Motif 4.0

Written on Monday November 27, 2017

Motif video recording software version 4.0 was released today. This version features many changes and improvements, as demonstrated in the following youtube video

Motif is a video recording sytem which supports single single camera or multiple camera recording, and video recordings can be from seconds to weeks in duration. The version 4.0 release has the following highlights:

add zoom, focus feedback and colormaps to preview display
support multiple Ximea cameras
add 'delete after copy', i.e. 'Move' and 'delete after export' modes
add web REST api and associated python Motif API
add scheduler for scheduling recordings and other operations

Sample screenshots of Motif 4.0 multi-camera and single-camera web user interface

I'd like to demonstrate a the last two of these features using the new Python API.

Starting and stopping recording is easy. The following snippet demonstrates starting recording on all cameras with the predefined compression settings named 'high' (see the Web UI for the names of your configured compression formats). The recording will run for 5 seconds and will have have the additional metadata 'experiment' and 'genotype' saved to the recorded file. The snipped works equally on single or simultaenous multiple-camera systems.

from motifapi import MotifApi

IP_ADDRESS = '10.11.12.13'
API_KEY = 'abcdef123456abcdef123456abcdef12'
api = MotifApi(IP_ADDRESS, API_KEY)

api.call('recording/start',
         codec='high',
         duration=5,
         metadata={'experiment': 'frobnicate', 'genotype': 'wt'})

Likewise, the API also supports defining scheduled tasks, this allows for example, to schedule recordings and their subsequent copy to storage to occur at specific times. Task scheduling re-uses Cron syntax with some extensions (monotonic tasks).

api.call('schedule/recording/start', task_name='record_video',
         cron_expression='0 06-16 * * *',
         codec='low', duration=30*60)

We are really excited about these new API feature as they allowa laboratory wide automation of single or multiple recording systems or experimental assays. We are looking forward to extending our API support in future releases.