[PD] Webcam advice

james tittle tigital at mac.com
Thu Feb 9 18:07:32 CET 2006


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





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