Real-time video production

[Tomi Maila]

I've a friend who is into video production and video art. Lately we have been discussing of several ideas where LabVIEW & NI Vision could be used as a tool to create real-time (or near real-time) video production for artistic and promotional marketing purposes.

So what would be needed for the projects is first to get a firewire compatible professional level video camera produced live video stream to be acquired into LabVIEW application. Then the LabVIEW application would need to do some visual pattern matching, masking and combining of video layers. The output of this process would need to be then displayed on a video screen and all this would need to happen in near real-time.

There was a keynote demo on NIWeek 08 by Johann Scholtz where live video stream aquired of Tim Dehne on the stage was masked and combined with a background video layer in real-time. This keynote indicates what I would like to do is possible with LabVIEW. However, I'm not so familiar with NI Vision software and hardware that I could estimate what would be the best set-up for this purpose from hardware point of view and what would it take to actually produce the application to do the real-time video production.

Can anyone more experienced in the NI Vision field comment, all comments are appreciated.

Cheers,

Tomi

[robijn]

Hi Tomi,

It's possible to do a little bit in this area. I've been working on instant replay, i.e. continuously recording and playing back at the same time in slow-motion. It's difficult to keep the framerate up continuously. It's easy to get a disturbance, and this sometimes leads to avelance effects causing a lock-up for many seconds... I would think for real-time mixing etcetera there are much nicer applications available, also for much less money.

Joris

[Tomi Maila]

QUOTE (robijn @ Jan 27 2009, 10:51 AM)

I would think for real-time mixing etcetera there are much nicer applications available, also for much less money.

Joris

Hi Joris,

The trick here was not to do only real-time mixing but smart mixing based on real-time visual pattern matching. LabVIEW Vision toolkit should have rather advanced visual pattern matching capabilities. That is not so easily available, at least not as far as I know...

[viSci]

I have a firewire application that does real time 640x480 with alpha blending and it works very well on a ordinary desktop. LV vision is very fast and powerful, you should

be able to do lots of cool real-time analysis and effects.

Also, keep in mind that you can use any type of firewire camera and do not need the IMAQ frame grabber hardware. Just make sure you have the IEEE 1394 IMAQ drivers.

Please, keep us updated on your progress, perhaps we can share some ideas...

[Chris]

QUOTE (sachsm @ Jan 27 2009, 09:54 AM)

I have a firewire application that does real time 640x480 with alpha blending and it works very well on a ordinary desktop. LV vision is very fast and powerful, you should

be able to do lots of cool real-time analysis and effects.

Also, keep in mind that you can use any type of firewire camera and do not need the IMAQ frame grabber hardware. Just make sure you have the IEEE 1394 IMAQ drivers.

Please, keep us updated on your progress, perhaps we can share some ideas...

I would also be very interested in any solution as well. I am trying to figure out how to analyse, in real-time using NI Vision, each captured screen from a high resolution laptop.

I have just started looking at Third Party solutions that might provide a DLL/ActiveX control or something that will allow me access to the live video stream at perhaps 30fps & up to 1400x900 pixels, unless of course there is someway this can be done in NI Vision? I am already using Camtasia Studio to capture the screen and

saving it as an AVI file for later processing in NI Vision, but I now need to be able to access this data in NI Vision for real-time analysis - any ideas??