Hi,

I was used to use 4 cameras with iPi but I recently purchased 2 kinect and made some record sessions.
With the 2 kinect I have very often problems of dropped frames and I do not understand really why.
This is very variable in the time:
One kinect can stay good for a long duration during recording and then fall suddenlly to a very bad dropped frames ratio of 50% or 60% and then come back again to a good ratio...
Sometimes it is the kinect #1, sometimes the kinect #2, sometimes both at the same time...
I have nevertheless the feelling that this bad ratio effect comes regularly and recursively.
I also notices that I have sometimes blockages: One of the kinect is blocked on a frame for a while and then it come back to normal.
What is influencing this dropped frames ratio ?
What can I do to improve it ?
Why is there no compression feature on the kinect records like there is with the web cameras ?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

Have you tried recording without RGB option enabled ?

Also RGB recording works better when in a shared screen in skype.

Cheers

Ahhh yes ! I forgot to mention it !
Yes I record without the RGB already...

TY for your answer mrbones but what do you mean by "when in a shared screen in skype." ?

I have also a side question:
I understood that the RGB is not used after during the tracking... Am I correct ?

I'm assuming you tried different ports? That should be simple to check.

However, since you had no trouble recording from 4 PS3 Eye cameras, my first thought is that you may have a Kinect driver conflict. Have you tried completely removing drivers and reinstalling? There's specific instructions for doing this in the wiki.

Hope this helps.

G.

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Yes, you are correct. For now, RGB image is not used for tracking the motion with Kinect, it's just supplementary information. You can safely record only depth.

@vmaslov: TY for the confirmation

@Greenlaw: TY for your answer. Yes indeed, I tried to put the kinect on different USB ports but this did not seem to change anything.
The drivers is a good idea... I will try to uninstall and install them again.

got other usb devices plugged in? card readers, hdd, integrated webcam? Id suspect taht something else is being called over usb causing an interrupt. Unplug stuff if youve got it plugged in... also try disabling indexing in windows, as it may be that either accessing external drives, or the one thats being written to by the recorder.

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@RebelHill: TY. I also thought about such a problem. So I disconnected the USB keyboard I used.
I have 4 USB ports so only two were used by the kinect. But this seems to have no beneficial effect...
In fact I use a iMac running under Windows 7... I do not know if the integrated webcam uses USB too or some other stuff...
I will see on the side of the files indexing too.

If you were able to record from four PS3 Eye cameras I would think the ports and controllers are okay. The rule of thumb is that you can only run two Eye cameras per controller. This should be sufficient for two Kinects with RGB disabled...maybe?

What kind of storage device are you recording to? I wonder if the bottleneck is there. I think Kinect data may be a little 'heavier' to push through than PS3 because of the additional processing involved. That's just a guess though...I don't really know.

If all you have is the laptop's internal drive, that could present a problem--ideally, you don't want to record to your system drive. With some laptops, however, you may not have a choice. I assume it's a fast drive if this is what you recorded data from the four PS3 Eyes to. Check that you have enough contiguous disk space available. (In other words, remove unnecessary data if you can and optimize.)

But if your internal drive is a fast SSD, then it should be okay--and we're back to square one.

Hmm. Let us know what happens.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!