If I'm building a new system, what's the FASTEST rendering speed I can get and what graphics card do I need to get there? I may be shopping around for a gaming system just for ipisoft studio. I can muster a healthy budget from my superiors if it delivers results. Couple of questions for the ipisoft moderators and anyone who has experience in this matter.

1. Does Dual SLI help? Triple SLI?

2. Does CPU speed help with the processing at all, or is it all graphics card?

3. If CPU helps, do multiple cores help too?

4. Finally, on an aside, I currently run Bootcamp on Mac Pro 2009. I saw
EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition Graphics Card. Perhaps my money is better spent on this and a SSD?

You can find processing speed estimates for various GPU models and processing options at our web site:
http://ipisoft.com/pr/GPU_speed_v_13_04.pdf


We will release multiple GPU support in the next update of iPi Mocap Studio. See details in our wiki:
http://wiki.ipisoft.com/Multiple_GPUs


Practically, any modern quad-core CPU is sufficient. Most computations are carried on video card.


If your goal is maximum processing speed, then better invest in dual video card system.

Awesome. Great answers. Another question....

Does that Graphics Card rendering speed chart apply to scene calibration too? That's what's killing me because it's taking 2-3 hours to calibrate a scene, and I have to take everything down at the end of the day.

Or is that served by CPU speed?

The calibration is also processed by GPU.
Your timing for calibration looks really huge. What GPU do you use now?
Maybe your calibration records are too long. Usually, several hundreds of frames are sufficient. As a rule of thumb, a calibration video should not be more than 1 minute long.

IMO, 2 - 3 hours for calibration is extraordinarily long.

The process here, for example, takes only a few minutes--short enough that I routinely run the full calibration process before I start recording action videos, just to be sure I have a good one for the session. I may also run a second calibration before taking everything down, to cover myself in case something changed during the shoot (an accidentally 'bumped' camera for example.) And by 'run', I mean recording, tracking and verification.

I make it a habit to to record and process at least two calibrations for a session--few things feel worse than having wasted an entire session because of unusable calibration data. Of course, this is only practical when you can run your calibrations and test them in a reasonably short time.

How long are your calibration videos? With dual Kinect, I typically shoot and track about 500 to 600 frames or about 20 seconds of video. When I was using PS Eye cameras, the length was a little more than double that (1200 to 1300.)

FYI, my graphics card is an old GTX 460. I still feel my process times are practical for production use but more recent GTX cards will produce significantly faster than what I'm getting.

Also, my computer is not especially fast by today's standards. It's an HP Pavilion i7 quad core built about two or three years ago, and still running on Win 7 Pro. I do have an SSD installed dedicated for motion capture, and I have two USB 3 cards installed and I dedicate each on to a Kinect. This hardware has little affect for improving tracking speed but it helps in recording reliable data.

One more thing to consider: the latest version of iPi Mocap Studio demands less from the hardware, so technically you could use a less powerful computer than was required for iPi DMC 1.0. But of course, this depends on what you want to record--if you go with the full 8 cameras setup, naturally you'll need a more powerful computer.

G.

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Wow! Something must be wrong then. Given, I'm making my calibration videos about 9,000 - 11000 frames long, and my background might have been noisy. But still. I'll try to to keep in your range and see if that works.