conversation piece
/ tech details /
In the current version of conversation piece I am using two small Fire-i firewire cameras to capture 15 640x480 24bpp images per second. The images are remarkably free of noise, but I find it difficult to focus the tiny cameras and my interface for setting the exposure, gain and white balance has been lacking.
I'm using the linux libdc1394 drivers, and cobbled together a small C program from the example code which writes double video buffers to disk. I am actally writing a 920x640 image to disk for each frame. I then have to rotate these images and compress them into an output codec.
The beam is a 10ft long 2x12. The trickiest part of the mechanical stuff was getting the bar which holds the cameras to move in synch with the balance beam, but not to have the cameras constantly giggle. I solved this by adding weights to the ends of the aluminium bar which holds the cameras, a DIY steady-cam.
Feeds