Placing timing info in captured video

[turbo_pascale (Rob)]

Something I was wondering about was how to accurately timestamp an AVI file. I'm not talking about having it in the images per se (although as an option it would be interesting), but being able to reasonably accurately embed the time in to the AVI some way (assuming I have a good sync to an atomic clock or similar on the laptop).

Recently I saw a post requesting people capture an occultation, with a very small margin for error in the time. It just got me thinking about how to do this with a camera such as the Imaging Source cams.

There has been other stuff described in the past for use with true video images (ie from CCTV type video cams), but I am particularly interested in knowing how to do this with the above style of camera.

It could simply be that I write a program to write out the time and start the capture via a driver, but it seems to me that there should be something already written for this kind of thing.

Anyone know of any pre-packaged software that does this kind of thing?


Thanks.
Turbo

[Dennis]

Hi Turbo

K3CCDTools and IC Capture both allow the date and time to be embedded in the file name. Here is an auto file naming example, showing user info and date/time:

Jupiter M180 TV25 DMK 07-06-30 20-47-45.avi

User defined pre-fix:
Jupiter=subject
M180=Mewlon 180 ‘scope
TV25=Televue x2.5 Barlow
DMK=The Imaging Source DMK21AF04 ccd camera

Auto filename stuff:
07-06-30= System date
20-47-45=System time

You would need to sync your field computer with a time clock, or know the delta to make this accurate.

The attached file is an example from K3CCDTools.

Cheers

Dennis