System information

MX Host PC
5-4 Vicon MX Hardware System Reference
Movie Capture Card on Host PC
Vicon MX supports synchronous movie image capture on the host PC
on which the primary Vicon application software is installed. This
requires a FireWire digital video capture card to be installed on the
host PC.
If you PC does not have a FireWire port included on the motherboard,
you will need to install an IEEE 1394 FireWire serial interface add on
PCI cards. The FireWire card must be Open Host Controller Interface
(OHCI) compliant. Cards that include the Texas Instruments chip set
are OHCI compliant. Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP
automatically recognize the FireWire interface; if you are using
another operating system, you may need to install additional drivers.
Movie capture requires a lot of bandwidth and storage space. A
stream of DV data is compressed (in the hardware onboard your
camcorder) to give a data rate of 3.6 MB per second at 720 x 576
(PAL) (or 480 for NTSC). That means over 4.3 GB of data for every
20 minutes of video captured in raw DV format.
Your hard drive must be fast enough to handle this amount of data
at a sustained rate in addition to the Vicon motion capture data. If the
hard drive cannot sustain this rate, you will drop movie frames on
capture which will result in gaps in your movie on playback.
For information on capturing movie images on the host PC, see the
documentation for your Vicon application software.
Movie Capture Card on Remote PC
Vicon MX supports digital video capture on a remote computer
incorporated in a Vicon MX system architecture. This requires the
Vicon Reference Video System option for the Nexus, Vicon iQ, or
Workstation application software installed on the host PC.
The Vicon Reference Video System supports devices that conform to
the IEEE 1394 Digital Video (DV) or the IIDC 1394 Digital Camera
(DCAM) standards. It enables you to simultaneously trigger DCAM
and DVcam capture on a host PC that can stream data from multiple
live cameras along with optical motion capture from Vicon cameras
through Vicon MX. Vicon Reference Video generates standard .avi
(Audio Video Interleaved) files that can be viewed in Nexus, Vicon iQ,
Workstation, Polygon, or third-party visualization software.
The Vicon Reference Video system is a client-server application. The
client application is installed on the Vicon host PC on which the
MXhardware_Reference.book Page 4 Thursday, September 7, 2006 11:36 AM