Recording an .avi file from a frame grabber

[PeterFoerster]

Hi,

I just got a frame grabber delivered. It's the MC4 Model of "The Imaging Source". With the grabber they delivered a CD with Drivers, including drivers for LabVIEW, so I got it to work rather quickly.

What I want to do with the grabber is record 4 cameras, put the 4 images together, put some text into the picture and save it as an .avi file with 25 fps. With this I encountered several problems:

1.: I didn't get the camera to record 25 fps.

2.: When I overlaid the image with text it was displayed just as expected in LabVIEW. However in the Video (that I watched with Windows Media Player) the text was gone.

Does anyone have experience with video processing? Any help is greatly appreciated.

I'll post some of my code tomorrow, so you can see, what I have done so far.

[ChristopheC]

Hi,

When you say "I didn't get the camera to record 25 fps", is it with or without writing the AVI file to disk?

For your second question, I am assuming you are using the overlay VIs to display your text on the image. The overlay is non destructive.

To save the overlay with the AVI, you first need to flatten it to the image, using the VI called IMAQ Merge Overlay.

Christophe

[PeterFoerster]

I didn't write the Frames to disk, I execute the VI that acquires the image in a loop and put all the frames into an array. Later I write them to an .avi File.

The VI I use to get the images takes approximately 200 ms to execute. This appears quite slowly to me.

[PeterFoerster]

Hi,

I've added the sample VIs that came with the frame grabber.

When I first got the frame grabber I tested it using the program that came with the card. In this programm I could record a Video, so, recording a video with the frame grabber is possible.

However with the sample VIs provided, I couldn't figure out how to implement a recording function. I get a fluent video in LabVIEW, however, that is displayed in the Active X control. Is it possible to get the video from that?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[PeterFoerster · Accepted solution]

Here's an update:

I had to call the AVIStartCapture Method via invoke node.

Now it works just fine.