Video Capture Component Help

This is a help screen for video capture.

What does the video capture do?

This component is used to capture videos. It also provides access to all the video capture configuration setting available on your system. You can adjust the frame rate and whether audio is captured with the video.

How do you start the capture component?

The video capture ICON is located in the "Tools" section of the Navigation Bar. To start a capture component single click on it ICON, or it can be started with the menu option File/Open/Video Capture.

To capture more then one angle is possible using two cameras. In this case you need to start two Capture Components one at a time.

How you capture a video

To start capturing click on the red "record" button, this action will create a video file and start video recording. When recording you will see the time code increasing, telling you how much video has been captured. To stop recording press the record or stop buttons.

How do you name the video?

At the top right corner of the capture component there is an edit box. This is where you can put the name of the video. The video is not stored and named until after the recording has been stopped, so you can change the name of the video while still recording it.

If a video containing the same name already exists in the directory where the newly captured video will be automatically have its name changed to prevent a conflict and to help you identify the new video. The name will have a number appended indicating the order in which the files were captured. Therefore, if you opened a new directory and captured three videos in that directory you would have three videos named (capture, capture (2), capture (3)).

What are all the other buttons for?

The other buttons become operational if you have a digital video camera with MCI (Media Control Interface) functionality. These buttons are used to control a media device for example, to fast forward the tape

On the toolbar there are several other buttons which control aspects of video equipment and video format. The buttons are listed below.

Format: Configuration of the video format (image size, color format, frames per second)

Audio: Configuration of the audio capture board

Properties: Configuration of the camera

Compression: Configuration of the video compression, (More info: click here)

Device: Selection of what camera to use (helpful from multiple camera systems) (More Info)

Input Selection: Configure what video input is used (if your card has many) (More info)

The dialog boxes that popup from the Format, Audio, and Properties windows are from the hardware maker and can change drastically depending on the options available. See your cameras documentation for details on the operation of these configurations.

Timed captured?

This is used to capture a series of swing videos, timed the same.

The button labeled "Timed Capture". This feature is for computer controlled video capturing. Pressing this button opens a window where you configure how long to capture a video and how long to wait before the next capture. Once you press start, the computer will go through a wait cycle and then flash green to tell the student to swing. After it will flash yellow to tell the student to wait.

Impact Information capture?

If the Bengtson impact analyzer is connected to the computer this feature is used to capture impact information of the swing, and provide automatic capture turn off.

To open this window, click on the button labeled "Impact Analysis" of the capture module window, shown above. When this window is displayed the Bengtson impact analysis unit will be monitored for impacts.

The operation of this unit is mostly automatic, you simply open this window and start the video capture as normal, then when the golfer has swung the Bengtson analyzer detects the swing and signals the video capture module that the capture has occured.

The data from the swing will be automatically assocaited to the video, and if selected, the video will be stopped.

The Left/Right buttons are used to tell the Bengtson unit the hand of the golfer. This selection must be made before the golfer swings the club.

The "Configure" button is used to configure the serial port settings where the impact analyzer was connected. See the Bengston unit for complete information on the configuration of the port.

Multiple simultaneous camera capture?

The reason it is multiple camera capture and not two camera capture is because MotionCoach can handle as many cameras an your computer hardware can. Multiple camera capture does make a big demand on all aspects of the computer, so to do this you need a fast computer.

All the Capture Components Record and Stop buttons are tied together, starting one will start all open video capture videos at the same time. This is the same for stopping and timed capturing. Again allow a bit of extra time for the computer to initialize the video capture streams before having the subject move. The computer will take extra time get all the video recording systems running.

Where do the captured videos go?

New videos are inserted into the gallery in two ways: they go to the current directory or they always go to a specified directory. This functionality can be configured with the gallery component. See the directory configuration section. The physical files all go into one directory, which is configured when the application was installed.

Device Selection?

Above is the device select dialog box. The right drop down list is a selection of video devices you have on your computer. On the right are audio devices. The number of devices in the depend on the devices you have loaded on you computer. For example if you have a WebCam but it is not plugged in, you will not see it in the list.

In the case of a Digital video camera there is no audio device, but you will get audio from it. In this case the video and audio come in the same digital stream.

To configure this video/audio hardware, just make the device selections and press the OK button.

Input Selection?

If you are using a TV card that contains more than one input (i.e. s-Video, and Composite) then be aware of the input selection button of the video capture component. Typical of this type of video capture hardware is ATI TV, or Dazzle USB cards. Normally you need to configure the cards for “Composite” input which are the round RCA style connectors usually found on camcorders. Once configured, the setting should stay the next time you open the capture dialog.