Hello Everyone,

I am planning to setup 16 PS3 eye cameras. I have already bought 16 cameras
and 3 Motion Controllers. I am using One Alienware 15 R2 with 3 USB
ports(3*USB 3.0) and One Workstation with high configuration and 8 USB
ports ( 3*USB 3.0 and 5*USB 2.0). I might also arranged for extra ports or
workstation. I have following doubts before proceeding for Pro Membership:

1. Should I buy Active USB 2.0 cable extension or Active USB 3.0 Cable
extensions for all my USB ports(Including USB 2.0 and USB 3.0)? Or should I
buy Active USB 3.0 Cable extensions for USB 3.0 and Active USB 2.0 Cable
extensions for USB 2.0?

2. Which camera setup configuration would be best for 16 cameras -
Rectangle or Circular? Is there any minimum Capture Space requirement for
16 cameras? Has Anyone ever tried 16 camera setup & what are the results of it?

3. I am planning to setup studio lights to eliminate ground shadows as much
as possible. Do you have any guide for light setups?

4. For multiple actors, Dress code is Actor 1(Full Sleeves Black Shirt
with Black Jeans and Black Shoes) and Actor 2(Full Sleeves Blue Shirt with
Blue Jeans and Blue Shoes) and if Actor 3(Full Sleeves Green Shirt with
Green Jeans and Green Shoes). Does this seem right? Shoot would be mostly
for complex fighting scene with rolling on ground and more.

Thank you for the help.

Hello,

1. You need USB 2.0 cables. They will work via USB 3.0 ports. You can use USB 3.0 cables as well, but cameras will work via USB 2.0 anyway, so this is not make any difference.

2. Circular configuration allows to best use available space. But depending on particular room dimenstions, you can choose rectangular configuration as well. The difference will be only in configuration of capture area which you will get. The main requirement is to ensure that person is fully visible in all cameras inside capture area. So there is minimum distance to camera requirement. For a person to be fully visible with hands up, you need to be at 2.5 meters from camera. This depends on actor's height, so may differ slightly for different actors. This means that two cameras oppisite to each other should be placed at distance equal to 5 meters plus capture area width. So if you want to have capture area 3 by 3 meters, you'll need opposing cameras to be at 8 meters.

3. We do not require professional light. The most important requirement to light is to ensure that colors look the same in different cameras. So please avoid directing cameras to bright light sources (in this case all colors will be darker in this particular camera). Minimizing shadows (expecially self-shadows on clothes) is also good. Shadows on floor are less improtant, but no shadows is good to have.
More on this: http://docs.ipisoft.com/User_Guide_for_ ... t_Settings

4. Clothes of different actors should be different, this is correct. However having shirt and pants of the same color is not good. In ideal case you need to have different colors on pants, torso and legs on each actor (so totally 9 different colors). Good colors are: black, dark green, purple, dark blue, brown. You can use different shades of the same color (i.e. green or dark olive green). Also make sure that clothes are not the same color as background.

I recommend to start with single-actor capture. As soon as you get solid results for single actor, you will understand the process much better, and it will be easier to switch to multi-actor capture.

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iPi Soft

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What is the size or area you are trying to set this up in ( LxW and Height of ceiling )?

It may be hard to stay out of the way while calibrating 16 cameras and you need the best calibration you can get, so keep that in mind and using a long sturdy stick with the light taped to the end of it will help for less moving whole body around capture area and also fixing a ping pong ball over the mag-light will help keep the light contained and in view to all cameras better. (some use the Move controller on white light, not sure how well it works though).

Also, if planning for each performer to use hand Move controllers, you will need 2 compatible Bluetooth dongles, each dongle will handle 4 Moves, so will need to be distributed between 2 computers, or will have to use the Native Windows drivers + Motion in Joy drivers to be used on one computer. Easier now to just distribute them on 2 computers and use Windows drivers. I am taking it you are running Win 10 on all machines?

Best to not over light your capture volume, especially bright direct overhead lighting, but use enough light to see actor clothing colors as they actually look and more ambient than directly pointing at actor, or your colors can appear washed out in the Studio for tracking. (Even low wattage lighting is tricky with PS Eyes).

Playing with each cameras Gain and Exposure settings can help also, each doesn't have to be exactly the same Gain, but should be the same Exposure setting and to help with motion blur, set all Exposure to 60, anything in between 60 and 120 won't make a difference. (faster shutter speed for less motion blur for tracking).

Another thing is NOT to have long hair covering the rear of any actors neck, or heavy facial hair and no bald spots on top of heads, use a solid colored head wrap if this is the case, or your head rotations can suffer. (even if completely bald, better to use a cap, or head covering).

I hope you have a monster machine for processing 16 cameras, and that's just to process one actor at a time, trying 3 actor tracking at once will really drag your fps down, or keeping takes shorter will help. 10 secs and under.

The Alienware machine has pretty good specs, not sure what your work station machine has, but...

Probably a machine that can fully utilize dual GTX 980 Ti's, Titans, or 1080's and a 28 or 40 lane processor for fastest fps tracking results for 3 actors at once, or you may end up only being able to track them one at a time, all actors can be recorded all in one scene recording, just track them individually.

Processing relies greatly on the graphics card for good frame rate tracking, especially if take length is longer 30 secs. or more, even with the new algorithm.

I have tested 3 actor tracking with 6 PS Eyes and it killed the processing fps using a single GTX 970 FTW Over Clocked to 1530 MHz.

One actor for me tracks at 2.70 fps ... 3 actors tracked at 0.70 fps ... so would be faster for me to track each separately.

Just a heads up on that.

I would like to see some results when you get it going well :)

Good Luck!

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Pertaining to the iPi Recorder, it doesn't take much power to run it, but I would make the most powerful machine the Master machine, or use an external hard drive for file storage, just so they are always easily accessible and wouldn't need another computer (being the laptop) always connected to the network and it is faster to transfer the data through a wired connection than over a wifi connection in most cases.

I personally would also only process with the minimum number of cameras needed that will do the job, you can have 16 during recording, but you don't need to process with all 16, you can remove cameras through the Recorder editing feature itself, but you need to also remove them from the Scene XML file, duplicate the original XML and edit the copy if wanted, just delete all lines of the unwanted camera data.

You have to do this in order to remove cameras from the studio processing task, or it will throw an error stating the scene cameras don't match the video project.

Also, be aware that the video recording files can get very large, very quickly, so best to have a separate storage drive just for them.

I personally record using JPG compression at 80%, as it keeps the file size smaller, but that's your choice.

I don't know where you are recording your videos, but avoid a high shine floor, it will reflect the lighting and could cause you issues later.

One last thing, it is better to wear different color gloves for each actor, it will really help when tracking fast hand motions, but again, your choice, but gloves don't have to be different than the pants, black pants, shoes or socks, and black gloves work fine together, what I use anyway, and I would think probably the same for any other colors, just really good to use deep saturated colors of any colors used, (white and yellow aren't recommended, especially if those colors are prominent in the background), because the lighting may wash the colors out in processing, and blonde hair will show as a different color, but in testing I felt it was better to use either darker haired performers, or some kind of darker head wrap/cap.

Do you have a dedicated location for recording, or will it be a setup/tear down after each session? Either way it is best to keep the immediate capture background fairly clutter free, but the program does a good job of isolating the tracking of the actor from the background, even when using JPG compression.

I hope some of this helps, but as Pavel stated, better to start with single actor test recordings, with each type of chosen colored clothing to get things working well, then step up to multi actors and more advanced extreme motions.

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No, computer DRAM plays very little part in iPi processing.

Higher end graphics card is best GTX 970 or better is best, or equivalent on AMD side.

VRAM on graphics card should be at least 2G if less higher end card.

I am not sure on the "M" laptop card models, or how they perform, maybe someone else could reply to those.

Possibly the new Vega card from AMD would be better than Nvidia, watching more to see real world testing.

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