Sync pyphotometry and video capture with bonsai

[Patricia Gomes]

Hi everyone

I'm trying to run a fiber photometry experiment with mice performing a behavioral task. Therefore, I need to sync a video with my fiber data, which will be acquired with pyphotometry.

I'm trying to use bonsai to do this, as I saw it was possible with other platforms. 

Can anyone help?

Thanks a lot!

Patrícia

[thoma...@neuro.fchampalimaud.org]

Hi Patrícia,

The standard way to sync pyPhotometry data with other systems is using sync pulses sent to one of the pyPhotometry digital inputs.  We typically do this by using our pyControl behavioural hardware to send sync pulse trains to all the systems that need to be synchronised with each other (e.g. photometry and video) and use the pulse times recorded on each system to align the data, see the pyControl synchronisation docs for details.  For this approach to work your video recording system would need to be able to record the state of a digital input on each frame of the video.  We use FLIR (formerly PointGrey) Chameleon 3 cameras which have a GPIO port that can recieve a digital input, and use Bonsai to record the video and pin-state data from the camera (using the workflow here).

best,

Thomas