Miniscope v4 timestamp

[Ashley Choi]

Hi everyone, 

I'm currently using the Miniscope v4 and am trying to analyze the recording that was just done. We noticed that the timestamp says that the first recorded frame is at -96ms and the second frame is at 6ms. Has anyone else had this with their recordings? Is this first frame real? It doesn't seem like it should be since it was recorded at -96ms, but the interval between the frames is what we'd expect (100ms). 

Thanks for your help!

 

[Daniel Aharoni]

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for the question. When the user clicks the start recording button in the Miniscope software the software logs the time of this click. All timestamps are saved relative to this click. In most cases, the frame acquired right before the click is still held within the frame buffer and ends up getting saved to the AVI file. This negative timestamp means the frame was acquired before the user clicked start record. 

Some people just treat this as having a timestamp of 0ms, others throw this first frame away. There isn't really a wrong way of handling this first frame.

[Ashley Choi]

Great, thank you!