Hi,
 I'm trying to develop a system for an installation running on a dual-G5 powermac that connects to my firewire DV camera and does the following:

-Upon a trigger (I'm hoping for video motion detection, but I don't know that that's realistic) plays a quicktime movie.
-Uses something like OpenCV to determine if a face is looking at the camera at the end of the movie
-If so, starts recording full size/framerate DV off of the firewire camera, and continues until the face leaves the frame for some number of seconds or a time limit is reached.

I was originally looking at integrating OpenCV and QTKit in Cocoa but my Cocoa skills are proving not nearly skilled enough.  I noticed that someone in the Processing community released a version of the OpenCV face tracker that'll output face tracking information to OSC, but I can't have both that software and P5 (I'm using JMyron now but could change to any other video capture toolkit) accessing the same camera.. I could solve it by placing a webcam next to my DV cam and using one for capture and the other for tracking, but that seems a bit complex..

Before I go any further down this road, is it possible that I can grab full-size/framerate video acceptably in P5? My goal is to capture video that I can later edit into something DVD-quality.  My camera's up to the task, I'm just worried about not dropping frames.  It's not really important to me that there be a preview window onscreen, so if P5 could trigger another capture application, that would work too..

I know this is kind of a scatterbrained question but has anyone looked at problems like this before? I'd appreciate any input.

Cheers,
Ryan