Splice up video into individual frames!

Video Processing: Processing video in Matlab is a bit tricky. Theoretically, there is aviread but, under linux, it will only ready uncompressed AVIs. Most current digital cameras produce video in DV AVI format. One way to deal with this is to splice up the video into individual frames and then read them into Matlab one by one. On the graphics cluster, you can do (some variant of) the following to produce the frames from a video:

mplayer -vo jpeg -jpeg quality=100 -fps 30 mymovie.avi

Also note that handling video is a time-consuming thing (not just for you, but for the computer as well). If you shoot a minute of video, that’s already 60*30=1800 images! So, start early and don’t be afraid to let Matlab crunch numbers overnight.