Markerless Motion Capture

Inexpensive Hardware for iPi Recorder

3 to 4 cameras

repeater cable
one per camera

optional extension cable - one per camera

replaces repeater and extension cable

Other hardware notes

We recommended that you use a computer with 4 USB ports. If you are using a computer or laptop that has less than 4 USB ports you might be able to utilize a powered USB/hub with 4 or more ports to to combine 2 cameras so that they plug in to the same port on your computer.

A reasonably modern desktop PC should be fast enough to allow recording of video with 3 or 4 cameras at 640x480 at 50 or 60 FPS (Frames Per Second). If you are using the Sony PSEye cameras, you don't even need additional USB controllers since the PSEye makes very efficient use of USB bandwidth, even at high framerates.

One particularly useful piece of equipment is a dedicated hard drive for recording video. Just one dedicated modern inexpensive desktop (3.5") hard drive should allow you recording live video without problems. "Dedicated" means a hard drive separate from your Windows system hard drive.

For video processing, you need a fast video card (the video card is where all the calculations are done in iPi Desktop Motion Capture™). The recently available NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 is much faster then any older video cards due to architectural improvements. We recommend that you consider a GeForce 470 or 480 based card. If you are more budget minded, you can get a $100 desktop video card like GeForce GTS 250 or Radeon 4850.

You should be able to record video on modern a dual-core (2 GHz) notebook PC, but you may need to reduce frame rate and/or resolution. Since most notebooks do not allow installation of extra hard drives, faster framerates can be problematic. (You cannot use external USB 2.0 hard drives because they are extremely slow). Also, a dual-core 2 GHz CPU is not fast enough to compress high-res video on the fly. If your computer has an eSata port that will let you connect an external dedicated hard drive without any sacrifice of recording speed.

Processing the captured video on a notebook PC is possible but it's just very slow. Notebooks do not have fast video cards because of apparent thermal limitations.