If you are using a third party data logger, like an accelerometer, you may be able to synchronize the video to the logged data using Logger Pro.

It will be simplest if the data is in CSV format. Download the data from the data logger onto a computer and open it in Excel or another spreadsheet program that will allow you to save it in CSV format.

Please make sure that you do the following before importing the data into Logger Pro.

1) Give each column of data a name or column heading using the first row
2) Don’t use underscores in the column headings
3) Don’t have a blank column between any of your data columns

You may need to create a column that has the true elapsed time of your experiment in seconds. Many data loggers may use time of day as a time stamp instead of seconds.

You can easily create a column for time if you know the sampling rate that the data logger was collecting at. For example, if a data logging accelerometer collected data at 100 samples / second you could easily create a column from the beginning of the data set that incremented in 0.01s steps. You could then give this column the heading Time.

Once you have done this save the file in CSV format.

If you can’t save the file in CSV format you can also save it in a Text format. In this case, do not give the columns headings in the spreadsheet program. You will need to rename the headings in Logger Pro.

Before you import the data into Logger Pro and synchronize the video make sure you do the following. Put the CSV file and the video file in the same folder.

Now launch Logger Pro. Go to the File drop down menu and select Import From, select CSV. Select your CSV file and then click on the Open menu. The data should be imported into Logger Pro and the Column Headings should be preserved. Double Click on the column heading that represents Time and make sure that it is labeled Time and make sure that the units are in seconds (s).

Now set up your Graphs in Logger Pro so you have the column of interest as the Y-Axis column and select Time as the X -Axis column. You can select all of this by clicking on the default graph in Logger Pro and selecting the Axes Options Tab from the Graph Options Dialog.

Once you have your graph displaying the proper Y-Axis as a function of Time you can insert your video. Go to the Insert drop down menu and select movie. Select your movie and then click the Open button. Your video should now be inserted into Logger Pro. Select Auto Arrange from the Page drop down menu to quickly arrange the video, graph and data columns on the page in Logger Pro.

Synchronize your video by clicking on the synchronize button on the bottom right hand corner of the video. The button looks like two arrows pointing at each other with a vertical line between the arrowheads. Follow the instructions in the dialog box to synchronize your video to the data.

Once you have completed importing data and video synchronization, save the Logger Pro file. Make sure you save this file in the same Folder that has the original video and CSV file in it. This is very important. The video and the Logger Pro file always need to be in the same folder.

Once that is done you can replay the data with the video by selecting Replay under the Analyze menu.