hey guys,
i have been experimenting with this for a while now and i still am not able to get it to work correctly. here are my calibration and motion videos. i am using this setup with 3 PS3 Eye cameras. any help would be much appreciated, thank you very much.

calibration - http://rapidshare.com/files/420831826/C ... Test02.avi

motion - http://rapidshare.com/files/420833368/MotionTest02.avi

I can only look at the calibration video because of RapidShare's free download limit, but from what I see it looks like you're using a regular flashlight to calibrate, and the light blinks out from each of the cameras at one point or another. This makes it very difficult to get accurate calibration data.

It's recommended that you use a small Maglite in 'candle mode'. If you hold the Maglite properly and don't get in front of it, 'candle mode' keeps the light from occluding itself. Try to keep the light visible to all cameras for the duration of the video (except for the first second or two where iPi DMC defines its clean plate.)

Also, it's not necessary to work in complete darkness. iPi DMC does a good job tracking the moving point in a normally lit room provided there aren't other lights or reflections in view that are brighter than the Maglite.

Hope this helps.

G.

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Greenlaw
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hey Greenlaw,
thanks for the input. i'll try it again when i get a maglight. do you think the calibration issues are the cause of all the problems? b/c when i tried to track, the ipi software analyzed the appearance fine, but when i clicked "refit pose", the limbs started to jumble up.
not sure what i've been doing wrong, i've scoured the forums and everyone seems to be able to do this pretty easily, but i am still yet to get a successful clip to post up here...



thanks again,
S.Ly

Well, I'm no expert, but from experience, it can be a calibration problem. Sounds strange at first, but if your calibration isn't clean, Ipi can easily analyze your actor of course, but when refitting, if the placement of the cameras isn't correct, the triangulation to estimate position of the legs will be messed up.
When I did my first session, my calibration was bad, I tracked anyway to test and it was not so bad, but the legs were the worst part. After a little DIY session to make a marker, and a clean, correct calibration data, it changed from akward motion to perfectly smooth tracking.

My 2 cents.

I just checked your videos. Apparently, the problem is: you don't have a clear background in your second video. First 1-2 seconds of video should contain clear background only (no actor).

I recommend that you re-record your videos as this problem is hard to fix.

Theoretically, background region is adjustable in iPi Studio and you can try changing it to frames 300-350 (where you go away from center of the room). iPi Studio calculates background as an average of pixel intensities for all frames in background region range so it may improve the situation. It may or may not work for this particular video. I will try processing it and will post the resulting animation here in this thread on forum.