Hello all in ipi stuido,
I'm new in using ipi soft.I have some questions please.
Q1:I have 10 Ps Cameras and one Xbox360 Kinect. Is it possible to use ALL OF THEM at the same time ?
Q2:I have one workstation with Ipisoft Mocap Studio in my studio and one with Ipisoft Mocap Studio at home. Is there a limit number of times if I deactivate the software in my studio and activate it at home via internet again and again daily and frequently? This is very important.
Q3:I use three computers with 10 Ps Cameras to record my videos. But the display cards in two of them are low-end (NV GTS 250/NV GTX610) product. Is there any problem ?

Thankyou very much.

Hi,

I can answer these questions:


No, the data types are totally different: PS3 Eye captures 2D rgb video and Kinect captures 3D depth sensing. In other words, . you can either use multiple PS3 Eye cameras or multiple Kinect sensors, but not both at the same time.


That's an unusual situation but since you're in control of the deactivation/activation, I think you're ok. But best to confirm that with iPiSoft anyway. I know some other software I use have a limit to how often I can do that in a give period.

It's more typical for users to have iPi Recorder all over the place, which is free to install and use, and have iPi Mocap Studio on the fastest and more powerful workstation. It's not even necessary for Mocap Studio to be present on a network to record the mocap. Do you really need to run the tracking stage at two different locations? I would just save the data to a disk drive and bring it to the more powerful computer for tracking.


When it comes to hardware requirements for recording, PS3 Eye cameras are more forgiving than Kinect. It's really more important to have a decent USB card (preferably USB 3.0,) and a fast drive for the capture data (preferably an SSD.)

Graphics cards are much more important for tracking the data in iPi Mocap Studio.

Hope this helps.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Thank you very much, GreenLaw. I'm so glad that your answer is so detailed.
Now I understand what is the between difference between PS camera and Kinect.
I found that many people said the result of PS camera was better after I did some research. But as I known, the Kinect V2 is far more expensive than the PS camera. Why ? I’m really confuse now. At first I thought Kinect V2 was the best choice for ipisoft. But I found the ankles were always sliding when he was using Kinect in the videos on youtube, is it normal ?

Are you using a single Kinect or multi-Kinect? Single Kinect with iPi Mocap Studio is better than using Kinect SDK because of iPi's proprietary post-tracking process. For the cost, a single Kinect sensor capture with Mocap Studio is easy to use and it's relatively cheap, but the mocap is no where near the quaiity you get with using dual Kinect sensors with iPi Mocap Studio or multiple PS3 Eye cameras.

But how does the dual Kinect configuration compare to PS3 Eye? The general rule is that dual-Kinect gives you quality comparable to 4 PS3 Eye cameras. If you're using dual-Kinect 2 sensors, the quality is even better because the device's higher definition depth data is considerably less noisy. Kinect 2 costs more than the original XBox 360 Kinect but the quality difference is significant.

Dual Kinect (original XBox 360) is what I used for creating mocap for my short film projects, and for the visual FX I created in a couple of SyFy channel films back when i was a freelancer. (You can see some of that film work on my 2015 VFX demo reel.)

I agree that PS3 Eye is capable of higher quality mocap than using dual-Kinect sensors but there are many more variables to consider with PS3 Eye: 1.) You need a fairly large space to set up your cameras, 2.) specially colored clothing, and 3.) you need to be able to light the environment evenly so there are no hard shadows on the performer. If you can't meet all three criteria, your capture quality will suffer greatly.

The advantage with Kinect is that you can work in a much smaller space, wear any color clothing you like (so long as it's reasonably close fitting,) and the room lighting is mostly a non-issue. (You can probably record in near darkness if you like...but it's safer to have some light in the room.) :)

I used to use PS3 Eye cameras back when they were first introduced, and shot mocap in my garage where I had a couple of soft boxes and a fairly large space to work in. This worked well for early tests I made for a personal short film and a previs for a TV commercial. The downside for me: it was too much trouble to keep moving my computer gear from the house to the garage. And because of space required by PS3 eye, I could not bring the mocap gear and lighting equipment into our house.

When Kinect support was added to Mocap Studio, this system worked much better for me. With Kinect, I was able to setup dual and triple configurations in our living room, and record from our adjacent computer room. Setup takes only a few minutes, so I can keep it out of sight until I actually need to use it. For me, it isn't practical to use PS3 Eye cameras, so I've pretty much stayed with the multi-Kinect configuration.

These days, I like to use dual-Kinect 2, and have been experimenting with triple-Kinect 2 capture. This big difference from the XBox Kinect, besides quality, is that with Kinect 2 you need a dedicated computer for each sensor, so this configuration may not be for everybody. In fact, it's personally taken me a while to be to experiment with triple-Kinect 2 sensors because of the steep hardware requirements. Some recent advances with mocap studio now allow multi-Kinect 2 sensors to work with one computer but it still requires some powerful hardware.

Anyway, I'm seeing some good results with the recent iPi Recorder updates. I've been meaning to post my test videos when I have the time, so stay tuned.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

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One thing that is REQUIRED is Direct X11 support on the video cards, not sure either of the 2 mentioned have DX11 support... Direct X 10 is no longer supported by iPi.

Lower end graphics cards with PS Eyes (10) will take forever to process, so be aware of that and if trying to track dual performers using the Pro license, it will crawl, so your best bet is to get one machine set up for processing with a GTX 970, or better, GTX 1080 Ti would be better nowdays, but if can afford the 2080 Ti it will give much faster processing speeds.

Both systems may require the use of 3 PS Move controllers, 2 for hands and 1 for head for better rotational tracking of those body parts and a working Bluetooth dongle, 6 Moves can run off one dongle.

10 PS Eyes aren't definitely needed, unless tracking dual performers, you can have 10 plugged in, but don't need to record with all 10, you can turn ones not needed off in the Home tab, or just unplug them, better to just use the minimum 6 cams when you can, unless your studio area is very large, you will need more cams to fill in the dead spots between the cameras view planes limits.

If you are inexperienced with 2D camera capturing, there is a learning curve with PS Eyes and as stated, special requirements that MUST be met for it to work correctly, if you can't meet these requirements, it is better you use dual Kinect V2 (X Box One) sensors, much more forgiving, but slightly less quality of tracking and animation output and a slightly lower end graphics card will track faster.

You can also transfer iPiVideos to a Flash drive of enough Gigs to handle what you transfer, or to a removable external hard drive, if you need to process between machine locations.

The Recorder only requires a minimum of 2G processor and basic Direct X 11 GPU to record, but needs to be set to run in high performance mode in power options.

All PS Eyes attached and in use during recording must maintain at least 59 fps constantly to work properly, or you will get severe frame skips and drops that will affect the quality of the tracking processing.

Each Kinect V2 sensor must maintain at least 29 fps constantly to perform correctly.

Hope this helps.

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