[Coral-List] RE: Software to determine benthic cover from video transects

Johnson, Dustin Dustin.Johnson at MyFWC.com
Thu Jan 19 11:13:43 EST 2006


Steven Dalton,
  I work on the Coral Reef Evaluation and Monitoring Project for the
State of Florida and we use video to analyze benthic community cover. We
use Point Count '99 software that is similar to the CPCe software. Our
process is to grab the frames from the video in order to count them in
software like CPCe. We use Observera's Ravenview,
http://www.observera.com/ravenview.html,  software which is quite
expensive but it allows us to create a mosaic of the video and grab the
frames from that mosaic with minimal overlap. There are other less
expensive ways of frame grabbing although they are more time consuming.
I do not know the names but I believe Sony has software, try Sony dv,
capable of this. You still have to buy a video capture card but it is
much less expensive. You can even grab frames in adobe premier although
it would involve saving the image each time an naming. You would want to
look for software that you can grab on the fly with, these are the
cheapest versions. And then you batch rename the files after. For more
information you can look on our website at
http://research.myfwc.com/features/category_main.asp?id=1340. 

Dustin A. Johnson
Coral Reef Evaluation and Monitoring Project
Fish & Wildlife Research Institute
100 8th Ave SE
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
(727) 896-8626 ext. 1116  
Fax: (727) 893-1270
Suncom: 523-1116
Dustin.Johnson at myfwc.com
www.floridamarine.org




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