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Camcorders for video capture? (Read 1471 times)
movax
Camcorders for video capture?
Jan 23rd, 2007, 10:29pm  
Hello,

Does anyone know if you can use a camcorder (specifically the Panasonic PV-GS300) as a live source from its FireWire/USB output?  Or are those for file transfer only?  What about any other DV camcorders?  (I've never really used one...  just my big old VHS monster from the 80's)

I'm looking at buying a camcorder and it would be nice to have the 3 CCD quality and manual image control to feed into processing just like a web cam.

Thanks guys
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jaylfk
Re: Camcorders for video capture?
Reply #1 - Jan 27th, 2007, 8:45pm  
If you are running Processing on OS X, you can go for it (dunno for Win or Linux as i've never tried.

Firewire will give you the best result in term of speed.

USB cams are too slow for realtime FX, latency is too high.

You'll get the features accessible from your DV camera without using processing code (zoom, gray, iris, shutter...).

The videocapture will be smooth (720x576x25fps).

You will be able to downscale at any size you want (eg. 640x480, 512x384, 360x288, 320x240....) and it will be even faster. Wink

And finally, blob/color/video tracking will be more efficient.

(i'm using a Panasonic NV-DS38 and a Sony FX1)
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movax
Re: Camcorders for video capture?
Reply #2 - Jan 29th, 2007, 10:29pm  
Ahh cool, glad to hear.  Yeah, I've been creating realtime video fx using my bargain webcam from wall-mart.  The image quality is horrible!  

So correct me if I misunderstand..  But when you are sending video to the computer for editing (say in Final Cut), you are essentially sending "live video" from the computer's point of view.  But do most cameras have the ability to send this signal while in their "live monitoring" state?

Its one of those features that is quite hard to research..
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scloopy
Re: Camcorders for video capture?
Reply #3 - Jan 29th, 2007, 10:35pm  
Yeah you should be able to put the camera on it's standby record mode (not recording) and then just plug in the firewire, and it should show the live video. Some cameras have an auto-shutoff feature that turns the camera off after a few minutes of inactivity which can be annoying. You might want to check if the camera you get can stay on indefinitely.
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movax
Re: Camcorders for video capture?
Reply #4 - Jan 30th, 2007, 12:16am  
Thanks guys, this is exciting!
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jaylfk
Re: Camcorders for video capture?
Reply #5 - Feb 7th, 2007, 4:00pm  
scloopy wrote on Jan 29th, 2007, 10:35pm:
Some cameras have an auto-shutoff feature that turns the camera off after a few minutes of inactivity which can be annoying. You might want to check if the camera you get can stay on indefinitely.


This can be avoided by removing the MiniDV tape from the deck and switching the camcorder the camera mode (not VCR). Wink
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