[Numpy-discussion] Loading a > GB file into array

Martin Spacek numpy at mspacek.mm.st
Sun Dec 2 20:22:49 EST 2007


Sebastian Haase wrote:
> reading this thread I have two comments.
> a) *Displaying* at 200Hz probably makes little sense, since humans
> would only see about max. of 30Hz (aka video frame rate).
> Consequently you would want to separate your data frame rate, that (as
> I understand) you want to save data to disk and - asynchrounously -
> "display as many frames as you can" (I have used pyOpenGL for this
> with great satisfaction)

Hi Sebastian,

Although 30Hz looks pretty good, if you watch a 60fps movie, you can
easily tell the difference. It's much smoother. Try recording AVIs on a
point and shoot digital camera, if you have one that can do both 30fps
and 60fps (like my fairly old Canon SD200).

And that's just perception. We're doing neurophysiology, recording from
neurons in the visual cortex, which can phase lock to CRT screen rasters
up to 100Hz. This is an artifact we don't want to deal with, so we use a
200Hz monitor. I need to be certain of exactly what's on the monitor on
every refresh, ie every 5ms, so I run python (with Andrew Straw's
package VisionEgg) as a "realtime" priority process in windows on a dual
core computer, which lets me reliably update the video frame buffer in
time for the next refresh, without having to worry about windows
multitasking butting in and stealing CPU cycles for the next 15-20ms.
Python runs on one core in "realtime", windows does its junk on the
other core. Right now, every 3rd video refresh (ie every 15ms, which is
66.7 Hz, close to the original 60fps the movie was recorded at) I update
with a new movie frame. That update needs to happen in less than 5ms,
every time. If there's any disk access involved during the update, it
inevitably exceeds that time limit, so I have to have it all in RAM
before playback begins. Having a second I/O thread running on the second
core would be great though.

--
Martin



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