Camera for infrared tracking

I am experimenting with motion tracking in TouchDesigner. Up till now I am just using a webcam in which I i removed the infrared-blocking-filter and added a film-negative let the infraredlight pass only.
The problem with webcams is, that they (usually) have an automatic exposure, so that the brigtness changes depending on wthe content of the image. Now I am looking for a webcam with which you can have emanual exposure or maybe a totally a different solution. I read about IP night cameras. Does anybody have experience with this? Can I just use any and plug the ethernet.cable into my laptop, and touchdesigner will accept it as an input? I cannot find a lot information about that in the web, so maybe somebody could shre his experience in that topic.

It totally depends on the model of camera you are using. For best results get one whose native SDK we support. Look at the Library dropdown in the Video Device In TOP to see what is supported.

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We use here IDS UI-314xcp-M,
fancy ,expensive runs well with direct show ids drivers (8bit only),
had diffrent issues with the ids camera api.
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11922&p=48135&hilit=ids#p48135

still,
check it out maybe it can work for you.

I’ve been playing with this lately as well. On windows, with USB cams, there are options available within the video in TOP to manually control exposure/chroma/contrast, etc…Which are very helpful. These options are not available on MacOS though. Which bums me out. heh.

Which USB-Camds do you use, daflye? I just bought a Sony Camcorder (DRC-SR35) with nightshot mode, but

  1. it doesnt seem to have a streaming-option, which I would need to get the stream into touchdesigenr, right?
  2. as soon I am in night shot mode it unfortunately locks the exposure to “auto”

I couldt find a usb webcam with fixed exposure…

Thanks barakooda for your suggestion, but I am looking for an inxepensive solution. Anybody has experinece with IP Camera via ethernet?

I am still looking for a camera I can attach to TD, which has manual exposure. I am working with the Difference and CacheChop, to register, if something changes in the frame. But the problem is, that if an object comes into the frame the whole image is brightened up, and messes up everything.

Hi

For a light painting project I bought a logitech usb webcam c920 hd pro.
It has no infrared mode so you must mod it like you did, but it has a real manual exposure setting as brightness, contrast, Colors saturation and white balance. All can be set manually with the driver app of Logitech. So no automatic changes when using it.

Maybe it’s a choice not expensive