Gerbils

I am breeding gerbils - at the moment I have 26 animals, living divided in four families.
Nineteen are living outside on my balcony, four are living in a large DIY-fish-tank
and two other couples are living in smaller fish-tanks.


All pictures with the thick frames are of a gerbil family, that lived "wild" on my terrace.


Pictures

Pups eating cornflakes.
Four gerbils foto-shot.
Eating crunchy bread...
What is going on inside ?

Hungry children.
One can't be happy if someone else is hungry too...
I am the cutetest gerbil in the world.
Mom and Dad are doing it...

...again and again...
A Gerbil getting cold feet.
Digging all the time.
This piece of cake is mine !

A Gerbil in the garden...
...is always worth a picture.
What's next ?
Say "Cheese!".

Jummy - this is tasty.
Where is the guinea-pig ?
Time please !
The guinea-pigs are out... What a mistake!

Who is that guy on our roof ?
A young gerbil in my girl-friends hand.
This is "Albrecht".
"Albrecht" once more.

A gerbil on my shoulder - doesn't the colors match perfectly ?
"Frieda" taking care of the pups in the huge nest outside.
This is "Helene".
Again "Helene".


Movies

Remeber ! All the images AND movies are copyrighted by Solon Lutz.
Ask for permission if you want to use anything.

MPEG-Movie 1
My spotted male "Albrecht" is on the watch (1998).
(114 Kb)		 MPEG-Movie 2
See "Albrecht" and "Frieda" take the pups back into the nest (1998).
(2.2 Mb)		 MPEG-Movie 3
My first two Gerbils ! (1984).
"Mr. Maus" fails once in jumping into the cage...ouch !
(650 Kb)		 MPEG-Movie 4
My "wild" gerbils ! (1991).
"Snowball" takes his first walk outside.
Also some other members of the family can be seen.
(2.4 Mb)
MPEG-Movie 5
Again "wild" gerbils ! (1991).
You can see "Blacky" and here fours kids before the entrance to their burrow.
(2.1 Mb)		 MPEG-Movie 6
The "wild" gerbils are making life hard for "Flori" the guinea-pig (1991).
(3.7 MB)		 MPEG-Movie 7
Recent pictures of "Albrecht" and "Helene" making babys ! (1999).
(1.3 Mb)		 MPEG-Movie 8
"Frieda" is giving birth to her 7th litter ! (1999).
(2.3 Mb)

Technical details

The films were taken with a Sony CCD-TR750E HI8 camera,
and digitized with 50 fields per second in full PAL YC resolution with 24bit depth of shade.
Used hardware was a VLab Motion M-JPEG video cut system
in an Amiga 3000T. The movies were encoded using the Berkeley
University MPEG Encoder.

The used bitrate was between 50 and 20 Kbit/s, the picture rate
about 25 fps - all further options were selected to provide the
optimum film quality and compression rates (between 1:85 and 1:450 per frame).

The encoding takes quite a long time (around 3 hours for 1800 frames).
One fourth of the time is used for the scaling and decoding of the raw
input pictures (in JPEG format).