Hey, Im tired of moving my tower PC out to living room to do capture sessions. Im looking into buying a laptop for this. BTW this is for dual Kinect setup.

ASUS G53SX-DH71 15.6IN FHD i7 2670QM 12GB 750GB GeForce 560 2GB WIN7 Prem HDMI USB3.0 Notebook

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=65190&vpn ... cture=ASUS


If any of you have experience or suggetions Im open to reading them. Thanks for your time.


www.triangleproductions.tv

I had just the same thought, and have moved my ipi system over to my new (ebay secondhand) laptop.

Dell XPS 15 L502X 2nd Gen i7-2630QM 2.0 to 2.9GHz 64 BIT Windows 7 Home Premium

I plugged up my two kinekts into what seems to be two separate usb controllers and it recorded
at 30fps without breaking a sweat. It's a powerful machine and has a 2GB Nvidia GT540M Graphics Card, but can be got for a good price, so long as you don't need one of the ultra thin Z models.

It's going to make ipi a lot easier to use for me.

hope this information is useful.

I can definitely say that CPU in this model is more then adequate for the task, and GPU is good and fast (for a notebook GPU). Seems like there are enough USB ports and USB controllers for dual Kinect config, but I cannot say for sure since I never tested ASUS notebooks.

From the description it looks like the notebook has single mechanical hard drive. Please keep in mind that current version of our software cannot compress dual Kinect videos, and single mechanical drive can be a bottleneck for dual Kinect video recording (depending on drive speed and fragmentation). (Single Kinect video or compressed PSEye video should not be a problem).

I/O speed can be improved with RAID0 (available in some notebook models) or with a fast modern SSD with TRIM under Win7.

For your info, here in iPiSoft we are using Alienware M17 R3 notebook for our video recordings and it proved to be a very reliable and fast machine for dual-Kinect mocap. It has a mechanical dual-drive RAID0 array in standard configuration, and can write uncompressed video without any problems. But M17 R3 is more expensive than ASUS notebook.

Hi, today i was at my local pc-shop searching for laptop. Most laptops had only 1 usb 2.0 controller that i could plug in, and 3.0 usbs usually distorted stream or stopped working after 30s. Do you just plug-in your kinects to 2.0 usbs and everything works just fine , or do you need some magic with that?

I described my setup in another thread, but basically I capture motions in the living room and operate iPi DMC on a PC in another room. To do this, I run active USB (a.k.a., repeater) cables from the computer room to the Kinects to insure strong power and data.

Then, to monitor the computer while in the living room, I run a remote program called Team Viewer on a tablet PC. This lets me wirelessly view what appears on the iPi Recorder screen in the computer room, which is very useful for positioning the Kinect devices.

Back in the computer room, iPi Recorder allows me to remotely operate the pitch control of each Kinect for final alignment. (I can do this in Team Viewer in the living room too, but it's more responsive to do this from the main computer.)

When I'm ready to capture, I just hit the Space Bar, count off a couple of seconds for the clean background video, and then enter the living room for capture. When I'm done, I hit the space bar again and iPi automatically names and saves the file. Press then I press the Space Bar for the next motion and repeat.

This workflow has been very efficient for me.

Oh, one more thing: I keep a GoogleDocs spreadsheet page open to record script notes, which is a record of what each video contains (calibration, motion description, and other useful notes.) I update the spreadsheet after every few shots. This spreadsheet is incredibly useful during tracking in iPi Studio and when setting up scenes in your 3D program.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Indeed, most laptops have only 1 USB 2.0 controller. So you must connect second Kinect to USB 3.0 (onboard or external on ExpressCard). Try to install Kinect SDK. Usually it helps solve problems regarding connections through USB 3.0. Also you may try disable recording color, leaving only depth - that reduces required USB bandwidth significantly.

Also, please note that new iPi Recorder coming with V2 release will support working with Kinects only using Kinect SDK.

Hi, I tried it with Kinect SDK and it worked! :)

First time listing here about monitoring..is that really working ?

Yes, I've been using TeamViewer and a tablet PC (a convertible laptop) to control Recorder since before we created 'Happy Box'. I'm still surprised by how well Team Viewer works for this--it's fast enough that I can use it to remotely adjust the pitch angle of the two Kinects in Recorder.

Recently, I change my 'remote' workflow a little when I started using the PS Move controllers. Since I can control the start and stop commands in Recorder using a the handheld controller (PS Move or Wii Motion Plus,) I no longer have the need to control Recorder through the tablet PC with TeamViewer this way. So now I switch TeamViewer off when I'm recording a session.

But I still use TeamViewer and the tablet PC to control Recorder to set up the two Kinects--the remote view helps me align the devices easily and more accurately without leaving the room.

After switching TeamViewer off, I keep the tablet PC running for keeping script notes, as described in my earlier post.

BTW, if you'd like to try for yourself, TeamViewer is free for non-commercial use. It's really easy to setup and use. :)

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!