Hi Phillip.
I have some experience with this and may be able to assist. Please stick with the extended response! I recommend a suitably configured Dell 7780 or Lenova with 13th Gen processor and RTX A series GPU. Neither is cheap when meeting all requirements.
I set up a fixed 10 camera DepthKit Studio rig at University of the Arts London which works well with 1440p 30fps settings. I used this knowledge to configure a rig with 6 cameras now with 8 at the same settings.
My recommendation is to future proof your 5 camera objective in case you want to expand it later to currently a max of 8 Azure Kinect.
AK’s set around a 2-3sq metre stage need long cables (10-16m) for both data and power. You must use the DepthKit Studio recommended active extension cables for data and the recommended extension cables for power. Cheaper alternatives don’t work! I have tried loads.
I recommend the latest i9 13th Gen CPU as currently the 12th Gen for 8 AK runs at or close to 100% CPU utilisation with all unnecessary functions ( in my case Bitdefender which consumes 15% CPU on its own) disabled and the laptop tuned to maximum performance. I now run Bitdefender on a Netgear Router supporting Armor relieving the Laptop of this function.
A Quadro GPU (otherwise GEForce limit is 5 concurrent video encoding sessions with recent new drivers - was 3 - which limits no of cameras to perhaps 5 or 6). An RTX A5500 ran at 55% utilisation. You might therefore get away with RTX A4500 particularly with only 5 cameras but can you upgrade if you want to add more? With GeForce GPU even RTX 4090 the answer is No! Excess encoding streams revert to the less efficient and already heavily loaded CPU.
AK are very sensitive to power fluctuation particularly on a shared circuit. I found a UPS an absolute must, with Laptop and all AK’s powered through it.
Each AK needs its own dedicated 5Gbs controller. You cannot be sure of this if you use the USB-A ports on the Laptop. Also even with long active data cables connection using USB-C to C do not work, as the AK’s don’t get enough power and they intermittently start glitching! The way around this is to ensure you have a breakout box or two each requiring the laptop to have a Thunderbolt 3 port (or Thunderbolt 4) connected to each Sonnet Echo (SEL small form factor) with DepthKit Studio recommended StarTech card installed. Each supports 4 USB-A each with their own dedicated 5Gbs controller.
You need two internal fast SSD’s (7700 bps recommended) with all AK streams going to a dedicated D drive. Size of drive depends on your captures. Eg. 8 AK x 5Gbs x 60 sec x no of recording mins x no of recordings or whatever calc is relevant to you.
Get Win 10 upgradable to Win 11, until Win 11 stable enough particularly for AZ.
A laptop cooler is recommended as the laptop may likely throttle at higher temps ( Studio PC had no problem with 68degree but Laptop throttled CPU below this after 30 mins intermittent recording.
Take advice re calibration and use Cory documented or mine( dm me if you want) approach. Use their marker codes not just any aruco markers ( none the same). Otherwise expect a quality calibration to take a long time rather than 10 mins.
Use stands with a heavy base. Any movement will invalidate a calibration. I use professional weighted boom stand for overhead AK.
Pics are of 6 AK system, and packed 8 AK portable system running latest DepthKit beta without green screen and post capture real time view of stitched capture.
Check lighting. Fluorescent lighting in situ is ok if taking the rig l somewhere that has it.
That’s enough for now. Reach out if you have any further questions.
Best wishes. Terence Quinn.
