CinePlex v3 Manual - Plexon Inc

2.8 Source Pane
The Source Pane default position is as a tab in the upper left pane of the CinePlex
Studio window. This pane is the second an experimenter will normally use when
setting up CinePlex Studio. There can be multiple Source panes if there are multiple
cameras on the system of if the user wishes to process multiple video files
together. The source pane for a camera is different from the Source pane for a file.
It contains settings that pertain to frame rate to use when recording, quality of
recordings to make, and whether the experiment involves one animal or many.
2.8.1 Frame Rate
The frame rates available for selection depend on the camera(s) attached to the
system. The lowest frame rate available is normally 1 frame per second. The
highest if the maximum frame rate attainable by the system as a whole after
accounting for camera, FireWire, disk and CPU limitations. In general, if there
are two cameras installed, the achievable frame rate per camera may be less than
if there were only one camera installed.
2.8.2 Compression
Any new files that CinePlex Studio creates will always be encoded in MPEG format
as defined in the applicable MPEG specification document. MPEG file sizes
and quality vary with the nominal compression bit rate. The higher the bit rate,
the higher the resulting video quality, but the resulting AVI files are larger as
well. In CinePlex Studio the MPEG Quality is adjustable fro 1 to 10. The larger
the value selected, the larger the resulting AVI file will be, but it will have better
resolution. Adjust this number to obtain acceptable results for the experiments.
The value defaults to 4, a value Plexon has found to be a good compromise in
most situations. For reference, the selectable values correspond to the MPEG
nominal bit rate divided by 500,000.
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