Thanks for the info. However, ADVC-100 that I use is a firewire A/V device so the default behavior is 30fps at 720x480 (NTSC) with the only bottleneck being the quality of the camcorder (which in this case is still better than a webcam). But all this is moot as Gem worked just fine a month ago when I was working on Hoary 5.04 and now on 6.10 it doesn't (either the extended nightly builds or my own build). And this worries me since my project depends upon transportability/transparency which is currently sorely missing in this setup...

Best wishes,

Ico

On 12/28/06, Mathieu Bouchard <matju@artengine.ca> wrote:
On Thu, 28 Dec 2006, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:

> Thanks for the advice but I am hoping to avoid webcam due to inherent
> quality/fps decrease.

USB2 is 40 times faster than USB1: at 400 mbps, in 720x576, full color 24
bits per pixel, cameras could do 40 fps... but typically they don't, they
use half the data rate (decimation of chroma columns, as in most broadcast
video) and have a cap at 30 fps because anyway the motion is already
blurry enough at 30 fps.

You may also need a special program to unlock the framerate of the camera.
For Philips cameras (most of the modern Logitech/Labtec) the setpwc
program will allow you to get away from the default framerate of 10 fps.

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada