After seeing safari-lawyers trail cam pictures of his Leopard at the bait, it made me wonder if any of you have ever put the camera on video mode with good results. Expanding on this, have any of you heard of the camera capturing the kill on video mode? Assuming you shot quick enough, this should be possible.

For those of you who have used the trail cam, do you think the mechanism disturbed the cat? How close did you put the camera to the bait?

I don't have any experience with the cameras and have just ordered my first.

That could be done easy. If you film your hunt and you have two cameras with you you can hang one in a tree just near the bait with a "gorilla pod" zooming the bait and have one camera in the hide zooming the whole tree, soo when the leopard comes you just press REC on your remote and video the leopard in IR from the tree . When you do it like this you have two different views.

When i hunted my buffalo last year i had Osprey filming my hunt but also Ivan Carter was in camp with his "team" so when i shot my buff i got it with two cameras in two different angles.

As I have mentioned in my prior posts, I was the beneficiary of a PhD study on leopards. Dusty, the PhD canidate, presented his work one night after dinner. He had a laptop and a projector and he showed picture after picture of leopards on bait. None appeared to be disturbed, but there were several shots where the cat looked right at the camera. I do not know if they "see" the infared emitters or if they hear the camera, but I think it is clear that they know it is there.

Capturing the whole affair on video would be challenging because most cameras engage, take a small amount of video, then disengage for between one and five minutes before they can be retriggered. IMHO, it would be pure luck to shoot the cat while the camera was taking video.

Here are some of the pictures.

Here is a trail cam shot of a leopard I shot in Botswana about 3 years ago. I have dozens of pictures from that trail cam and others we set out at other sites to select the best cat. We had 3 cats on different baits at the same time. In no instance did the camera seem to cause them any alarm.



This leopard actually was lying under the bait. You may have to look closely to see him in the shade.

The PH thought it was unusual that he would not retreat to the nearby brush during the day but instead stayed under the bait tree. He would occassionally get up and move to remain in the shade.

Here is the shot where he moved to go to the bait. He was shot out of the tree just beyond him about 3 minutes later.

This may be stupid but can you use a regular "flash" trail cam or will that freak them out?

Leopardtrack - I have two clips of leopards feeding on bait that I got from my Stealth Cameras. Go to my website and click on "Watch Videos" and you will find two different clips. Have a lot of video footage of leopards and lions on bait from the Stealth Camera and it great to have and good when studying the cats.

Awesome Adam and thank you.
The color video is from a regular video camera, and the B&W from a trail camera, correct?

Leopardtrack - yea you are correct. the first clip is from video camera and second clip is from trail camera. I thought I had more up there from trail camera. I will put some more clips on there in the next week with more of leopard feeding and some of lion as well, so check the site again next week.

quote:

Originally posted by Leopardtrack:

For those of you who have used the trail cam, do you think the mechanism disturbed the cat? How close did you put the camera to the bait?

When I was getting pics of my leopard and lion there was absolutely no disturbance of either due to the fact that a Reconyx RC60 is completely silent and does not have either a flash or a red infrared light at night. There's nothing there to catch the attention of what you're observing, even in pitch black darkness.
Here's a picture from 4:20AM. When there's movement, the camera can take a picture about every second, so you're able to pretty much get all the action.

I am trying to decide which mode to put camera on at bait, video or still. I would like to use video mode, but I am wondering how many minutes a 2G memory card will hold.

Any thoughts?

this is the best info I could find for you
http://www.cdrdvdrmedia.com/ki...dhc-card-class4.html


See how many images and songs you can store on Kingston Secure Digital High-Capacity Cards.
Video Content Recording Mode (Appx. minutes) with ±3%
6 Mbps 9 Mbps 13 Mbps
4 GB 90 Minutes 60 Minutes 42 Minutes
8 GB 180 Minutes 120 Minutes 83 Minutes
16 GB 361 Minutes 240 Minutes 166 Minutes

quote:

Originally posted by safari-lawyer:

Capturing the whole affair on video would be challenging because most cameras engage, take a small amount of video, then disengage for between one and five minutes before they can be retriggered. IMHO, it would be pure luck to shoot the cat while the camera was taking video.

The Scoutguard SG550V with remote allows you to set a delay between videos down to 1 second. And then you can set the video length up to 60 seconds. So in essence, you can record continuously until the memory runs out. There are two video resolutions to shoot in, so you could potentially record for a very long time.

I would have to calculate it out for a 2GB card that I use, but I know it would be quite a long video.

Hope this helps.

Kenati,
My Bushnell Trophy Cam has the same setting available, so I was thinking the same thing you are...I just wonder how many minutes the 2G card would last.

I just went and looked at some of my old 30 second videos. On average the IR night videos are 10 MB for 30 sec. The color video size varies depending on ambient light and contrast, with the darker videos requiring as little as 1/3 the amount of memory. I'd roughly estimate the average at 12 MB for 30 seconds of color (ranges from 5MB to 15MB).

So here are the calculations:

1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes
2 gigabyte = 2048 megabytes

Infrared Video
2048 MB divided by 10 MB = 204.8 clips of 30 sec = 102 minutes = 1 hr. 42 minutes


Color Video
2048 MB divided by 12 MB = 170.6 clips of 30 sec = 85 minutes = 1 hr. 25 minutes


That's a pretty decent amount of recording time. I don't have a 4GB card to try, but if anyone buys one of these cameras, please let us know if the 4GB cards work with them.

Thanks!

Kenati,
Thanks alot, and I am surprised at your findings...that little card holds alot of video. In that case, I will put it on 60 sec clips with only 1 sec reset and let it rip and see what happens.
I might even pop in a new memory card each time we check baits just to make sure.
Maybe it will record the kill who knows?

I can still print still pictures from card on video mode, correct?

Yes, you can print pics from video mode. The camera captures the first frame of video and saves it as a photo with date time and stamp, then begins recording. There is no noticeable gap in the video sequence from what I can tell.

UPDATE:
I emailed the distributor last night asking about maximum memory card capacity. They responded with some good news:

quote:

The largest card that the SG550 Series take is 2GB the next version of our camera will have bigger card support 16GB is going to be release by middle of august.

Thanks,

Jessie
Web: HCODealer.com
Email: sales@huntingcamonline.com
Phone: (803) 223-9710
Fax: (803) 334-4505

I dont have trail camera footage of a leopard but i do have of some warthog and impala, works well. Ill try and post it

I would love to see it.