[PD] pictures from a digital camera

IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig at iem.at
Mon Jan 15 17:04:19 CET 2007


hi

raphy.ilias at free.fr wrote:

> 
> That's the idea. Now, I don't know if there's a way to control a digital camera,
> or a videocamera (maybe it's easier, with the firewire protocol) to make it take
> a picture which can be then stored in a GEM object. All I've got is a USB
> digital camera (for photo) and a DVcamera (so with a firewire link). I'm not
> interested in having a huge resolution, 640x480 is the maximum (because I
> haven't got a very fast computer and I prefer to have lot of photographs (I
> hope there will be a lot of spectator !)). Is it possible to control theses
> devices with pd, or to create an external program (in a different language)
> which communicates with pd. Is there documentation about this ?

as for the digital (photo) camera:

to get the pictures into pd, you usually have to mount the device once
it is plugged into your pc, then you move the images to harddisk (which
is much faster) and unmount the device.
while you are moving the images to your harddisk, you would do the
rescaling.
since this is a rather complicated task, you would usually wrap this
into a script which has better access to the system than pd.
i would suggest a shell (bash) script (probably because i am better at
writing bash scripts than writing python code)

i guess a lot of people would use [shell] to control the bash script.
however i tend to rather use a simple "daemon", which runs independently
of pd and checks for the camera and executes the script on demand.
when the copying is done, i would send the names of the new files to pd
via "pdsend".
i prefer to not use [shell], because a) i usually don't have it
installed since it is an external, and b) because a separate daemon
would interfere less with pd's realtime thread.

but that is just my approach to such things.


fmga.sdr.
IOhannes




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