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Any thoughts on a high res camera - f.e. the Flea3

vvvv beta general
#1

Hello,

I’m in the research phase for an project where I need to display an camera feed on a highres 4k display. I had the point grey flea3 (8.8 MP Color USB 3.0) in mind for this case - http://www.ptgreystore.com/flea3-88-mp-color-usb-30. Any thoughts on this camera for using it in vvvv? I assume the best way to interface this camera is via the flycapture opencv nodes … this requires to purchase a EmguCV license - right?!

Any alternative cameras on the market in this price range with similar specs? Most important for my use case would be a “good looking” image.

Your thoughts and suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thanks
m9d

#2

is this for moving pics or stills?

granted you have a decently sized chip in the cam, raw image quality is usually directly related to the choice (and price tag) of your optical lense

generally i have had good experiences with various ids-imaging equipment, their drivers support proper dshow which makes things usually easier

#3

hey,

this will be for moving image.

I know from the past that using point grey cameras was always a mess concerning drivers and getting it to run properly. I tried to check out the ids-imaging stuff but it seems there website is down http://www.ids-imaging.com/ ?!

Cheers
m9d

#4

got the flea3-88 running with elliots flycap stuff. installation is a bit tricky as you have to download the right package from point grey and copy three dlls manually to the flycap plugin dir. once it runs its very stable… it runs forever without crashing and its even possible to unplug replug the cam and its still running. if you want to stream in max res with full framerate you have to switch to raw mode and do the debayering and colorvorrection in v4. also a guy with some knowledge told me the pixelpitch of this cam is actually so small that the lens cannot really reproduce the full chip resolution. anyways its still a pretty nice cam for the money. im currently at holydays but im back next week and can help you on this if you want.

#5

hey,

@elektromeier, thanks for the offer - will for sure come back to that. Yeah I already read the Flea3 specs and realized that full res wouldn’t make sense anyway because of the 22fps restriction. Seems there is no proper 4k hd cam on the market with decent fps in a reasonable price range. Seems like the Flea3 in “mode 4” and a resolution of 2048x1080px @46fps YUV422 will be the way to go.

The videostream should be shown on a 4k display – I hope the hd resolution still makes a crisp image on that display ;)

Thanks
m9d

#6

well u can get 25 fps by cropping the image a bit on the borders. we did that (somehting like 3800x1900 pixel at 25fps in raw mode) still looked pretty ok. i have some testpics at home… as long the lightning condition doesnt change levels in texture fx pack does a pretty good job for the whitebalance. for the debayering i did a little raw2rgb shader…

#7

Cool this sounds good - I assume you archived this by using “binning”?! Well let’s see - I’m not sure if even 25fps will be fast enough for my use-case … should be kind of a digital mirror in the end (can’t go more into details here … at least not now) and I’m a bit worried about the responsiveness.

I have to wait till the camera is on my table anyway - let’s see. I have a grasshopper to toy around but not with such a high resolution. Wrote some c++ code to do the debayering for the last project where this camera was used. But doing the decoding on the gpu makes totally sense!

Thanks and have nice holidays!

Cheers
m9d

#8

Hey,

the camera is now here to play with. Unfortunatly it’s “only” the Flea3 FL3-U3-32s2C version as the other one wasn’t in stock anymore. I tried the last day or so to compile a fresh version of the “VVVV.Packs.Image” … just got it running a few minutes ago. The thing is that the FlyCapture stuff seems very unstable, I wasn’t able to squeeze a image out of the cam without crashing vvvv (crashreport tbd). I tried it with the “old” precompiled pack but that didn’t help either.

I looked into the image pack plugin directory and found “FlyCapture2Managed.dll” and “FlyCapture2.dll” there. So my question what’s the third file you’t talking about and any other hints about how to get this stuff running inside vvvv?

Thanks

#9

hey m9dfukc

sorry for the late answer, i forgot completly after the holidays.
the third dll i need i need to run my version is: libiomp5md.dll

sounds strange, we have an installation using that cam running every day for over a year now without any problems…

#10

can send you my version if you want to see if theres a difference…

#11

Hey,

thanks for the offer. I got the camera working … at least more or less. I seem to have some general issues in compiling the VVVV.Packs.Image properly so that it crashes without a reasonable behavior (so at least it seems to me) – see here forum-alpha/weird-behavior-for-vvvv.packs.image and here https://discourse.vvvv.org/.

But would you mind to upload the Bayer decoding shader somewhere?

Thanks

#12

voila:

sites/all/modules/general/pubdlcnt/pubdlcnt.php?file=http://vvvv.org/sites/default/files/uploads/Debayer%20%28EX9.Texture%20Filter%20Bilinear%29.zip&nid=155371

#13

TOP!!!

#14

hey, does the point grey cameras work with x64 vvvv?
in case they wont i guess i can run x86 vvvv on different core and share the texture beween them right?

#15

I don’t see a reason that the point grey cameras shouldn’t work under x64 vvvv … except that I never compiled the VVVV.Packs.Image for x64. If you get that compiled it should be able to use the point grey 64bit flycapture dll’s together with the pack.

#16

For people looking for an alternative to Point Grey, the Kinect2 has a nice wide angled 1080p camera. Obviously not as many settings as the PG, but for a quick plug and play camera it’s very good.

#17

yeah, i actually got grasshoper cam for tandem with kinect2 because someone thought it would be wonderfull idea to have vertical windows .)

#18

btw i got grasshopper 3 GIGE work with vvvv in no time but with directshow, so if you can skip flycapture node it is easiest solution imo

#19

another option :
get a BlackMagic Production Camera 4k (Thunderbolt) and use the DeckLink nodes to get its output at 4k.

You can get pretty long Thunderbolt cables (Optical), the camera quality is nice, and you get 30fps.

Uppers:

  • 30fps
  • High dynamic range / high bitrate if you want even
  • Canon lens compatability
  • You now have a great camcorder

Downers:

  • Need a computer with Thunderbolt
  • Need to turn off the computer whilst replugging the camera
  • More expensive than flea3 / much bigger

I’ve never tested this, but in theory it should work (tested other BlackMagic 4k devices over thunderbolt in Windows / VVVV / DeckLink).

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