Hi,

I finally got around to using the latest Recorder with four PS3 cameras tonight. With my dual core laptop I'm consistently getting 50fps at 320 x 240; should be good enough. If not, I guess I'll have to lug my quad core desktop into the garage. :)

Anyway, one thing I noticed is that I cannot adjust any of the exposure/color settings at the top of the screen. If I click Calibration mode, the image gets darker as expected, but the individual settings seem disabled so I can't tweak the exposure to improve my frame rate. Is this normal when using PS3 cameras or is this a bug?

Thanks in advance for any help.

BTW, if anyone out there is still trying to decide if you need to switch from Logitech to PS3, the image quality is way more consistent across four PS3 cameras than it ever was with four Logitech cameras.

I ran into some silly technical issues with the laptop tonight which delayed my full iPi Studio test. Should be back on track tomorrow night though.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

As to main question:


This is by design. PS Eye cameras has very good auto adjust functionality based on desired fps.
We'll consider to hide not used sliders in UI in this case (now they simply disabled).


As to performance:


And what happens when you set 640 x 480 resolution at 50fps?
The thing is that there are the following options:

1. high frame drops => problem in USB ports+controllers => make sure that not more than 2 cams plugged via one USB 2.0 controller

2. compression buffer overflow => CPU isn't in time with compression => try to set lower quality or turn off compression (the last option can work only with high speed disk drives like SSD)

3. I/O buffer overflow => disk is too slow => make sure that compression is turned on + try to set lower quality (lower quality results in smaller video file) OR use faster disk drive (e.g. SSD)

Andrew, thanks for responding so quickly!
It's probably not necessary to change this; I just needed to know why this was happening as it didn't occur with the Logitech cameras. Maybe a simple pop-up note would do.

Thanks for the tips. I think the frame rate was impacted because I had compression turned off. I'm using a portable eSATA RAID drive that worked fine with the Logitech cameras, but of course I was getting even lower frame rate back then. It should work fine with the PS3 cameras.

Ths evening I'll test plugging the cameras into different USB ports (my laptop has six) and also try turning compression on and see what happens. I'll try 640 by 480 again too.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Just following up from last night's testing session.

I mainly experimented with different resolution, frame rate, and compression settings. With the laptop, I can capture 640 x 480 at 30fps and 320 x 240 at between 40 and 60fps. I'm not sure why the acceptable rate will vary.

Here's something interesting about that. When I initially try 320 x 240 at 60fps, I will drop frames like mad...I mean hundreds per minute. But if I select 640 x 480 at 60fps first, and then switch to 320 x 240 at 60fps, the laptop will capture with a minimal (generally acceptable) number of dropped frames.

At this point, I wondered if my laptop really had multiple USB controllers. I found a utility that let me check and it seems like, even though I have six ports, for USB 2.0 there is actually just one controller. (It's actually four USB 1.0 and 1 USB 2.0.) If I'm understanding this correctly, this might be why I'm not getting full speed.

Still, what I'm getting should be acceptable, shouldn't it? My assumption is that to record fast action I need a higher frame rate to reduce motion blur, but 30 fps should be okay for moderate speed action. Is this correct?

When I feel up to it, I'll take my quad core workstation with the new graphics card to the garage for a test. Maybe this weekend. I'm sure I'm almost certain I'll see significant improvement in the frame rate, though for convenience sake I hope I can continue using the laptop to capture video.

It was very late when finished my first full PS3 capture session and I should have just gone to bed, but just couldn't resist trying the new DMC 1.0. The calibration speed is now sooooo much faster than with the older software. Calibration now takes minutes vs. painful hours. Accuracy seems greatly improved too. Great job here guys!

I thought I'd have to time to track one motion but I ran into a problem shortly after calibration. As I was positioning the actor, iPi DMC crashed, and I found that my project file became corrupted and unloadable. Oh well, it was way past bedtime anyway.

Of course, I will try again tonight. :)

Greenlaw

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Quick question: Does iPi DMC care if the calibration video and the motion capture video was each recorded with different settings (res, fps, compression)?

Just wondering because I recorded the calibration video multiple times with variety of settings to see what worked best, but I didn't want to waste my time if it was known that all the motion footage needed to have the same settings as the calibration video for DMC to work properly.

In brief, I recorded most of the motion capture videos with only two different capture settings, 640 x 480 at 30fps and 320 x 240 at 40fps, and I want to know if I should only use calibration with matching settings.

Thanks in advance for any helpful info.

Greenlaw

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Scene parameters are 3d positions of cameras in meters, rotations of cameras in world system in degrees and field of view also in degrees. Thus neither compression, nor FPS, and even nor resolution affect on calibration results. That is, you can write calibration video with one values of compression, FPS and resolution and use calibration results in projects recorded with different values of compression, FPS and resolution.

It looks like bug. Can you describe in more details steps to reproduce this problem?

Camera configuration in iPi Studio is resolution-invariant, but still it is recommended that you record calibration video and action video at the same resolution and frame rate.

Many cameras (including Sony PS Eye and Logitech cameras) have slightly incorrect scaling algorithm implemented in camera on-board processing chip. Sony PS Eye shifts picture to approximately 0.7 pixels to right-bottom when scaling from native 640x480 resolution to 320x240, and Logitech cameras produce slightly non-square pixels when scaling.

Such minor distortions do not seriously affect capture, but you can minimize them by performing calibration at the same resolution as action video.

As for the framerate, you always want maximum possible framerate both for action video (to minimize motion blur and to capture more details of motion) and for calibration video (again, to minimize motion blur). So there is no reason to use different framerate for capture and for action.