Settings

This page describes the settings tab in ScannedReality Studio.

To go to the settings tab, click on “Settings” in the tab bar at the top of the application window. If this button is not visible, then exit out of any nested screens first.

The following groups of settings are available in the settings tab:

• Recording

• Sensors

  • Camera settings for Femto Bolt

  • Camera settings for Azure Kinect

  • Microphones

• Reconstruction

  • Editing setting presets

• Program & Account

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Recording

Here, you may configure your workspaces and change the recording cache size.

Workspaces

A workspace is a disk folder where recorded data and processed results will be saved. Multiple workspaces may be used in order to organize the files on disk, or in order to choose different file system partitions respectively disks to record to. If you create multiple workspaces, please give a descriptive name to each of them so that you can distinguish them later.

In the settings tab, a list of all configured workspaces is shown and you may add new workspaces, rename them, or remove them. Removing a workspace only removes the workspace’s definition in ScannedReality Studio; the files on disk are not deleted. If you want to delete all files in a workspace, you may do that with a file manager.

If you want to move a workspace to another location in the file system, you may do that by removing it from ScannedReality Studio, moving its folder with a file manager, and then re-adding the moved folder to ScannedReality Studio as a “new” workspace.

Recording cache size

This setting influences how much data may be cached while recording a video.

During video recording, video frames cannot always be written to disk immediately: Sometimes, the disk may be busy for a short while due to other tasks; in other cases, the disk may be generally too slow to write the frames as fast as they are delivered by the cameras. Because of this, video frames may be cached in memory before they get written to disk. Since unlimited caching could fill up the memory eventually and thus cause issues, the size of this cache is limited and controlled by this setting (given in Megabytes, 10^6 bytes).

Usually, only a small amount of data needs to be cached while the disk is briefly busy with other tasks. In this case, there is no need for a large cache size. The default value for the setting is thus 512 MB.

However, if your camera(s) generally deliver data faster than can be written to disk, then the cache may be used to store these data intermittently; after stopping recording, the application will write all remaining cached data to disk eventually. In this case, you may want to increase the cache size (within the limits of your available CPU memory) in order to be able to record longer videos.

If the cache has filled up, any new video frames that come in while the cache is full will be dropped.

Note

ScannedReality Studio avoids internal memory copies of the images while recording in order to achieve the best possible performance. However, this means that it needs to hold on to the original images delivered by the camera SDKs until they were written to disk. As of the time of writing, the Orbbec SDK has a fixed limit for how much memory it allocates for image data. If this limit is exceeded, issues will occur. Because of this, caching an extended amount of image data currently does not work if using Orbbec cameras.

Sensors

In this section, certain camera settings can be configured, as well as which microphone(s) to use for recording audio.

The camera settings which are available here are those that would be expected to be configured once and then mostly left constant. Other camera settings that may depend on the recording situation and thus may be changed more frequently, such as gain or white balance, can be changed during the guided recording setup instead, or by selecting the sensor settings from within the recording screen.

The sensor settings here can only be changed while the sensors are not active. If they are active, you may stop them with the sensor status button.

Camera settings for Femto Bolt

Here, settings for Femto Bolt cameras can be changed. See the Femto Bolt documentation page for details on these settings.

Camera settings for Azure Kinect

Here, settings for Azure Kinect cameras can be changed. See the Azure Kinect documentation page for details on these settings.

Microphones

In this section, the list of microphones to use for audio recording can be edited, and a technical setting for audio recording may be adjusted.

Microphone list

Here, the microphone(s) to use for recording audio may be specified.

Please note that while the program allows for adding multiple microphones simultaneously, in the current version of the program only the use of a single microphone at a time is fully supported.

Clicking the “Add” button lets you choose a microphone to add from all microphones that are currently attached to your PC (if there is more than one), or directly adds a microphone to the list if there is only one.

With a microphone added, the list entry allows you to configure certain options:

The sample rate is the number of audio samples that the microphone records per second. If there is a native sample rate for the microphone, then it will be tagged with “(preferred)” and we recommend to keep the setting at this value unless there is a strong reason to use another one. A sample rate of 48000 samples per second is a typical value.

The format defines the data format of each audio sample. ScannedReality Studio supports two formats: 16-bit signed, and 32-bit signed, where the latter has higher precision. If your microphone supports the 32-bit format, then this will be set as default. Audio from a microphone is currently always recorded in mono mode.

The “Remove” button removes a microphone from the list.

Requested audio samples per buffer

This technical setting specifies the number of audio samples which the program should request per buffer received from a microphone. This number should be a power of two. The actual value used by a device driver may differ from this requested value.

Usually, there should be no need to change this setting, but in case you experience issue with dropped audio data, it can be worth a try to increase this value.

Reconstruction

In this section, a setting to trade off between processing performance and memory use may be changed, and custom setting presets may be defined.

Minimize memory usage

Activate this setting if snapshot or video reconstruction otherwise exceeds the CPU or GPU memory. Activating this setting can strongly reduce the memory demand, but will cause the reconstruction to be significantly slower.

If your GPU has less than 16 GB of memory, then this setting is always active and cannot be deactivated.

Custom setting presets

Here, you can define custom reconstruction setting presets.

Defining custom presets from scratch is mainly intended for advanced users, since presets have a relatively large number of technical settings. The usual way to create a preset is to instead configure the reconstruction settings in the recording or processing tabs, and then use the ‘+’ button next to these settings to create a preset from the current setting values.

If you wish to create a preset from scratch, click the “New” button. You will be asked whether to use an existing preset or the currently configured values as a template for the new preset. The template determines the new preset’s initial settings, but all settings can still be changed later.

Since setting presets contain a large number of settings, they are documented here on their own page.

Remote control

The remote control settings are described on this separate documentation page.

Program & Account

MSAA sample count

MSAA (multisample anti-aliasing) is a technique for achieving smoother, less pixelated rendering. In ScannedReality Studio, this affects the rendering of 3D content and of some user interface elements.

This setting determines the number of samples that the program uses for MSAA, with higher sample counts giving better rendering quality. However, increasing the number of samples also increases the GPU memory and time that is required for rendering.

After making a change, please restart the program to apply it.

UI Scaling

This setting may be used to scale the whole user interface, which can for example be useful if using the program on a large monitor with a larger than usual viewing distance, or if the monitor’s dots per inch (DPI) have been recognized incorrectly. After making a change, please restart the program to apply it.

ScannedReality Account

This shows the account that was used to log in to ScannedReality Studio. If you wish to use a different account (for example in order to use a different license), then you can log out from the current account here, which will bring you back to the login screen.