In HD mode the Capture tab will display a composited color image. In Sync mode this will be the infrared view with a white tracking grid overlay.

 

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Capture

 

The Capture button begins a capture with the Kinect. When in the Capture Window you can also use the space bar to begin a Capture.

 

Auto Exposure

 

In HD mode we have the ability to compensate and adjust the Kinect’s automatic exposure. This is fully explained in the “Exposure Compensation” tutorial.

 

With "Exposure Compensation" enabled NextStage will reverse the Kinect's automatic exposure, and the exposure of the image can be controlled using the bottom slider.

 

Display Data

 

Between the exposure controls and capture button NextStage displays several pieces of information.

 

 

 

 

In the center of the capture view NextStage Pro will display the current position and rotation of the Kinect. NextStage Lite has all of the other display data except for the position and rotation readouts.

 

Capture Length tells us how long the current recording is in minutes and seconds.

 

Storage Remaining is not enabled in the NextStage beta.

 

Dropped Frames displays how many frames have been dropped in the current recording. If any frames are dropped this text will changes from green to red. This number will reset to 0 at the start of each recording.

 

Application FPS tells us how fast NextStage itself is running as an application. This does not mean that the Kinect itself is running at this framerate. It displays how many times the application NextStage is updating within a second.

 

Because the Kinect is a read only device, and Windows is not a realtime operating system, we want this number to be as high as possible.

 

If this number goes below 30, NextStage is taking too long to process each frame, and it will miss frames sent by the Kinect.

 

If the frame rate is below 40 the text will be red.

 

Above 40 it will be orange.

 

Above 100 the text will be green.

 

Above 40 is safe, but it is possible on a complicated frame that it might briefly drop below 30. Ideally we want this to run over 100 frames per second.

 

If you are having trouble keeping this number above 100 you can try tracking less markers, shoot a less complicated scene, import a less complicated virtual set, turn off “render background plate” or use a faster harddrive.

 

If you are still having issues getting the framerate up you may need to run NextStage on a more powerful computer.

 

 

Capture