cameras shutting down

[kevper2]

Hello, I'm Kevin, from argentina. We've been dealing with some problems in the mocap system recently.


- First of all, when using the system, some of the cameras shut down for no reason in the middle of the session. It happens randomly with one camera each time, not always the same.

But there is particularly one of them, than when the usb cable is plugged in the camera, the hub completely shuts down and disables the 5 remaining cameras. sometimes the hub reactivates the 6 cameras and sometimes nothing happens, it remains off. This does not happen with other cameras, that when unplugged and plugged again, the green led just turns on, without affecting the others. Are these cameras capable of hot swapping? We think that there may be a short circuit in the camera mini usb port. Have you ever heard of anything like this?

The cables work fine, we've tried them in several cameras and the don't seem to be the problem.


- Theres also another issue: sometimes the cameras (with exposure set at 25 for example) show far less luminosity in the video frame. At first, I thought it might be a display failure as this does not affect the wanding process, but when solving the samples, it is not succesful at all. It just stays there in poor status, while the other solve just fine.


I assume these problems affect my capture quality, as frequently the actors lose some parts of their bodies, unlike before. We were unable to finish our last mocap session because of this.

Are these known issues? Are there any tests to be certain about what is going on here?

We appreciate your help! Thanks!!

[bsteagal]

Hola Kevin!

a few questions.. What version of Arena are you using? also, what type of hub, Optihub or the older more generic powered USB hubs? what version of cameras, r1 or r2?

Tambien puedo contestar tus preguntas en Espanol si quieres.. bryan@kkstudio.us

saludos

[NaturalPoint - Mike]

Bryan's questions are right on the money to start troubleshooting.

Do you have more than 6 cameras? How large of a volume are you trying to build? You mentioned that the problem is recent, has it worked properly previous to this?

[kevper2]

It's okey, it's a good opportunity to work on my english!

The version of the Arena is the 1.7.3. (I just noticed there's a new version).

The hubs are Optihubs.

The cameras are v100:r2 with wide angle lenses.

There are 12 cameras in 6 tripods making a hexagonal figure with an effective 3mt diameter volume.

The problem is indeed recent. Cameras dying in the middle of the session happened sometimes before, but never at this scale where the camera shuts down the hub completely when plugged in again.

We've opened the camera and the one that didn't work fine, had the usb connector cage kind of enlarged. We assume that that may be the reason for the problem, as the pins may have been mixed and may be touching things they are not supposed to touch. We plugged the camera to a pc and the usb port stated that there was an exceeding bandwith coming from the camera.

We have a technician working to try to fix the camera and he told me that he would need a diagram of the inner circuits of the camera. It would be great if you can provide me one so that he can see how they should be.

Thanks for your help!

[NaturalPoint - Mike]

If you suspect a physical issue with the cameras, we can set up an RMA to have it fixed either under warranty or at cost (if it is outside of warranty). We do not recommend attempting to repair the cameras yourself, and if the camera is under warranty, attempting to repair it will void that. We do not provide electrical diagrams for cameras.

If you would like to explore repair options, please feel free to contact our support department at support@naturalpoint.com and reference this post.

[kevper2]

Well, we decided to buy new cameras and try to fix the other ourselves, so the RMA was not needed. But we still have a couple of particular things to work out.

The first one, is that when I start up the software and try to select the cameras to begin, some of the cameras do not appear. For example, of the 12 cameras, the 8th doesn�t appear. I restart the software and now the 5th doesn�t appear. I have to keep doing this until all the cameras appear and this takes a lot of time. This also happens sometimes when the cameras are turned off when setting up the skeleton. Is there any known reason for this?

The other problem that we are having, and the most important, is that some months ago the system worked fine when using a minimum of 3 cameras to track the markers. Now, due to an unknown reason, we have to lower that number to 2 to get a decent capture, as if we use 3, the actors keep breaking all the time. Although the capture is stable, the quality of the capture is lower, we have more vibration in the characters. What do you think that could be bothering?

We bought two new cameras last week in order to replace that camera that was not working good and hoped to get this solved, but it did not happen. We've also bought an extra hub to try if the solution was that and still the same results.

Have you had any previous reports on this?

Thanks for your help!

[NaturalPoint - Mike]

Is this still on 1.7.3 or are you getting this with 1.8.1?