Just bought four ps3 cams and plugged one in, the picture is really bad compared to my Logitech Quikcam Pro. I just bought the software, so have not had a chance to try out the process. Why are the ps3 cams recommended, is it based on frame rate?. So clarity of the cameras is not paramount?. Thanks in advance for your advice.

Framerate is much more important then camera resolution.

At 640x480 system accuracy is already limited by inaccuracies of modeling of actor clothes rather then camera resolution. High framerate allows you to capture more details of the motion and have less motion blur. Basically, double framerate doubles the amount of useful information about captured motion.

PlayStation Eye camera actually has better sensor then Logitech Quikcam Pro. But default auto-exposure algorithm works differently for these cameras. Logitech Quikcam Pro automatically increases exposure and reduces framerate to increase "picture quality" as it understands it, at the expense of motion blur and framerate. PlayStation Eye camera automatically adjusts exposure and all other camera parameters to provide best picture quality for selected frame rate. Thanks to large sensor pixels, low-light sensitivity of PlayStation Eye camera is better then Logitech camera.

PlayStation Eye camera also has optics with very low distortion. By contrast, Logitech Quikcam Pro camera has non-square pixels and other hard-to-model distortions, due to a combination of defects of picture scaling algorithm and off-center optical axis.

Thanks for the in depth answer. I hooked up four ps3 cameras, I have a fairly new desktop but was disappointed to see that I could not record all four at 640x480, I had to go down to 320x240. I am interested to know whether anybody has managed to hook four ps3 cameras and record at 640x480. If no one has, does the accuracy take a big hit going down to 320x240?. Would it be better to use three cameras at 640x480 instead?.

What CPU do you have?

Make sure you are using raw Bayer mode with PS Eye cameras.
Don't set compression quality too high, it is not very important. High resolution is more critical then compression quality.
Your PC should have 2 high-speed (USB 2.0) controllers in chipset. Make sure you distribute cameras evenly between controllers. For example, connect 2 cameras to front panel and 2 cameras to back panel.

With 2.6 GHz dual-core CPU, you should have no problem recording at 30-40 FPS at 640x480 with 4 cameras. With a quad-core CPU, you should have no problem recording at 60 FPS at 640x480 with 4 cameras.

It is recommended that you use dedicated had drive for video recording (e.g. do not record to C: drive - operating system keeps accessing files on C: drive, this can interfere with video recording).

I'm glad you said that because that was my plan for my laptop. Now I have a major problem as my laptop only has 3 usb ports and hdmi port. If I use one usb port for a external HD that would only leave 2 ports for the cameras. I know previously you said that 2 cameras should work per usb port. Does this set-up sound like its possible to do now?

But why do you want to waste even more USB bandwidth on additional hard drive? With multiple cameras, you are already short of USB bandwidth. You should also keep in mind that many external hard drive enclosures have lousy USB 2.0 controllers, so your actual external USB HDD performance may be below 1/4 of the speed declared by USB 2.0 standard.

A more realistic option could be an external HDD connected via External SATA or USB 3.0. If your laptop does not have eSATA, you probably can use an Express Card with eSATA or USB 3.0 controller, like this:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_sc ... a+express+

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss? ... rd&x=0&y=0

But be careful when choosing Express Card controller - there are multiple Express Card physical form factors and many laptop makers tend to invent their own incompatible form factor. So the safe method is to get your laptop with you into a brick-end-mortar electronics store to make sure you get the right Express Card.

The best laptop accessory for working with video is a fast modern Solid State Drive but they still are very expensive.

FYI, I see that Newegg is selling 60GB - 64GB SSD's in the $134 to $150 range, so the prices are coming down. Newegg just happened to be the first place I looked, and it may be cheaper elsewhere.

(I'm investigating whether I can use an SSD as a second drive in my laptop but I'm not sure this is possible yet.)

Edit: No, the laptop only has one drive bay. Bummer. :(

Greenlaw

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

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You should look closely at specifications when choosing an inexpensive SSD. Some SSDs are old models with very slow sequential write speeds (slower then HDDs).

Ideally, you need an SSD with sequential write speed of at least 100 MB/s - that's slightly more then the amount of data per second from 4 cameras at 640x480 at 60 FPS in uncompressed raw Bayer mode. Some new SSDs have sequential write speeds of 200 MB/s or better.

By the way, I hope you are using raw Bayer mode at 640x480 - it saves 50% of bandwidth and there is no reason not to use it.



Theoretically, you can use SSD as your first drive and keep the OS and latest recorded video on SSD. You can connect your HDD with all other data via external USB 3.0 enclosure when not recording video. From the other side, it can be too much of a problem moving all your existing files to such configuration.

Thanks for all the helpful information Michael. For now I think I'm going to use my quad core workstation to record and track with iPi Studio, but I will keep all your tips in mind when I decide to get a new computer. :)

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Hi,

Does anybody know how I can take single pictures with this camera, there doesn't seem to be an option in either the CL-eye device manager or ipi Camera calibration software .. I'm trying to get past the first hurdle
of aligning the chequered pattern to pictures taken by the camera in the ipi camera calibration tool... any ideas on how to do that would be much appreciated.


Cheers!