I have wanted the T2i for months. I have the T1i now. If the price comes down before I buy one, I might go for the T31, it's only $79 more than the T1i now.

The T1i does video, but it's all Auto mode. You can only adjust the white balance, and only before you start recording, not after. So if the light changes, the video brightness moves all over the scale. It can be very annoying.

Before I got the Adobe Suite, I was using something called Magix, Movie Edit Pro v17. It's only about $60 for the boxed version with manual, and I think it will do the labels and text thing too, but I have uninstalled it and can't tell you how to do. It will do text animations though. Not a bad program for the price, and pretty easy to use if you know your way around a timeline and layer interface. Still, it isn't hard to learn.

Cactusdave · Post by **Cactusdave** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 10:02 am

Thanks Mitch. I got the 550D very cheaply because the previous owner, an astrophotography buff, was using it outdoors in the dark tethered to a laptop. He managed to trip over the tether and drag the USB cable out of its socket in the camera, damaging the socket in the process. Canon wanted to charge him £200+ to replace the socket which he decided was uneconomic. So I got a 550D body in good condition, very cheaply, just can't use it tethered. Standard remote release socket, IR remote and HDMI socket are all fine so it's not too much of a loss.

Mitch640 · Post by **Mitch640** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 1:22 pm

I'm afraid your going to find it very hard to use not tethered. Your going to have do everything now, through the rear panel or the eyepiece. I'd get it fixed.

curt0909 · Post by **curt0909** » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:31 pm

Some how I missed this post. Great video Mitch.

Mitch640 · Post by **Mitch640** » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:36 pm

Thanks Curt. That kind of look at these guys is all new to me, it was quite exciting to see it the first time.