Capturing video from Unibrain Fire-i 520. Examples?

[soujeh]

I am new to LabVIEW, but I'm trying to learn the basics I need to capture video from my Firewire camera. Are there any examples or tutorials that are directly related to capturing video from a Firewire camera ? And is my camera supported ? I got the Vision Development Module, Vision Assistant, LabVIEW, IMAQ, IMAQ1394, IMAQdx, the works.

[AnalogKid2DigitalMan]

I searched on Unibrain Fire on the forums, did not have time to go through the hits, you may want to read through these posts:

http://forums.ni.com/ni/search?submitted=true&type=message&sort_by=score&advanced=true&q=Unibrain+Fi...=&=

[soujeh]

Thanks, but I've already searched around a bit. So far the stuff I've found seems a bit too advanced for my needs. The only thing I really need is to come up with a VI that can capture video from a Firewire cam until stopped.

[BruceAmmons]

Try out the firewire examples in the IMAQdx examples.  There should be some that acquire continuously from a firewire camera.

Make sure you configure your camera in MAX first.  Color cameras take a little more work to get everything looking right.

Bruce

[soujeh]

Thanks, had a look and these examples seem more right. A few questions though. How do you save the captured images as an .avi ? And what is "MAX" ? Like I said I'm pretty new to this whole thing.

[BruceAmmons]

MAX is Measurement and Automation Explorer.  It is an icon on your desktop.  It allows you to configure your camera and test it before you start writing programs.

The simplest method to write an AVI file is to create the AVI, then add each image as it is acquired.  When you are finished, close the AVI file.  This can slow down your acquisition process if you have a slow computer or slow hard drive, though.

The second method is to acquire all you images to memory using a sequence, then loop through the images and write them to the AVI.

Bruce

[soujeh]

Alright! Thanks for the help. The first method will probably be the best for me since the computer in question has relatively low amount of memory (1GB or so) and it's supposed to capture about 10 minutes of 640x480 video @ 30 FPS.

[soujeh]

Okay I'm just sitting around experimenting with the Create AVI function right now, but it doesn't seem to create a file ? Do I need to add anything else to this little test-VI ? The path I use is c:\test.avi

[soujeh]

Okay, using the example for IMAQ1394 Grab this is what I came up with. It grabs the images fine and shows them in the Front Panel, but it doesn't create an avi. Can someone take a quick look at the VI ? Here's a screenshot.