Two questions about video hardware for a project.

I’m working on developing a fire tracking system for adding trails to fire spinning performances in realtime. I have a proof of concept in VVVV that has worked ok at a couple of gigs (video below), but the performance has been a bit inconsistent so I’m thinking of making a version in TouchDesigner to see which programme is most suited to this kind of setup. I’ve heard a lot of good things about TD’s handling of high definition video.

Unfortunately, I can’t get my Avermedia HD c985 capture card to stream video in TD with the directshow(WDM) video driver, despite it working with VVVV’s DShow9 video streaming nodes. I just get an “Error: Unable to connect to device.” message and nothing else. Is there anything I can do to get it running?

It’s a major impediment to testing the relative merits of TD for this kind of setup, but eventually I’m planning to buy dedicated hardware if I can get reliable performance from software, which leads me to my second question. I’m not really familiar with specialised computer vision cameras, so can anyone suggest a pair of cameras that are capable of reliably streaming uncompressed HD video into TD at 30 or 60fps? (Low light performance is a bonus.) I need one for untreated video and one that I can filter to only accept IR light so I can isolate fire, and ideally I’d like to be able to mount them so they have as similar a field of view as possible.

Thanks in advance! TouchDesigner looks like potentially epic software and I’m really looking forward to playing with it.

[video]Live Projection - Square Fire 2015 | Live Projection - Square Fire 2015 https://www.facebook.com/events/806450632810736/ Footage and Editing by Frazer Dempsey | By Square Fire | Facebook
[video]Poi trails feedback effect test. - YouTube

Regarding getting the camera working. Can you try immediately after a reboot to see if it will connect to the camera. Sometimes if you use the camera in another application the Operating System won’t let it go and TouchDesigner will not be able to access it. Just a thought. Are you sure the camera supports DirectShow? Are the drivers up to date?