Hello Martin and thanx for your reply,
In fact, i need a camera to track people in a space (indoor). The
camera will be on the ceiling.
There is 5 meters between the ceiling and the floor.
With the coordinates of people, i will turn on/off differents lamps
on a statue placed in the center of the space.
So i need a camera working on a MacMini with MacOSX.5 and Pd and GEM.
The last MacMini has a FireWire 800 and 5 USB 2.0.
I saw the point grey website, but i can't find price on it. However,
they talk about 10 meters cable for FireWire 800.
Do you know a model and its price ?
Today, I tried a Unibrain Fire-i™ Digital Board Camera and it seems
good (FireWire 400 : 89 euros + 19 euros with lens) But i never tried
it in installation.
++
Jack
Le 6 mars 09 à 18:06, Martin Schied a écrit :
hey all,
Jaime Oliver schrieb:
mmh, I don't really know about lengths. I think there is a limit
to how long your firewire cable should be. I usually work with
analog cameras in linux where cables can be long ad I capture with
a pci card.I think a cheap option that I've seen working well with macs is
the unibrain fire-i: http://www.unibrain.com/Products/VisionImg/Fire_i_DC.htmyou can buy lenses and chain them, not more than 30fps though,
J
lengths between firewire 400 devices is usually 4.5m, but you can
daisy chain them up to 16 times giving you 72 metres. it's not very
recommendable to make long chains, as every plug may be a "weak
point" in your chain. firewire 800 can have longer cables, but i
don't know...Jack schrieb:
Thanx for the reply. The models are too big for me. I need a
smaller camera (something like a cube) because the installation
must be discreet. Have you something else to suggest ? Chris : what do you think about Sony driver ? I can't use a PCI
card because i will work with a macmini. ++as manufacturer of small firewire cameras there's also "point
grey". I don't know exactly about cost, and didn't try them on my
own but they often were recommended by people doing tracking, also
being said they were affordable, especially the "firefly mv" which
delivers 60fps@640x480 and even higher frame rates at lower
resolutions.that's what they say about macintosh (seems to work): http://www.ptgrey.com/support/kb/index.asp?a=4&q=173
i also made tests with usb webcams (only on linux and windows),
some with usable results but most of them are crap. to be usable
they should support "real" usb2.0 for high frame rates at full
sensor resolution (usually 640x480), without compression and have
ccd sensors for better quality and light sensitivity. (finding out
usb version and other technical stuff can be real pain from
manufacruerer sites, usually you'll have to try them). image quality was always worse than cheap video cameras - but as an
advantage they were not interlaced like usual consumer video
cameras. cable lengths can be extended by usb hubs or "repeater"
cables several times, but that's also the "many-connectors - many
errors" thing@Jack: what exactly will your tracking method be based on? natural
features? colors? markers? with some luck a cheap usb webcam could
be good enough and also really small. (yeah, i'm a fan of using
cheap consumer producs and having trouble with them - be warned)cheers, Martin