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Here are a couple of short AV's of consecutive images of Rainbow Bee-eaters coming in to feed chicks in the nest. The rainbow bee-eater is the only species of bee-eater found in Australia and is monotypic, meaning it has no accepted subspecies. Its closest relative is most likely the olive bee-eater (Merops superciliosus) of southern and eastern Africa, but molecular phylogenetic analysis places the rainbow bee-eater as the closest relative to the European bee-eater. It was first described by John Latham in 1801. The generic name is Ancient Greek merops, which means 'bee-eater' and the specific epithet is Latin ornatus 'ornate, adorned'. The birds do not only eat bees with other insects part of their diet, including dragonflies, march flies, damselflies and other flying insects. The nest's end is large enough to fit two adult birds and the chicks. The birds also rely on adolescent chicks from a previous clutch to feed the new brood. This particular nest had 4 birds providing food for the chicks. The birds generally land on a nearby branch as a lookout perch. I had placed a dead branch on a dead tree as a lookout perch. Often, taking some time to peruse the area and be comfortable, it is safe to enter the nest. They do become comfortable with people/photographers and are always on the lookout for other birds and snakes as they nest in the ground. I had hoped to record the unusual sound of the birds calling, but this generally happens in flight while chasing insects. Unfortunately, there is too much background noise. The first one is a flyover and the second one shows the bird disappearing down the nest in the ground. Regards Mark

Hi Digatral, Thank you for sharing these two beautiful videos and for the information about them. Always great to learn about other bird species. Rosemary

I made a couple of AV's recently of infrared images at a local tea tree lake. The first one features the scene without the ND filter and some images have an ND filter applied in the following image to smooth the water. The second AV features just the ND images, and it is a shorter version. I am also working on a version of monochrome IR images with colour added in post-processing. Interesting that Youtube features the same image as the thumbnail. Cheers Mark

It is so easy for judges to influence what we do. I once made a judge bait sequence with every arty dissolve I could find. I only inflicted on one judge as I could see the palpitations

Hi Mark They certainly have impact although I did find the snap changes a bit repetitive and some of the images appeared to be duplicated. Perhaps some long dissolves would fool the eye into not realising that a dissolve had taken place. The music would have to change and be more soothing ng

Open your project / save it using a new name (this helps to keep your original project) / open the new project / make a right click into the Slide List / choose random order / create an Executable file for PC

Simple backlight frame using two masks and gaussian blur. LED backlight is sometimes known as Ambilight available on certain model Philips HDTVs. https://www.philips.co.uk/c-e/so/tv-buying-guide/what-is-ambilight-tv It is slightly different than the Border Simple Style in PTE AV Studio. Thanks, Tom Update: New version should work with any aspect ratio. LED Backlight Frame.ptestyle

There is a new feature in Photoshop called "Harmonize" which will do a little more than just colour correction. Not sure if it will work on layers so you might have to merge your two layers, apply harmonize, then extract your object again or something similar, but I think that I would give it a try. (It does work with layers). There are a few YT videos explaining the procedure - try this one to start.