Hello all!

Let me apologize in advance if this is in a thread somewhere and I missed it or my noobish terms are way off...I am looking to purchase the software, but I have just a few questions about it's capabilities. Hope you guys can help!!

Lets say I have everything in the Standard version of the iPi software (cameras, etc. included) and the plan is to film a dance, performed by two people at the same time.

My question is this:

What sort of results am I going to have with captioning the individual movements of one person...if two are being filmed? Could I use this video of both people dancing and apply 'bones' to one person, then later go back and use the same video to apply bones to the second person in the video performing the dance?

Would the results be better to film each person individually, doing each dancer in this case, on their own separate video?

Hello! Unfortunately the software can only track one person at a time. Technically, the software cam track two people providing they are not overlapping one another. In your case, it would be a mess to try and capture two people dancing because they are going to cross one another, interact with each other, and be in the others space. This will cause occlusion and cause arms and legs to go flying everywhere. Your best bet is for the two to rehearse the dance together and then separately. Then capture them one by one.

Let us know how it goes!

Pat

Actually, this works fine... ive done it before... but there are some tricks.

First, as said, u can only track one person at a time... but all that means is tracking the same video twice, each time tracking one of the 2 individuals.

Second... camera placement... this'll help no end, but requires some thought, preparation, and experimentation. basically, if you rehearse and coreograph the moves ahead of time, you can watch which way the people move, see the lines of view where they'll occlude each other, and look for angles where there's less, and setup you camera array to fit this action.

Third... make sure the characters clothing contrast against one another... if the arms of one are the same colour as the torso of the other, and they have a hug... failure will follow!

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Hey Rebel, do you have any capped video you can show? I'm sure that many of us would be interested in seeing the results.

Thanks.

Pat

ta-da...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ert5CY5BA5I

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Cool!

Without the ball, it took me a minute to figure out just what kind of crazy 'dance' they were doing though. :)

G.

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Hmmmmmmmmm - this is most interesting. Thanks! So, different colored suites for the performers, neutral background, and cameras at various heights. I have 6 cams, how many did you use on this?

Pat

Yup... the basics that apply for a single person apply. Good contrasting colours for the different body parts ipi can recognise (in actor settings), so overlapping yourself is easy to track. Then extend this to the second person, to keep a colour contrast between their body parts and your own. T pose them in separately, as u see in the vid, and make sure to get good lighting, that gives pretty much even exposures on each angle... background is unimportant, so long as it contrasts with the colours your characters are wearing.

Otherwise, this is 6 cams, at 60fps... basically a five point star around, varying between 1-1.5 m high, and a 6th cam high on a balcony, 5-6m up, looking down over the whole stage as an angled birds eye.

Not much else to it really.

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You - Are - My - Hero. (sniff, wipes tear) lol

Pat