Arena 64 bit and other Questions

[fxrtst]

Hey guys,

I am wondering if Arena will work on a Mac Pro running 64 bit Vista Ultimate? I am finding it difficult to find the information I'm looking for on the web site and I did not find any .pdf or manual for Arena. Also I installed and activated Arena on my laptop which is 32 bit and I am wondering if my license includes installing the software on other computers I own and just move the hardware from one computer to the next. And lastly, for newbies I'd love a more indepth info about setting up Arena and Motionbuilder over a network. My laptop is wireless and connects to a router, is this recommended or is it better to have a ethernet cable and have computers adhoc connected..?? Or all computers hardwired thru my router? Whats the best way to connect Arena's stream to Motionbuilder live? Thanks in advance,

Will

[Jim]

Hello:

Arena should run on 64bit Vista, on the Mac Pro, using Bootcamp.

The Arena license is locked to the camera you registered, so you can move the camera and license file to any machine you want.

We usually hard wire the machines together, through a hub, but it should work over the router or wireless, don't see why it wouldn't.

We do not have a print manual for Arena yet. The software is being continually improved, so we find it more efficient to offer videos showing how to perform the main functions.

You can see all the tutorials here:
http://www.naturalpoint.com/optitrack/p ... ideos.html

This also covers how to setup a MB link.

[fxrtst]

Jim,

Thanks for the reply. Arena is 64 bit or will run x86 in Vista? I'd like to take advantage of the extra ram in the 64 bit environment as my computer has 16 gigs. Great to know on the license. Thanks for the link on the videos...looking forward to more!!

Will

[Birch]

Will,

The Arena executable is a 32 bit runtime. Our MotionBuilder plugin has 32 and 64 bit runtimes for use with the 32 and 64 bit MotionBuilder versions.

[fxrtst]

Thanks...at least will be able to use Motionbuilder Extension 2. Is there a 64 bit version in Arena's future?

Thanks,

Will

[Birch]

We don't have specific plans for a 64 bit build of Arena, but are aware of the advantages and will be evaluating it as time goes on.

[fxrtst]

Thanks guys. Just one more question. I have not yet assembled my mocap stage and done any testing, a few things have come to mind. How much ram vs time is there if I record a capture. In other words with the limited ram on a 32 bit application (currently I have 2 Gigs on my laptop) how long of a clip can I record before I run out of ram? If I am streaming live over a network onto my Mac Pro running Vista Ultimate 64 and Motionbuilder Ext 2 (64 bit support), will I get long takes because I can use all of my 16 gigs of Ram? And does Arena running a live stream (from my 32 bit laptop), use very little Ram, as it is basically feeding marker data live, almost like a video feed, and thus does not use Ram in the laptop? Just trying to best work out the best pipline and use of computers.

Thanks,

Will

[Birch]

[quote=fxrtst]How much ram vs time is there if I record a capture. In other words with the limited ram on a 32 bit application (currently I have 2 Gigs on my laptop) how long of a clip can I record before I run out of ram? [/quote]

In theory you might able to use a lot of the 2GB of memory, in practice allocation overhead and other issues may interfere with the recording throughput before it was all used. If you do any testing with this, please share the results here. We have not tended to do takes longer than five minutes in length.

For memory usage, we did some testing a couple months ago using the pre-1.0 release. These numbers are likely to have changed since the original testing. Here are the results :

A 40 second capture with 8 cameras and 34 markers caused memory usage to grow by 31 megabytes. Which comes out to around 800 K bytes per second, and a little under 1 K bytes per camera per frame.

[quote=fxrtst]If I am streaming live over a network onto my Mac Pro running Vista Ultimate 64 and Motionbuilder Ext 2 (64 bit support), will I get long takes because I can use all of my 16 gigs of Ram? And does Arena running a live stream (from my 32 bit laptop), use very little Ram, as it is basically feeding marker data live, almost like a video feed, and thus does not use Ram in the laptop? [/quote]

Correct, when Arena is streaming real-time solving over the network it uses a small amount of memory. The real-time streaming does not have any time limitation since it isn't recording. I don't know about the recording capabilities in MotionBuilder, but as long as it can read the streaming data then it seems possible to capture long takes in it.