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Storage Device Selection

This tutorial describes the storage device options in Acquire.

Description of Storage Devices

To start, we'll create a Runtime object and print the storage device options.

import acquire

# Instantiate a Runtime object
runtime = acquire.Runtime()

# Instantiate a DeviceManager object for the Runtime
dm = runtime.device_manager()

# Print devices in DeviceManager of kind Storage
for device in dm.devices():
    if device.kind == acquire.DeviceKind.Storage:
        print(device)
The output of that script will be:

<DeviceIdentifier Storage "raw">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "tiff">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "trash">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "tiff-json">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "Zarr">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrBlosc1ZstdByteShuffle">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrBlosc1Lz4ByteShuffle">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrV3">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrV3Blosc1ZstdByteShuffle">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrV3Blosc1Lz4ByteShuffle">

Acquire supports streaming data to bigtiff, Zarr V2, Zarr V3. For both Zarr V2 and Zarr V3, Acquire provides OME metadata.

Zarr has additional capabilities relative to the basic storage devices, namely chunking, compression, and multiscale storage. You can learn more about the Zarr capabilities in Acquire in the Acquire Zarr documentation.

  • raw - Streams to a raw binary file.

  • tiff - Streams to a bigtiff file. Metadata is stored in the ImageDescription tag for each frame as a JSON string.

  • trash - Writes nothing. Discards incoming data. Useful for live streaming applications.

  • tiff-json - Stores the video stream in a bigtiff, and stores metadata in a JSON file. Both are located in a folder identified by the filename property.

  • Zarr - Streams data to a Zarr V2 file with associated metadata.

  • ZarrBlosc1ZstdByteShuffle - Streams compressed data (zstd codec) to a Zarr V2 file with associated metadata.

  • ZarrBlosc1Lz4ByteShuffle - Streams compressed data (lz4 codec) to a Zarr V2 file with associated metadata.

    • ZarrV3 - Streams data to a Zarr V3 file with associated metadata.

  • ZarrV3Blosc1ZstdByteShuffle - Streams compressed data (zstd codec) to a Zarr V3 file with associated metadata.

  • ZarrV3Blosc1Lz4ByteShuffle - Streams compressed data (lz4 codec) to a Zarr V3 file with associated metadata.

Configure the Storage Device

In the example below, the the tiff storage device is selected, and the data from one video source will be streamed to a file out.tif.

# get the current configuration
config = runtime.get_configuration()

# Select the tiff storage device
config.video[0].storage.identifier = dm.select(acquire.DeviceKind.Storage, "tiff")

# Set the data filename to out.tif in your current directory (provide the whole filetree to save to a different directory)
config.video[0].storage.settings.filename = "out.tif"

Before proceeding, complete the Camera setup and call set_configuration to save those new configuration settings.

Download this tutorial as a Python script