44 second animation

I have a 44 second uninterrupted speech video, shot for AI motion capture specs. Using the free account I have been able to upload a metahuman body in TPose to use as the goal. Sadly the free account forces you to use up some seconds doing a learning phase, but regardless, the 20 second limit won't cut it. I have discovered that running the videos in shorter pieces don't blend together well because the origin changes, so this needs to be processed as an unbroken 44 second clip. Nearest I can calculate using the early-2000's-cellphone-plan-inspired pricing sheet, I need 88 credits (because head rotations (obviously necessary) and hand animation (necessary but not great) take an additional 0.5 credits each) to animate and a per clip that doesn't have a 20 or 30 second limit. If I'm to do this once, as a test, it appears that the 'professional' tier, at $117 is the cheapest option. It is the first tier that offers greater than 30 sec clip restrictions, but also contains many features I don't require. 

From a testing perspective, $117 is pretty steep for a single shot. Of course after processing that I have 11.75 minutes left over of processing time, but for now I'd have no use for it. As well, my use case only requires metahuman body animation,  for which I only require a single customer character (as the fbx animation gets applied to any metahuman after the processing is downloaded from DM). Though I suppose that all the metahuman variations (16) could be uploaded to cover the gamut.

My question(s) are, is there another way to get this single 44 sec clip run through the system? it was originally shot at 4k 120 - how much of difference does that make in terms of the result it delivers? 

I personally hope that deepmotion, wonder studio, move.ai, etc stop circling this obfuscated 'credit' system with this restriction and that, and abandon the same confusing monthly contracts reminiscent of the early days of cell phone plans. Make motion processing $1 per minute with no other restrictions. Provide all 16 metahuman skeletons, unreal 4 mannequins, unreal 5 Manny (male and female), Character creator 4 skeleton (male and female), and whatever other popular formats (c4D, Unity etc.) as available pre-targeted downloadable for the customer. The way this works now, even the 'studio' option isn't actually appropriate for a studio. Any studio production would be doing all the motion capture in a chunk rather than spreading it out across months, doing a bit at a time. Anyway, I hope as this AI motion culling tech improves that the business that surrounds it does as well.

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  • Thanks for providing your feedback!

    but regardless, the 20 second limit won't cut it. 

    Our 20-second limit is to help users meter their credit usage during their testing. Our users have historically found that 60 credits is enough to test the functionality, quality and features to decide if they want to upgrade to work on their full project. and with our lowest tier at $15, it's easy to continue testing if needed

     From a testing perspective, $117 is pretty steep for a single shot. 

    Our Freemium tier is not meant to give you access to process longer full projects, but to get you familiar with the technology and what it can do.

    My question(s) are, is there another way to get this single 44 sec clip run through the system?

    If you'd like to share your video with our support team, we can run it with Professional settings and provide you with an mp4 demo of the result. If you're interested in this, please send your video to support@deepmotion.com mentioning this thread!

    Make motion processing $1 per minute with no other restrictions

    Not all animation processing is created equal! Face Tracking & Hand Tracking both take up comparable resources to full body tracking, meaning it costs us more on our end to process these, costs that we don't want to blanket pass out to our users who don't need to use those features. 

    Provide all 16 metahuman skeletons, unreal 4 mannequins, unreal 5 Manny (male and female), Character creator 4 skeleton (male and female), and whatever other popular formats (c4D, Unity etc.) as available pre-targeted downloadable for the customer.

    We are working on this as we speak! You may have noticed some changes with our Character Library over the last few weeks, we are preparing to add rigs from various platforms for easier retargeting

    Any studio production would be doing all the motion capture in a chunk rather than spreading it out across months, doing a bit at a time. 

    Studios that need to process a lot of animations typically use our API plans which allow you to process as many animations as you need at any time. Regardless, we are looking at adding batch uploads for our cloud users as well.

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  • Thank you for the detailed response, truly. I would love to hear more about the API solution which I will ask about when I send you my 44 sec clip and the metahuman rig!

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  • I wrote to support 7 days ago, got a response saying  they would process the clip on Monday, which was great as I was scheduled to present deepmotion as a possible solution to our team on Wednesday.  No response on Monday, so I wrote a follow up Monday eve - got the stock response saying I'll be contacted with 48 hrs. I've replied to the email twice since then, no response. I've been ghosted. Is this typical?

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    • Scott Barrett Our sincere apologies, our email ticket was mistakenly marked as complete, we have followed up with your requested materials. 

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    • DeepMotion_Admin I see the email - thank you!

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    • DeepMotion_Admin I have upgraded my acct to Professional and have tried processing the clip I mentioned (a different take than the one I provided before), and it runs the processing to more than 90% (not sure the exact %) and then fails, reporting: "Animation baking timeout". I've tried three different bit rates in case that was the problem, but they all fail. Trying to bake to a metahuman character that worked when I was still on trial mode. I did submit a ticket but the staff here in the forum seem to be a little quicker with the responses and I could definitely use help fast - this project is way overdue.

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    • Scott Barrett We have followed up with you on your support email ticket with next steps. I'll mark this thread closed. 

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    • DeepMotion_Admin Hi, yes you did follow up but I would appreciate if you weren't so quick to mark a thread as closed (unless you just mean here on the forum, in which case I suppose it's ok). I still have questions, the character is a metahuman, not something custom, it did work previously with your system when I was in free mode, and now I'm being told it doesn't work. The response generated more questions and I'm hoping that I'm not in a fire-and-forget loop with your team. It would be terrific if you folks had a discord where users/devs could have a feedback that doesn't 'close' like a traditional forum.

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    • Scott Barrett Our team is helping via your e-mail support ticket - we will be communicating with you there so as to not fracture our communication. 

      We will be launching a Discord here in the next month or two.

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  • 9 mths agoLast active
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