Every stretch of slow motion bird footage gets graded 0 through 5. The grade decides where it goes: the daily clip, the films, the ambient mixes, or the archive. An automated pass assigns the first grade from how much is actually happening in frame; the final call is always human, and every human correction teaches the system this yard's version of interesting.
v1.0.0 · Updated Sat / 2026-08-08 / evening CT
Birds fighting mid-air. Hummingbirds doing hummingbird things. Multiple species on screen negotiating who owns the feeder. Peak motion, peak drama, no dead frames.
Sustained interesting action: arrivals and takeoffs stacking up, active squabbles, several distinct moments per minute. Not quite a banger, never boring.
Birds relocating, feeding flurries, real motion without aggression. The workhorse tier: most of what makes a watchable long-form film lives here.
Minimal activity, but deliberately kept. This is the connective tissue of a ten-hour ambient mix: mostly calm, so that when something moves in your periphery, it feels like you caught it yourself.
A finch parked at a port, pecking, for a long stretch. On record, searchable, and almost never used.
Empty frame, swaying branches, no visitors. Flagged so nobody ever reviews it again.
A motion-analysis pass watches every frame and scores what the eye would: how much movement, how fast, how many birds, arrivals and exits, wing bursts versus idle pecking. Levels 0 through 3 come from that signal directly. The 4/5 line involves judgment (a fight and a feeding flurry can carry similar energy), so the top tiers start as educated guesses and get corrected in review.
The correction is the clever part: in the edit, each graded clip sits on the video track matching its level. Regrading a clip means dragging it up or down a track, which takes one second, and the system reads those corrections back and adjusts its thresholds for that camera setup. Reviewing the footage is training it.
Known edge case under calibration: the rotating feeder, whose spin reads as constant motion. Its zone gets its own raised baseline so the spin itself never inflates a grade.
v1.0.0 (2026-08-08): First public write-up of the level system: six levels, definitions, destinations, and the track-based regrading loop.