[SLL] increasing thread priority

[Mathew D. Watson]

I have a machine vision camera (prosilica ge1650) that drops about 10% 
of the image frames when the acquisition software is run by me and drops 
0% when run as root. Prosilica says this happens because threads in 
their software compete with other applications when run by a regular user.

What is the best way to increase the priority of this application? One 
way I can think of is set uid root,  but running as root makes me nervous.

Mat