Tutorials > Measurement tutorials > Video acquisition

For this test we opened one 0.5 A fuse, measured the voltage and the current at the output of the fuse and used a hair dryer to switch the fuse. The Basler and web cam were recording the video.

Even though it is against the practice of this tutorial, I would still like to show the hardware settings of DEWESoft. There are both camera types selected - Basler and DirectX (which recognizes web cams and camera phones). So we will measure this experiment with one medium speed Basler camera and one web cam.

In the setup screen of DEWESoft we see the two cameras. The first one is Basler A602fc and the second one is USB web camera. We select both and set up the cameras.

Channel setup

First we set up the Basler. We set the Frame rate to 200 fps , but in this case the resolution can't be 640x480 (VGA), so it is reduced to 640x242. The next step is to set the Shutter speed , which can't be longer than 5 ms to be able to acquire 200 fps. Lower shutter speeds will reduce the smearing of picture with fast movements, but will also reduce the brightness of the picture. Therefore we will need either a strong light or we will need to increase the Brightness and Gain . On the other hand, this will increase the noise in the picture and will reduce the picture quality.

Speed Cam setup

The settings of the Web cam depend on the capabilities of the camera. There are a huge differences between one web cam and the next in terms of speed, picture quality and available functions. Some cameras have automatic shutter and automatic gain, there are even a few with automatic focus. This changes so often that it doesn't make sense to mention any camera brand in particular in the manual. Dewetron is testing new cameras on the market all the time, so it is worth asking them what the latest and greatest is.

Some cameras have different compression types like YUV or I420. This means that the each pixel will not have 24 bits of data (8 bits of data per color), but less. In short, using such modes will result in smaller picture sizes and will reduce the data file size in the end, but the colors might not be as perfect as with RGB (uncompressed). However, the human eye is much more sensitive to scales of gray than to shades of colors. These compression algorithms use exactly this fact, therefore we might not even see any difference.

Usually, the cameras also offer Custom settings , which will show all the special functions of the specific cameras, such as flipping or rotation the picture.

Web Cam setup

For acquiring analog data, we set one voltage and one current channel the same as it is in the Voltage and current tutorial.

Analog setup