On Feb 9, 2006, at 11:28 AM, Jonathan Goodwin wrote:
Phew!
Just got in from trudging the city centre of Plymouth...no Firewire
webcams, only USB! Doh!How do USB cams fare with the PD, GEM and Mac OS X combo? I'm sure
I read somewhere that they won't work, am I right?...should I just be
ordering a FW cam online already?!
...since you're using osx, you have the advantage (and sometimes
disadvantage) of quicktime's media handling: basically anything that
says it works with osx will work with gem on osx...this means usb,
usb2, or firewire...firewire seems desirable because of a higher
datarate, but you can usually only use one camera per firewire port,
especially when working with higher resolution images...otoh, several
usb cameras can be used on the same port, but they will be lesser
quality signals...
...if you are serious about video input, you want to stay away from
off-the-shelf cameras (they usually have crappy optics) and look to
other solutions; just search for "firewire" or "ieee-1394" cameras,
and you should find some $500-2000 cameras that have interchangeable
lens mounts...
james