Depthkit Studio Azure Kinect Glitching Video Feed

Hello! This is Eugene Kuznetsov currently writing. I work as the manager overseeing the Emerging Media Lab where we have a 5 Azure Kinect sensor volumetric capturing setup. I hope you have been doing well. I am writing to get some insight about an issue I am seeing with some of our Azure Kinect sensors and/or troubleshooting their connection to our capture computer.

The video feed on some of the sensors (usually one or two) ends up briefly freezing/stuttering/glitching out rather randomly. I see this when looking through them individually through Depthkit Studio or the Azure Kinect Viewer. Sometimes, all the video feeds are fine but we may still see intermittent flashing/glitching on the actual spatial capture when recording. Usually we swap which USB port the Azure Kinects are plugged into (we have them all plugged in with USB-C to USB 3.0 cables, into Tripp Lite ASB-A 3.0 Extension Cables). We have a Precision 3650 computer that was specced out accordingly, originally for a 5-sensor setup. Specs provided below:

OS Window 11
CPU 11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i9-11900K @ 3.50GHz, 3504 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
GPU NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000
RAM 64GB RAM
Storage 256 GB SSD
Additional Startech USB PCIe Expansion card

I have noticed that the feed glitches more regularly/frequently when plugged into the Startech’s USB ports, and as such we have been avoiding plugging any of the sensors into it. None of the old Renesas drivers are installed, and I’ve reinstalled the drivers for that USB expansion card, to no avail in addressing the glitched feed issue. The other USB ports usually work without issue when examining the sensors one-by-one. We start noticing the sensors intermittently glitching out during Streaming, while recording has also been dropping frames whether the sensors are set to 1440p or 1080p. Previously we have not seen frame dropping with this resolution mode set. Thank you for your time and help.

@EmersonCollege Apologies that you’re experiencing this issue, and thank you for providing all of these details.

A visual glitch is usually the result of an incomplete or torn frame from the sensor, and usually indicates a bandwidth constraint somewhere upstream. Are you able to record this artifact and identify it in the recorded media to verify which sensors the issue is affecting? What usage percentages are reported in Windows Task Manager for CPU, GPU, and Memory? Are there any messages in the console log which may help us identify the cause?

Have you been able to narrow down the issue to specific points in the signal path by bypassing or swapping components and seeing if the issue follows a particular component across changes? (E.g. sensor serial number(s), factory USB cable, Tripp Lite USB extender cable, USB ports, PCIe slots…) Though from what I can find on the Dell, it looks like there’s only one PCIe x16 slot for the GPU and one PCIe x4 for the StarTech card - Is this correct?

@EmersonCollege - Following up to see if you’ve been able to narrow down the cause based on the above guidance. Let us know if this issue persists - Otherwise, we will move to close the ticket.