How do I free up terminal for a script to keep running, i.e. run a script in two places at once?

I have a camera connected to my computer which, for it to take a video, runs a function that is along the lines of:

 function video(camera)
  while X
    camera.takePicture();
    drawnow;
  end
 end

My main driver script is along the lines of:

camera.video;
%do stuff that changes the images and what the camera sees

I want the camera to be running while the rest of the script is running so I can see what is going on.

Anyone have an easy way of doing this? I don't want to overkill.

Answer 1

[Matt Macaulay]

I don't think it's possible to have the script run at two places at once. However a quick workaround would be to move the while loop to the main driver script:

while X
    camera.video;
    %do stuff that changes the images and what the camera sees
end

and so the video function is now only

function video(camera)
    camera.takePicture();
    drawnow;
 end

[Real Name]

Thanks for the answer. Although I don't feel too comfortable changing the video camera function, I'm mainly concerned about if this loop will be able to run fast enough such that I can see updates happening in real time. The computer I'm working off of is pretty slow.

Do you know of another parallel processing way of doing this?