I bought a monster computer specifically for IP Motion Tracker:

Acer M500

Plus 3 Webcams:

Logitech WebCam Pro (BRAND NEW from Bestbuy)
Logitech QuickCam Pro (REFURBISHED from New Egg)
Logitech QuickCam Pro (REFURBISHED from New Egg)

I installed the installer on the WebCam Pro and didn't installed on the Quickcam Pro's. I think they are the same models anyway. But I am being prompted by Vista to full install the other two which I only cancel. They all respond to the Logitech Webcam Software and I can select and change the settings on each camera through the advance settings of the webcam pro's installed program. They all work fine in IP Recorder. So I shouldn't have any problems shooting on three cameras. I also disabled Rightlight and Auto Focus in the cameras.

I followed the LightDog Film's Calibration Tutorial.

I made sure I placed the correct height and rough XZ Orbit on each camera.
Disabled Auto Adjust Camera FOV and Auto Detect Initial Camera Location
FOV for all cameras' I set to 74.
Contrast was brought up to darken the place.

Calibration went smoothly with many of the tracks in green diamonds. But the results are not usable.

Camera 1 (WebCam Pro) looks correct.
Camera 2 (QuickCam Pro) Is tilted
Camera 3 (QuickCam Pro) Is also tilted.

http://img4.imageshack.us/g/webcampro.jpg/

Much worse happens if I define the Ground points, with cameras flying to wrong positions.

Here is the link to the Calibration video and the Tracked Calibration file as reference:

http://www.downloadtaxi.com/d/1257883910


And of course... HELP!

Identify completely.look at the topic above.
I also think you should try the automatic calibration, if you are using last beta version. For me at least , is working better.
marking ground was my big issue.

We are looking into this problem.
Thanks for posting the video, it is certainly helpful for debugging the problem.

Hi there. I'm having the devil of a time getting my camera setup to calibrate, it just keeps marking most of the dots red and ending up with crazy camera positions - most frustrating as I've got lots of plans for using this mocap software :)

In order to be as helpful as possible I've also uploaded my calibration video file here:
http://www.downloadtaxi.com/d/1259173868

As far as I can see, I've done everything necessary:
I have an AA maglite in candle mode
I draw the box, the floor, and some random moves, and all you can see is the light.
I'm using three Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000's, as recommended.
I set the FOV to 74deg as Michael said in other posts, and manually set up initial camera positions.
All the automatic white balancing/light levels etc are turned off on all three cameras, and they all have the same birghtness, exposure, contrast etc settings.

The studio software tracks the light quite nicely and then does a clear box of green markers, all looking OK, but then as it calibrates it starts marking them all red for some reason, then stretching them out, and the cameras end up under the floor or whatever, it's a disaster :(

If anyone can let me know what I'm doing wrong here I'd be most appreciative, I really want to get on with a large amount of mocap for my current project.

-Ian Chisholm

Hm - interesting. I've been performing the mocap test round a friends house as he has a big enough front room, and it's his computer I've been using to process the calibration vid. After my post last night I had a go on my PC with the same video footage and the same scene files I was using on his, and mine calibrated it correctly o.O Is it possible that different computers will get different results? I built that PC for him and it's almost the same as mine, I can get the exact specs of each machine if it helps the troubleshooting process?

I also found that adding the 3rd ground point caused the cameras to go wild, except I then found it appears to be a visual artefact - simply switching through the camera views puts them back to how they were, hurrah!

-Ian

Ian, do you think its maybe the result of how close you "roughly align the camera" before pressing the "calibrate" button? Maybe how you aligned the second time which is in your friend's house is much closer compared to your first attempt.

I have taken a look at your calibration video and I cannot see where you facing at there. In my experience, when I roughly align the cameras according to how the video appears, the processing time to calibrate it is much quicker and got better results (the above post) but it is not usable.

Right now I am narrowing the possible missing links so far I have:

1.) Maybe I need to install every installation disk for every camera? I have WebCam Pro and two QuickCam Pro though they look the same, maybe they are still different versions with different FOVs etc?

2.) FOV of my 2 Quickcams Pro might be different from the WebCam Pros?

3.) Maybe I need to buy another QuickCam Pro and not use WebCam Pro to verify my theory?


Ah man, look at the money I am shelving at. I hope this is just a glitch and I hope to get a workable solution for like Ian, I also have alot of plans to this one! :)

Thanks for sharing the video. Your calibration video actually looks very good. Here is the corresponding project file after calibration:

http://www.ipisoft.com/animation/calib_ ... .MoCap.zip

With this particular video, "Auto Detect Initial Camera Positions" is not working correctly, but very rough manual positioning solves the problem.

Hey, how did you his? What kind of settings did you use? Why did his video work? Is it because its super dark? Could you also calibrate mine:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=857



What do you mean with this? Do you mean the roughly positioning the camera before calibration or repositioning the camera to recalibrate again?

In current version, calibration results are not reliably repeatable, for two reasons:

1) In case of "Auto Detect Initial Camera Position", a random number is used to seed the calibration process, and it may produce slightly different results from one run to another. We plan a better, more reliable auto-detect in future versions and it should not have this problem.

2) In case of manual adjustment of initial camera positions, calibration results can be different depending on initial camera positions. Typical problem is incorrectly specifying which camera is to the left and which is to the right (by far, the biggest problem with manual adjustment of initial camera positions).

We are looking at your videos right now. By the way, thanks for sharing your videos, this is very useful for debugging. We will send you results in a couple of days.

There seems to be some small bugs in our software causing problems with your calibration videos.
I can tell that we will definitely publish a new version soon with bug fixes based on your feedback.