Quick Setup Guide - Periodic Image Capture

Following are the minimum steps required to use SiteCam to automatically capture images. All users of SiteCam should become familiar with these steps, as they are the foundation of all of SiteCam's functionality.

Create a new SiteCam document by selecting New in the File menu (Cmd-N).

Open the preview window (Cmd-P) and make sure you are getting video. If you do not see video, open the Video Settings dialog by selecting Configure Digitizer in the File menu (Cmd-D). Select an appropriate video source (often you'll need to switch from composite video to s-video or vice versa). When you see the video source in the dialog, you can click on OK to save the changes. If you still do not see video, go to the Digitizer Fine Tuning section.

Note: SiteCam is often used on machines that are also being used for other things. So, to save processing time, the preview window only displays a new video frame every 3/4 of a second (this setting can be changed).

Now is a good time to save the document. Save it as "mydoc". If you save it in the startup items folder in your system folder, it will restore automatically.

Open the SiteCam Settings Dialog by selecting Output Format from the Document menu (Cmd-E).

Under Media Format: Set the format to JPEG

Set the size to 320 x 240 or leave it where it is

Select Interval from the Setup popup menu: Set the interval to 15 minutes, start normal (at 0, 15, 30, or 45 minutes past the hour)

Select Destination from the Setup popup menu: Set the destination directory to: the SiteCam documentation "images" directory.

Select Start Periodic Capture from the Document menu to start taking pictures every 15 minutes. With your current settings, images will be saved as "mydoc01.jpg", "mydoc02.jpg", "mydoc03.jpg", through "mydoc12.jpg". Image "mydoc01.jpg" will always be the most recent image (if "rename" is checked in the Destination dialog). When 15 images have been saved, the oldest one (mydoc12.jpg) will be deleted.

Open the destination folder and see that SiteCam is indeed taking pictures.

Working?

• Close and Open the preview window - you don't need it open to have SiteCam still work.
• Open the preview window then add captions to add a text message to your webcam. A caption can include the current date and time. Be sure to try the different text modes or it the randomizer button.
• Try setting up the motion detection.
• Create another document by selecting "New" under the File menu.
• Create time-lapse QuickTime movies

You can create another webcam document at any time, but keep an eye on memory usage and increase the memory partition of SiteCam if needed. SiteCam should have at least 1Mb of free RAM when running so that it can have extra memory when processing files.